The Idler

Country Diary 69: The Pigs Are Dead

THE PIGS ARE DEAD. The night before killing day, Sunday, Victoria and I sat with our John Seymour and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall books and read about blood puddings, offal, quartering heads, brawn, chorizo, scalding the skin, butchering, salting and all the rest of it and found the whole thing mightily daunting. Because we haven’t got a clue what we’re doing.

In the morning the phone rang. It was Mark, who was coming round with his friend Andy to kill the pigs and get us started on the whole process of converting them into edible stuff. At first I was hoping that he was ringing up to cancel so we could put it off for another day. But no, just confirming that they were on their way with tractor and trailer. On arrival, Mark and Andy backed the trailer up top the pigs’ gate. I distracted them with a bucket of food while the gate was opened. They were hungry as we’d not fed them the day before.

Eventually we enticed them into the trailer with food and water, and then drove them round to the yard. There Mark loaded a pistol and gave it to Andy, who calmly and paradoxically lovingly shot one in the head. Andy stroked the second pig behind its neck and put a shot to its head. Again, it seemed only stunned. They were dead. It is difficult to describe the experience. It is not exactly sad in a sentimental, pet-dying way. But it is intense and you want to thank the gentle pigs for dying so peacefully and giving their bodies to us. Maybe we will go vegetarian in the coming months, who can say. But certainly this is the most humane method of killing pigs: better than the slaughterhouse because there is no travelling, no waiting, no foreboding of what is to come. Certainly I could never buy bacon from the supermarket again.

We strung the pigs up by their ankles on the tractor and hoisted them into the air by the back legs. I got ready with a big bucket and Mark slit their throats. We collected the blood. He then eviscerated the animals and cut off one of their heads. I helped cut off the other. Victoria began stirring the blood in order to make blood pudding: you have to get the clots and the stringy bits out. She put the still warm livers of the pigs into the fridge. Andy said that the pigs were enormous and would weigh about 180kg. There was about an inch and a half of fat as we cut into them. I carried a head indoors: just the head alone weighed a good deal. My hands and boots were covered in pig blood.

All this makes far more hardcore, by the way, than Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who just sends his pigs off the the slaughterhouse and then has them butchered. We killed them ourselves and butchered them ourselves.

We then dragged the pigs into the dairy and pulled them up onto large hooks which Andy had just screwed into the dairy ceiling. Now came the hardest job of all: removing the thick black bristles from the pigs’ skin. Over the years, Andy and Mark had developed a technique using a wallpaper steamer. You hold the steamer over the pig’s skin and then work over it with a knife, pulling out or chopping off the bristles. Two hours later I had barely de-bristled a ham. Well, Mark and Andy made their farewells and refused any kind of payment. Top blokes.

That evening Victoria and I stayed up till two in the morning making blood puddings and liver paté. There is no choice: you have to make these things there and then. As we speak there are 20 Spanish-style black puddings in the fridge, made with rice, onion and smoked paprika. Right now we don’t really feel like eating them. I was imagining frying up some for breakfast the next day, but when it came to it, I decided that I only wanted a bowl of muesli. Too much blood.

The next day I spent on further attempts to de-bristle the pigs. I was getting nowhere with the steamer method so I switched to blowtorch to burn the hairs off. Burning is the method recommended by William Cobbett: he puts the newly dead pigs on a bed of straw and sets fire to them two or three times. John Seymour by contrast recommends scalding: pouring bathloads of hot water over the pigs and then scraping off the loosened brsitles and a layer of skin. I also tried to saw the heads up. But this really was too much, and we decided to give this job to the butcher, who is also going to mince up the sausage meat, with which we’ll make chorizo.

I made some progress with the blowtorch, but it created a hell of a stink on the house, I also simply held a match to the longer hairs.

But when Simon - a top chef - came with his knives to do the butchering, he said that the skin was still too bristly. So as he cut the meat, I took pieces to the kitchen where I poured hot water over the skin, then scraped, and finally we shaved the skin with safety razors. What a blimmin palaver. I think next time we might try the Cobbett method.

So Simon and I busily set about chopping up the pigs. First we sawed them in half longitudinally. Then we hauled the half a carcass onto a trestle table which we’d set up in the dairy. Off came the trotters, the hams and the collar. Out came spare ribs, pork bellies and back meat for salting. We kept the book open in front of us all the time. We managed one pig on the first day. The bits variously ended up in salt, in the freezer or in a bucket of brine. I carried the huge bucket of innards to the vegetable patch and buried them in a ditch. Good food for the soil.

ENDS