Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (27 page)

“Oh?” He seemed hesitant.

“Huge chunks of Brie,” I said, and just to remind him: “For the pigs.”

He smiled. “Oh, OK. So see you next week?”

“Yes, yes, the sixteenth.”

Later I e-mailed Chris to apologize for scaring him at the Dumpster. “I admit that my behavior is deviant,” I wrote, “but I get so enthusiastic about it, I forget it might freak someone out.” He wrote back:

Novella,

I’ll be ready to go in the morning. Pork arrives Monday. I usually start by 10 am and spread the work over two or three days.

It was funny the other night—I hesitantly approached the suspicious guy [Bill] in the dirty Mercedes (suspicious/Mercedes oxymoron?) and suddenly you appear from the darkened dumpster area in your miner’s hat. I’ve heard about your farm and want to come see it.

I had the green light. It was without fear that I continued to collect the roast-chicken carcasses, the olive-oil-soaked bread, and the scraps of fine meat that were all part of the glory of the Eccolo Dumpster. My pigs were going to be amazing.

A few days later, I heard a commotion outside. Our new downstairs neighbors’ dogs were barking, then I heard a distinct grunt. Bill was soaking in the tub, and we were just chatting about the day’s events. I ran downstairs.

I glanced at the gates: they were all open, including the main pig door. As I rounded the corner I saw one of the monks, Chao, in his full burgundy robes, holding an orange parking cone. He was speaking pig.
“Uh-uh-uh-huh,”
he grunted. The pigs were capering around 28th Street.

When they cavort, things break. Big Guy plowed into a garbage can, and it toppled. Little Girl was trying to get into the garden by ramming into another gate with her tremendous shoulders. A bull in a china shop would have been remarkably calm compared to these two. Another neighbor, Sandra, who had recently remarked that my farm reminded her of her childhood home in Puerto Rico, lofted a broomstick, with her daughter assisting.

This wasn’t the first time this had happened. A few weeks earlier, I had heard someone outside say, “Is that a pig?” and then I saw Big Guy headed for the busy intersection of Martin Luther King and 27th Street. (Little Girl, being nice, was in the pen, eating like a pig princess should.) I trailed him, yelling and pleading, but he had a date, apparently, or a bus to catch, and he merely glanced sideways at me, grunted, and trotted faster. Even trapped within a well of fear, I couldn’t help but enjoy the clicking sound of his hooves on the city sidewalk, his ears flopping in the wind.

As cute as this pig outing was, if Big Guy had made it to 27th Street, he would have turned into inedible bacon, not to mention that I would have had some pretty steep body-shop fees to pay. He weighed about 175 pounds.

Luckily, I spotted some of our 28th Street neighbors up ahead, returning from the corner store. “Can you stop the pig?” I asked.

“What?” a young man with cornrows said.

“Just, uh, you know, scare him,” I suggested. The man got in front of the pig. Big Guy stopped.

The man clapped his hands. I could see Big Guy’s tiny brain working on how to solve this problem, and whether it was worth all the hassle—and exercise. With a soft
bouf,
he turned his curly tail and trotted back to the 2-8. Me chasing behind, yelling encouraging things.

The guy with the cornrows wanted to process what had happened. As I shut the gate behind Big Guy he asked with a smile, “Do you think God made pigs to eat? Cuz when I saw that pig, I thought, yum, ham and bacon.”

“I don’t know,” I said, “but I think the same thing. We bred them to be like this, so maybe they become what we want.”

Cornrows grinned. “Well, I’ve never seen a pig before. That was really something.”

Feeling like an experienced pig wrangler after that experience, I walked outside feeling relatively calm about the two pigs now cavorting in the street. I went first to Little Girl, who was trying to break down the fence to the garden, and yanked on her ear. She sat down. Tugging two hundred pounds by the ear is remarkably ineffective. “Can you hit her butt with the stick?” I called to Sandra. She came over and gave Little Girl a short smack. The pig budged, a little.

Sandra’s daughter and Chao built an impromptu herding area out of fallen garbage cans so that the pigs could be trapped at the end of our dead-end street. The monk worked on Big Guy, who finally got sick of the man in the robes making the grunting noises and went into the pen without anyone touching him. I broke out a bag of bread and lured Little Girl with it—she followed me into the gate.

“Thanks, you guys!” I said from behind the gate, sweating and feeling frazzled by the escape. These people were so nice.

The monk pointed to the schoolyard field to which the pigs had beelined. “They want to be free,” he said.

I had to agree.

The next week, on a sunny August morning, I arrived at the restaurant for the first day of my salumi apprenticeship. I made sure to wear a new white shirt and clean shoes.

Chris greeted me, drinking a milky cappuccino—did I want one? I nodded, and a woman behind the bar pulled me a frothy cap. I met Chris’s wife, who was arranging flowers at the bar. “Here to steal Chris’s secrets?” she asked, smiling. I shrugged. Before we started, Chris told me his one ground rule: I must never share his recipes with another person. These salami recipes represented years of training and fine-tuning. I nodded. All that tradition felt a little weighty, as if I were being indoctrinated into a secret society.

We went to the back kitchen to set up. He had pulled out several raw pork shoulders and a large slab of back fat. We were going to make salami. When Chris bustled out to get a hotel pan, one of the prep cooks, a skinny twenty-year-old, asked me how I had heard about Eccolo and Chris’s salumi-making skills. “I Dumpster dive here,” I began to tell him. He shrieked with laughter and high-fived me.

Maybe I’ve read too much Anthony Bourdain, but I had imagined that the back of a restaurant would be a crude, uncivilized place. I expected to get groped, not high-fived. Everyone who passed through this kitchen seemed intelligent and kind.

Samin, the sous-chef and Chris’s right-hand woman, arrived and began to slice turnips. She looked about twenty-six and had thick, dark hair. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“Making pickled turnips,” she said. She told me that everything served at the restaurant was homemade. The mustard, stewed tomatoes, mayonnaise, pickles, sauerkraut, walnut liquor, and obviously the salumi, which includes all the cured meats, like salami, coppa, prosciutto. She was what she called the grandma of the place.

“I’ll show you my pantry sometime,” Samin promised, adding that she sometimes made spicy pickled vegetables in the style of her Iranian grandmother.

No one seemed to think it was odd that a Dumpster-diving urban pig farmer was in their midst. In fact, I came to learn that the restaurant industry was filled with other obsessive freaks like Samin, who would never buy a factory-made pickle. I was just another one of the freaks.

Chris came back and put the meat on ice, then we took a quick tour of the cold rooms where the salumi were aged. The whole ceiling was filled with hanging meats, hundreds of salumi stalactites in various shapes and stages of decay.

“We make a finocchino salami, made with fennel,” Chris said, and grasped the end of a mold-dusted salami. “Here’s a soria, made with hot peppers. Coppa—” He pointed at smaller, more circular parcels of meat. Though it was cold, I could still smell the place—a wonderful combination of mushroom and meat.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing at a gigantic salami about three times the size of the others.

Chris smiled. “That’s my special one. I call it the Petit Jesus,” he said. “I have to secure it with a net, see?” I could see a raised checked pattern on it—like it was wearing fishnet stockings. The Petit Jesus, he told me, hangs in supplication for many months before it is ready. A waiter came in, consulted the metal tag hanging from a coppa, and then took the meat away to be cut paper thin and served on a large wooden plank decorated with olives. I stood gazing up at all the meat in awe. How many pigs did it represent?

Chris and I walked back into the prep room, and I noticed two prosciuttos—two salted pig legs—hanging near the doorway. They looked exactly like my pigs’ legs, but dry and hairless. “Watch your head on these,” Chris said, pointing but not looking at them.

Without ceremony, he began to trim a pork shoulder. He set the hunk of meat on a cutting board and cut it in one-inch chunks. These he tossed into the hotel pan (which was sitting on ice), separating them by degree of fat: extremely fatty in one corner, no fat in another. Each shoulder, with back fat added, would make about ten salamis, Chris said.

Salumi are never cooked, he explained as he trimmed the pork shoulder. The meat instead is “cooked” by salt, a bacterial enzyme, nitrates, and time. “So a raw-food person could eat salami?” I asked.

“But we won’t let them,” said Chris, smiling. Focused on his work, his head bowed over the project, his careful hands deconstructing the shoulder, he rattled off the names of the main muscle groups that made up the pork shoulder and what jobs they’d done for the pig. He told me that his pork came from Oregon and had grazed on hazelnuts.

After weighing and dicing up some pure white back fat, Chris sent the meat and fat through an industrial meat grinder. He had me weigh out the spices and curing agents that went into each kind of salami. We used a digital scale, and everything was measured in grams. I felt as if I was back in one of my college science labs.

We added the spices to the ground meat. “Look in here,” Chris said. A whirling mixer was whipping the meat and spices together. It looked like some sort of ghastly cookie dough. “It’ll reach a perfect point—there!—when it starts to hold together. This is very important,” Chris said, exhaling, and turned off the machine.

Samin peeked her head into the room. “Your son is here,” she said. And then a skinny punk-rock teenager slouched in. He was prep-cooking at the restaurant for the summer. Leaving father and son alone for a moment, I ran out to the kitchen to get the salami stuffer, a giant red metal machine. I passed by the line cooks, who were sweaty and concentrating on making pasta and roasting chickens.

I had never worked in a real kitchen before. In college I was a dishwasher for a few months, but the place was just a Mexican joint. This kitchen, in contrast, was amazing. There was an entire wall of spices in mason jars. The pastry chef, a wholesome Chinese American woman, had her own realm, with a Sub-Zero freezer and all manner of sauces within easy reach. A long wooden counter that stretched between the line cooks and the servers held vases of fresh herbs, wooden bowls of eggs, and a million utensils. There were three walk-in refrigerators.

Back in the meat room, I met Chris’s son, who also wanted to watch the salami-making. I handed Chris the stuffer, an old-fashioned Italian contraption, which he placed on the counter.

“This is a beef middle,” Chris said, showing us the beef intestine we would stuff the meat into. It had been soaking in water and looked like a large condom made of skin. It looked even more like a condom when Chris attached it to the salami stuffer, glopped a load of the mixed-up meat into the hopper, and began to turn the crank. The intestine grew plump with meat. It was mesmerizing.

“This is when lots of dirty jokes get made,” Chris said. Acting unimpressed, his son wandered off to prep lettuce for the salads.

After the casing had stretched to about three feet long, Chris popped the meat onto a metal tray and tied the end with string. “There you go,” he said after all the salamis had been stuffed and tied.

After we painted a different batch of salamis with penicillin culture, we had a little extra time. Chris said we should make a coppa. He trimmed one of the shoulders into a perfect heart of meat about the size of a football. This we rubbed with smoked paprika and some other fiery spices. Chris brought out a veiny cow intestine, called the beef bottom, and we slipped the heart of meat inside. Then we went around to the cook line and dipped the coppa into boiling water.

“Smell it,” Chris said. I leaned in—it smelled like a barnyard.

“I like it.” I grinned.

“You would,” he said, like we were old friends.

“Let’s try one,” he said, and brought out an example of what the finished product would look like after four months of aging. The coppa had gone from football to softball size, a white mold had formed around the whole thing, and when Chris cut into it, the meat was a deep red, as if it had been cooked. He handed me a piece. This is food that honors the pig, I thought as I chewed and the subtle flavors filled my mouth. It wasn’t like the turkey or a rabbit—merely a delicious and sacred thing to eat; this pig, through alchemy, had been transformed into something higher, almost immortal.

Chris stared at a slice, then we both chewed thoughtfully. It was so good, smoky and rich, earthy. “So that’s my deal,” said Chris.

In his book
About Looking,
John Berger wrote, “A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements in that sentence are connected by an ‘and’ and not by a ‘but.’ ” I felt well on my way to peasantdom. But I needed Chris to teach me more—and I secretly hoped he would help me when it came time for my pigs to meet their maker.