Word: pigging
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Gist:Barlow is not a half-assed carnivore. An expatriate Brit who relocated to the Galician town of his Spaniard wife, he launches himself on a foolhardy mission: travel around northwest Spain and eat as much pig as possible. Snout, marrow, heart, bladder, head-all of it. Along the way, he tells the tale of Galicia, a cold, rainy, and stubbornly independent piece of Spain on the Atlantic Ocean. It is "a patchwork of small, low-intensity farms...real working countryside" and home to Don Quixote's Miguel de Cervantes, longtime Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco, and the Castro family...
Highlight Reel:1. On the reputation of the pig: "Traditionally, pork is the staple meat of rural Galicia. It's a good, dependable food source. But dependable is the word. The pig does not evoke a sense of grandeur. It is an everyday animal. And its meat is not generally considered to be glamorous or sexy. Think sexy meat and it's a big juicy fillet or beef winking up at you from the plate, next to it a decent bottle of Bordeaux. Think healthy meat, if you must, and it's a small portion of free-range chicken breast...
...more rarified pieces of the pig: "Pressed head of pig doesn't sound that tempting. All I can say is give Manolo a call, he might persuade you otherwise. After the cachucha is simmered until soft, the bones are removed. The two half-head pieces are then crammed into a steel press about half the size of a shoe box, and pressure is applied until all the squeal's gone out of it...I don't count them, but there's a real cacophony of flavors, from the familiar sweetness of boiled ham to the earthy notes of the skin...
...developing an attachment to any one snack or beverage. Chances are, you'll soon enough find yourself standing bereft in a convenience store, scanning the shelves for a product that's been replaced by a newer craze. Which currently includes foods boosted with a nutritional supplement derived from pig placenta. Somehow, I just can't imagine that in a cream puff...
...Squeal,” Barlow’s third food-writing venture, catalogues his quest to eat the whole hog in a yearlong journey through Galicia—a rain-battered, idiosyncratic area in Northern Spain. His challenge is to “eat every part of the pig, in as many places as possible,” but with a Dionysian disregard for order, Barlow leaves the rules of the game frustratingly vague. How will he know if he eats every part? How much of each part does he have to eat? Do eyeballs count? His headfirst dives into...