We were gathered in a cold upstairs room, 20 of us, making a respectful circle around the corpse as it lay on a steel table. The Italian butchers were sharpening their knives—cleavers, choppers, long thin blades with upward curves for separating fat from skin, flesh from bone. What we were about to watch was an ancient winter rite, once universal, now half-forgotten and barely legal. As the knife was raised over the hairless flesh, I found myself looking over my shoulder, half-expecting some breathless enforcers of decency to burst through the door—the inquisition, the police, the Edinburgh health and safety inspectorate.
Europeans have always slaughtered pigs in early winter. Saints days, from St Andrew's to St Stephen's, are marked for the job; the tradition of combining religion, the winter solstice and a feast of freshly killed pork goes back to the Roman Saturnalia, and probably beyond. Pigs have been domesticated for 9,000 years. It's a wholly practical ritual: by December, forage has run out, but the nine or ten-month-old pigs of the year's farrowing are fat on the nuts, berries, mushrooms and other debris of autumn. As the temperatures drop, the best time to preserve their meat arrives. The new wine pressing should be ready for sampling—in any case, it's a good moment for a party.
The Europeans who do still slaughter their own pigs are mainly in the east, where subsistence agriculture is still alive. But the embrace of the EU brings with it the cold hand of regulation. In Romania, some 1.5m pigs are usually slaughtered in backyards in the week before Christmas. They are drained of their blood and then rolled into a bonfire, to singe and clean the skin. But Brussels rules don't permit amateurs to slaughter pigs: a vet must be present and a stunning device used. According to the Economist, the Romanians asked for a derogation to kill animals according to their traditions, just as Muslims and Jews can. It is Christmas, after all. The commission said no, but, as I write, the Romanian smallholders's pig slaughter will go ahead as planned.
In Edinburgh, EU law is iron. Home-butchered animals can only be eaten by a farmer and his immediate family. So, to all our disappointment, the pig we'd come to see dealt with in the northeastern Italian style had been killed and bled a day before in an abattoir, its offal removed and its skin singed by blowtorch. So we missed out on the blood sausages, but, as the three butchers from Friuli set to work, we heard a sizzle and then the titillating smell of pig's liver being fried with onions drifted in from the kitchen.
The event was organised by the Edinburgh chapter of the Slow Food movement, a global gang of food lovers dedicated to preserving, promoting and, above all, eating traditional foods. They had brought over the three butchers, led by Renato Toros, from the town of Cormons, on the Slovenian border. The pig was an organically reared Tamworth, from Peelham farm in Berwickshire. "Everything is going to be used, except the oink," said its breeder, Chris Walton, with a grin.
Within 30 minutes, the 110-kilogram pig was chopped to pieces you could have put through a letterbox. What was left were piles of fat, skin and bone. Unexpectedly, all the meat, even the very best, was destined for sausages of one sort or another: the loin and the fillet for salami, the belly meat and the legs for salsicce, the scraps, the skin and some of the fat for cotechino. It was a pig with a lot of fat—the stiffest went to be salted and peppered, to emerge in a month as lardo, opaque strips to be eaten as a delicacy. But the bulk was rendered immediately with apple and bay leaves for strutto, an oil to be bottled and used for cooking. The skull was cleaved, and the brain—no bigger than a large walnut—plucked out for marcundelle, a much-loved offal sausage which Renato described as "Friuli haggis." Into a stockpot went the bones, including, sadly, the trotters. I had hoped to see them become zampone, a sausage made by stuffing the skin of the pig's lower leg. It's a New Year dish: boiled and served on a bed of lentils, it looks entertainingly like the arm of a plump baby.
In a ridiculously short time, the pig's remains were being ground through a mincer and shaped into great pink sandcastles. Flavourings—coriander powder, pepper, salt, white wine and garlic—were added, along with precise amounts of saltpetre, the preservative. Then the sausage meat was pumped into lengths of cow and sheep intestine, and tied off.
Now, at home, I have a Friuli-style salami hanging in the airing cupboard, sprouting a healthy white mould. I've already eaten the cotechini, which mature for only five days: they were delicious, wickedly fatty and much more pungent than expected. But most important of all, soon after you read this, my children will find out about their Christmas present: a piglet, due from the next farrowing at Peelham Farm, which we shall lodge with Chris Walton, delivering it our kitchen scraps (vegetables, not meat; the animal health rules don't allow it). Charlotte's Web will be banned from our house. Next December, the kids will discover the delights of fresh sanguinaccio. The Italian remedy for children's tears, when they see their friend the family pig die, is pork crackling, straight from the roasting pan.
