Poor Man's Feast —

Pardon my French: I have to get this off my chest. Hide the children. Vegetarians, look away.

I have a f**king pig in my downstairs freezer.

I had to buy the downstairs freezer specifically for my f**king pig. Together, they cost me $1325: $700 for the f**king pig, and $625 for the f**king freezer.

The pig arrived last Fall, as pigs usually do; food writer friends of mine — terrific, hardcore food people of the type who are always writing massive cookbooks, and are forever in the throes of recipe creation and testing and throwing spectacular dinner parties — suggested we go in on it, and it seemed like a gosh darn swell idea at the time, since I’m always flapping my gums about the fact that I refuse on principal to eat industrially-produced meat. So we agreed to have the animal raised by a western Massachusetts farmer and on a cool day last October, after the pig was dispatched at a local slaughterhouse and then butchered by a local high-end butcher, I drove up to my friends’ house in the Berkshires with every cooler I own stuffed into the back of my car; the guys helped me pack up my half of the cryovacked cuts, and I drove home.

Just me and my f**king pig.

I backed the car in to my driveway so that it’d be easier for me to get the pig — all 150 pounds of it— through the garage and into the basement, where the freezer stands, between an electricity-sucking wine cooler that is usually empty (don’t read into that) and a second, enormous refrigerator that we bought as a back-up for when we have Thanksgiving or Christmas or Easter or Passover at our house, which of course we almost never do. It took me forty-five minutes to lug all of the meat into the basement and another twenty to figure out how to organize it, even though I’m not a Virgo.

There was at least twenty pounds of pork belly, divided up into three pound, square, brick-like packages. There were more chops than I’ve ever seen in one place this side of Costco. There were four trotters and ten pounds of leaf lard, fifteen pounds of pork liver, a twenty-five pound fresh ham, a mammoth Boston butt, two huge shoulders, a ten pound loin roast, four small packages of sirloin, a single rack of ribs, 5 two-pound packages of ground pork, a jowl, one kidney, and an ear. That was nearly a year ago.

If you look in my freezer now, you’ll still find the trotters, the leaf lard, the liver, most of the belly, the ham, the jowl, the Boston butt, the loin roast, the kidney, and the ear. Which is a lot of f**king pig. Which made the idea of bringing 150 pounds of meat into a house inhabited by two vegetable-loving humans a stupid f**king idea, and one that I’ll never, ever do again. Even if it is all the rage. Even if it makes me feel just the tiniest bit superior. Even if the f**king pig was a Gloucestershire Old Spot named Hector. Even if it means never having to buy pork at the supermarket again, and never again shelling out my hard earned cash for meat from an animal that lived a short, tortured existence.

The bottom line: for me, having a pig raised and slaughtered for my consumption was an exercise in frippery and excess. And unless you live in a rural area, you have dinner parties every single weekend, or The King Family is living under your roof, it’s a frivolous, short-sighted idea for you too. On the one hand, you might have a day job, a commute, a wife, two dogs, maybe a few kids, a house to look after, an aging mother, an aging mother-in-law, deadlines out the wazoo, and therefore you’re totally delusional if you really think you’re going to take the time to cure your own guanciale from the jowl of your own pig. (You might have noticed: all those nice folks out in Seattle and Portland and the Bay Area and Brooklyn who do this stuff on a regular basis and do it really well, like Paul Bertolli and Armandino Batali — this is their life’s work, in most cases.) But beyond that — unless you own a restaurant or are feeding an army or have shot your own deer or live in the wiles of the great north (or south) and you otherwise have limited access to high quality fresh meat — having a whole animal (or in my case, part of an animal) in a freezer in your basement is dumb, in ways that it took me a while to figure out.

The day I took possession of my partial porker was the day I effectively stopped being a member of my local food community.

It was the day I stopped visiting my butcher on the other side of town for my weekly constitutional: a stroll around his shop, small-talk with the wonderful guys who work for him, a conversation with my butcher himself about the contents of his case —- he might have just broken down a pig or two the day before and, if a restaurant hadn’t gotten there first, there might be fresh shanks; a tail (or two); a ten pound shoulder he’d be happy to cut in half, bone out, and roll; a porchetta laden with fennel pollen; maybe three different kinds of fresh sausages. Depending on the season, the weather, and day of the week, I’d be standing there and pondering dinner: if time was short, I might take home a small boneless loin roast or a tenderloin. It it was the weekend and the temperature had dipped, I’d buy a smallish hunk of butt, for a braise. If I had a yen for Latin food, I’d come home with a sturdy shoulder meant for Cochinita Pibil which I’d wrap in banana leaves and cook for hours until the dogs drooled so badly they looked like they’d swallowed shoelaces.

And while my butcher and his guys wrapped up my purchases — which always included a hunk of house-smoked bacon and a hockey puck of pancetta — they’d want to know: So how’s your family? Did you get to the farmer’s market this week? Do you want to try some crazy-ass Hungarian-style sausage we’re just working the kinks out of? If you want to meet the farmer who raised the pork you’re taking home today, turn around and say hello. What are you cooking lately? Last December, when my town experienced the unthinkable, my butcher shop became the unofficial rest stop for those of us who, in the middle of running errands found ourselves suddenly gasping, and couldn’t put one foot in front of the other: we cared for each other, and for our butcher too, whose wife — a Sandy Hook teacher — survived the school shootings. We’re friends; we’ve shared books and recipes and laughter and tears and stories about family and tragedy and peace and travel, and always, food and sustenance. It goes without saying that I want to support him because he’s a super guy; but he’s also the proprietor of a local, independent business at the physical and personal center of my community, and he provides my town with a service that cannot be quantified. I don’t get that when I head downstairs, sad and alone, to my f**king freezer to sift through the cryovacked cuts, wondering when will be the right time for me to cure the gigantic fresh ham that’s been living there for nearly a year. Not to mention the f**king kidney, the jowl, the ear, or the trotters that now look like two pairs of porcine Jimmy Choos that got caught in an ice storm.

Whoever you are reading this, I beg you to look around, and get to know your food community before you a commit to a purchase like my aforementioned pig: are there farmer’s markets for you to frequent, where you can buy fresh or frozen local meats directly from the farmers or ranchers? Are there butchers and specialty shops for you to visit, and people in your town who have devoted their lives to producing food — growing it, raising it, harvesting it, selling it— who will benefit from your business and from the ongoing relationship you will develop with them? My guess is yes, and this is a good sight more important than the flip insouciance of vogue.

So, sure: it was a nice, feel-good, fancy pants idea to bring home half a pig, raised just for me and my friends. But if you’re not a recipe developer or a tester (I do both, but infrequently) or you’re not feeding a cast of thousands on a regular basis, or you otherwise have no access to good quality meat, it’s a better idea to pour the money back into your food community, and support your local butchers and food craftspeople who do what they do because it’s a job they love but also a skill and a talent that you are damned lucky to have access to; it’s a better idea to support purveyors at farmer’s markets, and all the specialty shops who have relationships to the farmers who raise the animals that fancy-ass boneheads like me decide, on a whim, it’d be cool to have living in my basement for a year, covered in a thin, blue rime of frostbite.

It has been exactly one month and a day since I last wrote, and that, in the blogging world, is a lifetime — a broad swath of running around and chores to do and errands to run and people to see and fires to put out and commutation tickets to buy and tweeting and texting and trains to ride and meals to make and books to edit and articles to write and recipes to test. Hours go by and then days and then weeks, and the time seems to evaporate, just like that. Which it did.

It’s just life, one of my friends said, adding the annoying aphorism Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. But the fact is, I haven’t really been making other plans. I’ve been living with blinders on, trying to keep far too many balls in the air at once, dropping some here and there, running on fumes. Until I was reminded, in the harshest of ways, that I wasn’t paying attention to the beauty and the light, and the most important things.

Susan’s mother passed away last Monday, the 12th, in the evening. Helen hadn’t been well for months; back in February, right before I left on tour, she’d had one in what the doctors thought was probably a number of heart attacks. There was congestive heart failure, an aortic valve the size of a pinhead, high blood pressure, low blood pressure, water-logged feet, more heart attacks. There were repeated trips to two different doctors, one hospitalization, broken hearing aids, salt-free cooking, and Susan’s attempts at replicating her favorite meal — pizza — with rubbery flavorless cheese and watery tomatoes. There was a caregiver who was taken out of the house in an ambulance (Meniere’s Disease, set off by stress); a second caregiver who Helen fired; a third caregiver who we loved but who chose to go back to Poland. There were terrifying pre-dawn phone calls, and furious fights over the cane she refused to use, fights over the walker she refused to use, fights over the car she threatened to drive, secret decisions to replace the car key with one that wouldn’t work, fights over the forty five year old, eyeball-burning lime green Karastan broadloom she was certain the caregiver was wearing out by walking on it, fights over proper lawn care and the trimming of twenty-five, eight foot tall hemlock trees which she insisted she could do by herself.

With electric shears.

At 94.

And there was a leg gash that happened when she went down the stairs to help the furnace guy. The basement stairs.

What can you say about a 94-year-old woman who insisted on helping the furnace guy in the basement when she could barely cross the room, or trimming her hemlock trees with electric shears when she couldn’t even lift her arms?

You can say the usual stuff: Incredible! Remarkable! Such an inspiration! So independent!

And really, that’s all true. But it’s also trite and does absolutely nothing to define her. And that’s the question we’re left with, isn’t it: after nearly a century of life, how can this woman be accurately defined by those of us who survive her? How can anyone who dies — young, old, untimely, expected, violent, peaceful — be defined by their survivors? It just feels so impossible and otherworldly to me, the way that beauty feels so impossible, and so inexplicable.

My mother-in-law wasn’t a cardboard cutout, a one-dimensional paper doll in a Goodwill getup; she wasn’t just the frail little old lady who the new, grandstanding Monsignor at the church she attended faithfully for 75 years — he had never even met her — wouldn’t allow me to eulogize after her devout family had asked me to (was it because I’m a woman married to Helen’s beloved daughter, Monsignor, and you didn’t want my type speaking in your church on your watch? You can disrespect me, sir, but how dare you disrespect this family, and my wife, and her mother.). My mother-in-law was audacious, farm-raised, a pious Catholic, simple, complicated, a fierce contradiction in terms, a flesh-and-blood connection to another time and place where people lived lives unsullied by Smartphones and text messages, GMO-labeling and the ability to buy assault rifles, diapers, and bubble bath all in the same place.

It was not always easy for us, me and Helen; she was deeply suspicious when I showed up that day in her kitchen, way back in 2000. Susan and I sat at her small Hitchcock kitchen table, eating galumpki — stuffed cabbage — under the watchful blue doe eyes of a Ted Neely-esque rendering of Jesus stuck to the refrigerator with a daisy magnet. Who was I? Where were my people from? She was dubious, and she wasn’t shy about letting me know that. And I wasn’t entirely sure about this Polish Catholic Yankee woman with a penchant for dressing in bright pink from head to toe, who tooled around town in an ’81 Buick with 7000 miles on it, who would flirt with any man who crossed her path (including my father, who she met a year later), and whose daughter with the green eyes and kind heart I was madly, hopelessly in love with.

So I tried to win Helen over with my cooking: our first Christmas together, I wrapped an entire filet of prime beef in pancetta and lemon slices, tied it up with sprigs of rosemary tucked under the string, and slathered it with olive oil. She glowered through a beefy, porcine haze when I brought it to the table.

It’s too complicated, she said, sighing, coughing.

She was right.

It took me fourteen Easters to figure out that she just wanted a plain ham with a predictable glaze, and some mashed potatoes — not one covered in French mustard and Panettone breadcrumbs, or brushed with small batch Bourbon and artisanal orange juice. She told me endless stories of the meatballs that her mother used to make — braised in some sort of taupe cream sauce that only her late sister Sophie had the recipe for — until I tried to replicate them for her, and failed miserably.

What were they made from? I asked, exasperated.

Meat, she said, unsmiling.

We went through a year-long spate where she refused to talk to me — she never bothered telling me and Susan why — until I showed up at her house and made a batch of Edna Lewis’s fried chicken (cooked in lard, bacon fat, with a hunk of country ham) followed by Molly Wizenberg’s famous Hearts and Minds Chocolate Cake, which seemed appropriate both in flavor and moniker. The ice thawed; we hugged as Susan and I left.

I love you, Elissa, she said, her voice creaky.

You do? I asked.

Just cause I’m mad doesn’t mean I don’t, she laughed.

(Peace out, Helen-style.)

Over recent years, things changed; our trips to see her stopped involving doing the backbreaking chores she loved, like spending three hours bent over in the autumn sun, picking turnips at the farm around the corner from her house. She could no longer walk our dogs with us; it was just too hard. Her cooking changed, too: she gave up roasting the cheap, lemon yellow, cornfed chickens sold by her local supermarket and instead drove herself an extra half hour to a fancy grocer — the additional cost in gas infuriated her — and paid eight bucks more for a better one, after seeing an undercover report on the plight of industrially-farmed birds. She was 92.

From here on in, she told me angrily and malaproptic as ever, I will only eat Bell & Howell chickens.

Of course, I said, thinking of my father’s old movie projector gathering dust in our basement. There was no way I was going to correct her.

So here we are, facing an immense void so deep and wide it’s indefinable. We’re confused, muddled, a little bit dizzy. Susan is untethered. We cleaned out her freezer today and I was furious as I pulled out all the things she wasn’t supposed to eat with her condition — the sausage, the frozen meals, the fried and frozen hash browns, a package of skin-on chicken thighs labeled CHICKEN TIGHTS. If she hadn’t eaten this dreck (tights notwithstanding) — if she’d taken better care of herself — I was certain she would have lived so much longer, and I would have gotten to know her better.

Or at least I could have spent more time on her back porch with Susan — the three of us drinking weak vodka tonics and listening to Helen talk about the sturdy beauty of her half-century-old, wall-to-wall Karastan, and how a mother fox and her three kits stopped by to say hello when she was out in the garden, deadheading the coneflowers.

The Pig Who Came to Dinner: A Rant Against Excess

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