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Press Times
The Times - August 12, 2007
Tucking in and pigging out - Reviewed by Bee Wilson
There is a theory in anthropology, says the food writer Paul Richardson, that the human race can be divided into “porcophobes and porcophiles: those cultures that flee from the pig as a taboo animal and want nothing to do with it, alive or dead, and those that make pork meat a central plank of their nutritional and culinary lives”.
Spain is definitely one of the porcophile nations. Jamon iberico, chorizo, morcilla, lomo, pork and beans, panceta, pig’s cheeks, pig’s ear, roast suckling pig. . . there is no end to the delicious porky things to come out of the Spanish kitchen. Richardson has lived in Spain since 1990, when he fell in love with a Spanish agronomist called Nacho, and he takes us on a piggy journey through the cities, coast and plains of Iberia. He writes lyrically of his love of such things as salted butter toffee and a dish of “rice with goat’s cheese, octopus, asparagus and paprika”, which is clearly fused with his love for Nacho. But his choicest descriptions are of pigs – how they are fed (acorns do wonders for the flesh), kept, killed, cooked and eaten.
Richardson recalls his first taste of jamon serrano – “the deepest-flavoured ham I had ever tasted, making Parma ham seem sweetly innocuous”. He tells of the annual pig slaughter and how “every porcophile village in Spain has its own plato matancero” – a special dish eaten on the day of the killing, usually involving offal, which tastes best when it is freshly pulled from “the steaming architecture of bone and muscle”. Detail by delicious detail, he builds up a picture of a culture in which food is both religion and love affair, patterning the days and months. “The passing year in Catalunya is a dizzy whirl of celebrations of everything from turnips, peas, mushrooms and chestnuts, and snails, to chocolate, doughnuts, sardines and sausages.”
Understandably, he contrasts the sunny cooking of Spain – the “bright sweet taste of being alive” – with the dreary English food he has left behind. Then again, reading Beyond Nose to Tail, Fergus Henderson’s new cookbook, you could start to wonder if Spanish cooks and English cooks aren’t brothers under the skin. Henderson, the chef at the fashionable and influential St John restaurant in London’s Smithfield, presents “a kind of British cooking” that is wildly porcocentric. The book is adorned with a Victorian-looking engraving of a pig diving into a jelly. Henderson, who is famous for his “nose to tail” school of cooking, which extracts sumptuousness from every particle of an animal, gives recipes for pressed pig’s ear, confit pig’s cheek with dandelion, pork scratching, pig’s head and beans and a pot-roast half pig’s head, about which he remarks, “I say only half a head, as it is a perfect romantic supper for two. Imagine gazing into the eyes of your loved one over a golden pig’s cheek, ear and snout.” Indeed!
Henderson’s pig worship could rival any Spaniard’s. His master recipe is for a curious thing called Trotter Gear, made from pig’s trotters braised for hours with Madeira, garlic and thyme until it yields its full “unctuous potential”. More than half the book is given over to pudding and baking recipes by Justin Piers Gellatly, Henderson’s pastry chef, and even here an affinity with Spain can be detected: doughnuts (surely the equivalent of churros), eggy custards, rice pudding (our answer to arroz con leche).
Before I get too carried away with the comparison, though, one has to remember that Henderson is writing about a fantasy version of British cooking that barely exists outside his restaurant. It is a consoling world, in which dishes are either “steadying” or “uplifting”, and where it is normal to take a glass of Madeira and a piece of seed cake at about 11, to “see you safely through till lunch”. Alas, this is not authentic British eating, but a delightful invention. In the real Britain, our porcophilia mostly extends to Danish bacon and freezer sausages of dubious origin. Some Spanish people eat dodgy pork, too, but at least there is a genuine food culture behind the junk. Richardson tells us that the Spanish “will still drive for miles to eat pork muzzle in a gelatinous sauce, or a pig’s ear, sliced up small and flash fried with plenty of garlic”. It would be hard to find many such true porcophiles in Britain. Henderson is one of them, though, and I take comfort in that.
