Despite my present discomfort, I can no longer recognize in myself the girl who spent three years here sleeping in the loft until ten thirty and lazily rising up to go pick zucchini for my breakfast scramble. My years of professional cooking have long since ignited my personal motor. I can’t bear to sit and be idle, especially when there’s asparagus to pick or black currants waiting to be stripped from their stems. I am a fussbudget. A tinkerer. A woman who not only uncannily resembles her mother but also pads around the perimeter of the kitchen like her, calmly stalking the beast called dinner. Some people might identify the humming I felt in my hands as “nesting.” Whatever it’s called, my instinctive reaction to my son’s impending birth is to stockpile food. Big meaty piles of it.
My current concern is that I don’t have a bigger stockpot. As the water around the pig’s head comes to a boil, I am distressed to see the snout still poking out above the pot’s rim, blowing bubbles at me through its nostrils. I cannot contaminate cooked meat with raw meat. I grab the handles, slide a protective towel over my enormous belly, and jerk the pot outside, where I conveniently spot the thing I need lying in the grass—Aaron’s Sawzall. Using two forks like corn handles, I hump the pig’s head into a clean roasting pan, grab the Sawzall, buzz through the soft fat and then the hard palate, the reverberations of which I can feel deep in my belly, and cut off the snout. Damn, I sheared off the tip of the tongue. But what’s done is done. The head returned to the pot and the pot to the stove once more, hot water seethes over the sawed-off nose, to my great relief.
—
When my cousin Matt arrived early that morning at our neighbor’s farm to kill the pig and take it back to the family meat market in Pierz for butchering, he stood in front of the hanging animal and asked me to repeat my requests.
“You sure you want the feet?” he asked, giving my belly a sidelong glance.
“Yep, and the liver and the kidneys,” I assured him, holding out a clean bucket for transporting them.
He shook his head. His lifelong tenure cutting up farm animals had killed his romance for offal. “You are not going to want to eat the feet. They’re going to taste like they’ve spent their lives marinating in pig shit—because they have.”
“I want them!” I insisted. “And I want to make headcheese, so let’s leave the head whole.”
We both remembered the sturdy headcheese Grandma Dion used to make for Christmas Eve supper. She’d cut hers into neat cubes of translucent aspic, arranged them in two obedient lines on a flowered platter, and served them with a sidecar cruet of white vinegar. The cubes quaked whenever we awkward teenagers knocked our knees against the table. Matt and I shuddered at it while his dad, Uncle Keith, taunted us: Smacking his lips, he reached for more, lewdly consuming cube after gelatinous cube.
I was armed with visions of fancier headcheeses I’d eaten in New York. French tête de porc en gelée. Italian formaggio di testa. Served at room temperature, the testa was a mosaic of bits tugged from the pig’s most intimate, cranial spaces, and it was marvelous—more luscious than Grandma’s. Mine, I thought, would be on the soft side but still rustic, something like the delicious offspring of Italian testa and Midwestern souse. And while the head simmered, I’d poach the feet, debone them, roll them into roulades like we’d done at Danube, slice and sauté these sticky pucks in a hot pan until the edges browned, and then set them on a pile of steely, mustardy French lentils. I’d julienne the ears and fry them until they were the color of tobacco and as crisp as onion rings and serve those over sweet garden greens.
I frowned at the gray brew of meat in the pot. It didn’t look right. Having watched Todd the meat cook make testa in the subterranean Cru kitchen, I knew I should have cured the head for two days in a plastic bucket of fragrant brine. Two days’ cure was the usual—as cooks say—“ride” for headcheese. I had no time for protocols, though. I brined it for three hours.
When the pig’s jaw loosened from its carriage, I pulled out all the tender pieces. My hands ran through the pile, feeling out good bits of meat instinctively, blindly, tasting as I went. There were obvious gems—nuggets of dark tender meat at the apples of the cheeks, another nice pocket above the brow, the squidgy-soft tongue, and a triangle-shaped disk of sweet meat along the jowl. Like the middle streak of bacon that’s not quite fat and not quite lean, the jowl trembled with its marbling. I threw it intact into the pile. But then there were the hidden parts, the surprises awarded to those who pick from bones: a strip of tender meat hanging in the nape, a pleasing bounciness to the gelatinous snout, a sweet melting quality to the white fat. When I was done, the pile of what I considered usable outweighed my scraps and bones—as it should, I thought. I had watched this poor hog go down this morning; I couldn’t bear to waste an inch of it. Showering the contents of my bowl with finely minced garlic, thyme from the herb bed, and tons of chopped parsley, strewn like grass clippings, I delicately packed the headcheese into molds.
I then threw the pig’s feet—petunia pink and covered with bristly white hair—into a fresh pot of water and the furred ears into another. When they came to a simmer, a great fog rose toward the rafters into our bedroom above the kitchen, filling every cavity in my head with pigsty earthiness. I realized that I’d failed to take into account the super-nose of pregnancy. Matt was right; the feet reeked. I’d have to blanch them at least three times.
Aaron came into the kitchen looking as if he’d just come back from the mines, in a downpour, through a pack of pawing dogs.
“The pump’s not drawing,” he said, walking across my kitchen floor in his muddy boots to pour a glass of water from the plastic five-gallon jug.
“Sand point’s clogged. It’s probably just calcium.” Aaron drank the entire pint of water in a single laborious swallow. Gulping for air, he said, “We rented an old well-puller at R and R Rental and now we’re dragging the pipe lengths up with a lever. Fucking brutal. We’re doing nineteenth-century work here.” His dad followed him, eyes wide to the floor, his shirt dirt-streaked, and finished matter-of-factly, “And then when we get all the pipe pulled up, we’re going to repound another sand point.”
“Today?” I asked. They looked spent.
“Definitely.” Maurice laughed. “We will not be returning to this job tomorrow.”
The lack of a water source was making this entire pioneer day a lot more historically accurate.
“That smell is vicious!” Aaron gasped, following the sight of the fumes billowing up into our bedroom. He shot me an incredulous look, pivoted around me to the stove where the feet and ears were simmering, stacked the ear-blanching pot on top of the foot-blanching pot, and promptly took the stinking mess outside. A few moments later I heard it softly flop at the edge of the woods.