FROM PIG TO PORK (más+menos 12: FOOD) / Kirsten Reinecke

In the small town of Aracena, in the southern Spanish province of Huelva, some farmers still perform the traditional matanza or pig slaughter, in which all family members play a role in the process of converting a living animal into food.


At nine in the morning, friends and family began arriving at the small farmhouse of Manolo Villa and Chari Navarro. Each was greeted with a small glass of Miura, a sour cherry cream liquor, “to start off.” After that, Cruzcampo beers were abundantly enjoyed throughout the day by all, including the grandmas. The matanza is both a party and a chore, in which the entire family gathers to work together in making the jamones (cured ham legs), salchichones (sausages), and the other meat cuts that the family will eat throughout the following year. “None of this food is sold. All of it stays in the family. We’re lucky; we get to eat a plate of jamón every day,” Chari said with a grin.
Manolo and Chari have two daughters, nine-year-old twins named Silvia and Esther (she introduced herself as “Ehté” in her strong Andalusian accent). “Of course we’re excited about the matanza!,” they enthusiastically claimed. “Or at least to eat the jamón. The jamón is our favorite.” On the day of the matanza, the girls wore matching necklaces –one pink and one blue– and matching outfits –one pink and one blue. Twins run in the family; Rocío, wife of Chari’s brother Daniel, arrived later in high heels (quickly changed) with her twin sons, two-month old Alejandro José and Nemesio. La abuelita (grammy), the grandma or great-aunt of many people there, quickly took charge of the babies, cooing and tickling and making sure they were in the shade.
The tiny farmhouse was filled with friendly clutter; on the mantelpiece Christmas ornaments and a plastic doll bottle mingled with dried flowers and a gourd. Outside, dusty tricycles and old wooden chairs were scattered across the dirt patio. “This house is so old, we don’t even know how old it is. It belonged to Manolo’s grandparents, and their parents before, and who knows beyond that.” Chari seemed relatively uninterested by the history of the house, and spoke much more enthusiastically about her art class. “Painting just relaxes you completely.” Colorful still-lifes by Esther, Silvia, and Chari covered the walls, along with numerous hanging copper pots. From the rafters hung the few sausages that remained from last year.
When the time came to retrieve the pigs from their pasture down the road, the men rode in the pick-up truck while the women, children, and dogs followed on foot. Pigs are curious creatures, and they came right up to the fence to investigate. Villa dangled a string loop attached to a short pole in front of the pig’s snout, who obligingly nosed it. Slipping the loop into its mouth was easy, and the pig was captured.
The pig screamed and struggled, but the men, Ángel, Daniel, Fani, and Manolo, quickly bundled it up onto a short wooden table brought from the house. The pig was positioned on its right side with its right front leg tied down. Ángel managed to help hold down the shrieking animal while still deftly chomping on his cigar. Then Fani, the matarife (butcher), made one clean swipe with his knife, and Chari stepped in to collect the gushing blood in a pale green, plastic bucket.
The blood was such a vibrant red that it didn’t seem like it could belong inside the ecrus, tans, and browns of human and animal bodies. With her bare hands, Chari stirred the bright blood, pulling out handfuls of veins and tossing the red strings onto the ground. Against the greens of the countryside, the splashes and drips stood out shockingly.
The second pig, having seen the first’s fate, was a bit more leery but still easily caught. The swift, efficient process was repeated. The men didn’t wear aprons, but didn’t get a spot of blood on them. Remaining in the pasture were a few adolescents and the piglets. Rosario said, rather morbidly, “They have been left orphans,” and let the other women stir the blood.
The pigs were hefted onto the bed of the pick-up and taken back to the house. There, they were dragged out, leaving streaks of blood on the vehicle. Then the men used gas torches to burn the hair off the carcasses. The dogs, seemingly discomfited by the stench of burning flesh, huddled in the corner of the dirt patio.
Everything went quickly and efficiently. The stomach, intestines, and other organs were removed. The women began cleaning the intestines while the men continued butchering the animal, cutting off the legs, the sides, the cheeks. The spine and tail were tossed aside, but nearly everything else was used. Everyone was quiet, performing his or her individual chores. Piles of meat were everywhere. Soft splats and splashes came from the bucket by the sink, where María, Rosario, and Chari took turns squeezing the partially digested mess out of the intestines. They sorted the intestines into different sizes, for use later in making different types of sausages.
After the primary separation and cleaning of the meat, everyone took a break for a few tapitas, or snacks. Plates of bread, jamón, chorizo, morcilla, and salchicha (all types of sausage) from last year’s matanza were set out on the same table on which the pigs had been butchered. Everyone munched happily, with the blood stains underfoot and girls calling, “Mamá, I want some jamón! Give me a piece of bread! Mamá!” The bread, beer, and jamón seemed to be made for each other.
After the snack, the men, finished with their work, trooped inside to watch TV, primarily fútbol (soccer) and toros (bullfights). Meanwhile, the women, Irene, María, Rosario, and Chari, settled down to the task of turning raw meat into sausage. The ages of the women ranged from late thirties to early eighties. Working on the same table –now covered with a plastic blue tablecloth decorated with yellow and orange flowers and butterflies– they cleaned the fat off each and every scrap of meat.
Esther and Silvia didn’t yet participate in the work. “Next year, when you’re ten, then you’re going to be learning how to make sausages,” Chari warned them. Instead, the girls spent most of the day playing with the dogs: Rex, Brandi, and Linda. Rex was sleepy “since he had to stay awake all night, guarding.” Brandi, Esther explained, “is the mischievous one” and Linda is “the calm one.” Both dogs were pretty calm, considering that they let the girls strap them into doll carriages and feed them water from bottles.
At around four, the family hungrily gathered around a large clay pot full of cocido, a sort of stew with garbanzo beans (chickpea). All dug in with their spoons and carefully carried a heaping spoonful to their mouths, catching drips with thick slices of bread. “Eating as a family out of one bowl is the tradition during a matanza,” Chari explained. Next up was meat, probably from the morning’s slaughter, and finally an entire plateful of four desserts: two types of flan, apoleá (cinnamon custard with bread), and arroz con leche (cinnamon rice pudding).

The next day, the work of turning the meat into sausages began. Inside the little house, the women moved carefully amidst numerous big, plastic tubs filled with meat. Large quantities of meat jiggle and shake like jelly when moved. Much of the meat had been ground and combined with various spices, bright orange-red pepper in the chorizo and spearmint, parsley, red pepper, onion, and cilantro in the morcilla tonta (best translated as “silly blood sausage”).
In addition to the spices in the morcilla tonta, Rosario poured a bucket of blood into the ground meat mixture while Chari stirred, staining her hands red. The morcilla tonta is fried rather than cured, and therefore can be eaten immediately after being made. “La morcilla tonta”, claimed María’s husband, grandpa Manolo, in his gravelly voice, “is the best. My favorite.” Irene and Chari stuffed this sausage by hand. Using a little metal funnel, the women grabbed handfuls of the bloody mixture, and pushed it into the smallest intestines. The morcillas were dark red, and the white strings used to tie them off became blood-stained as well. The finished sausages were hung over sticks propped on top of buckets.
To make the other morcillas, chorizos, and salchichas, the women set up an assembly line outdoors on the same table that was so employed the previous day. Sausage mixture was piled into a grinder that spewed it into an intestine held carefully over the nozzle. Rosario, in charge of piling the meat into the grinder, sneaked bits of the ground sausage mixture like a kid snatching cookie dough. Grinning she said, “It’s just so good! I always taste it!”
For several hours, Rosario piled the meat and turned the handle of the grinder, Chari held the intestine over the nozzle, María tied the sausages with plain white string, and Irene used a small knob bristling with tiny spikes to poke holes into the sausages. The women chattered and gossiped as they worked. It would have been easy to forget that these women were in the 21st century except for the ringing cell phones and Katy Perry’s “I kissed a girl” playing on the twins’ hot pink Disney princess radio.
Finally, for lunch on the second day, the family got to sample the first results of their hard work. The morcilla tonta was fried up in the pan and everyone eagerly tasted a bit. It was spicy and good, with a dark, murky taste in the background. Quite a bit of work remained, hanging the hams and sausages to cure for several months, changing temperatures and location every couple of months, but for now the family rested a while, enjoying the morcilla.