Pig-Tales I: introduction

5000 years before Christ there was the pig.
The pig was domesticated before paper was invented.
And the Chinese have a hand in both.

8 porkers also travelled to the New World with Christopher Columbus. Whether they survived the great crossing is another question. They were on that ship. And that is important enough for me.

13 pigs came with Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto to America. The man with a taste for roast pork discovered the Mississippi river while looking for a route to China (the Sleeping Dragon does have a finger in every pie) and also eventually died of a fever on the banks of the selfsame Mississippi. His 13 pigs on the other hand went forth and multiplied under the hot sun, when the great American dream was still stewing somewhere under the swamps.

While the beginnings of the pork industry remain a mere footnote on the pages of America's brutal and bloody history of colonisation, war and genocide, the blood that was spilt in this case is perhaps no less in quantity.
The meat packers became millionaires. The pig became charcuterie. There was the year of the pig. There were the three little pigs. There was the one perfectly groomed Hollywood pig with a name.
And far far away across many seas I was discovering the pig unburdened by its historical and cultural connotations. A tad confused, but, mostly unburdened.

Deriving from the rather musical sound of Latin 'porcus' to the stylishly chic French 'porcus', English 'pork' entered my consciousness as a dirty word. The name represented a creature of dirt rather than the scatological or sexual expletives learnt through hushed whispers during lunch breaks in school.
Childhood is a confusing time. The thing that baffled me the most was the disconnect between the squeaky clean, baby pink, hairless, and rather cute creatures out of the picture books and cartoons on Doordarshan (yes, i grew up in a pre cable-tv era) to a nomadic population of ugly, hairy, black garbage-eating monsters that were seen rummaging around the large piles of rubbish with their miniature ugly, hairy, black, garbage-eating family in tow.
I understood why it was a dirty word.
I often wondered if the black hairy exterior was a body wig waiting to be discarded in a moment of swan-like surprise.

My earliest memories of the pig apart from the two that got eaten by a wolf was the pig I ate myself.
The distinct aroma of the perfectly fried, succulent and spicy pork sausage still sets up a veritable orchestra on my taste buds. It was a grown ups party, far back in time and space and most of the other specific details grow brittle and fall away around the edges like the brown edges of burnt paper.
What remains... is a memory of a smell and the corresponding flavour.
It entered my nostrils as an alien creature. A rich, warm, and incredibly appetizing smell wafting all the way from under the closed doors of the kitchen, riding on the air-conditioned draft of air and finally colliding with my olfactory senses in a hundred peppery, spicy, and meaty notes. I remember the drool collecting at the bottom of my mouth threatening to dribble out from the corner of my mouth. I remember the look of that tiny, perfectly browned, parcel of meat bursting with flavour and heat. I remember wanting to take the whole plate and running away into a dark corner and indulging in sinful gluttony.
This was my first pork cocktail sausage. Since then I have eaten many many kilos of pork sausages. Of all sizes and with all kinds of spices. I have eaten them in the city, eaten them in arid dry towns, and  have gorged on them in the hills.  And each time has been as pleasurable as that first forkful.

Well, the intestines are a hardly the best introduction to any animal, with this particular one it is as good as a Miltonian prologue.
An exercise in grammar, the sausage is a synecdoche for the pig. A feminist nightmare, the pig is a case study in objectification which is cut, dried and quartered in terms of its nether parts.
Raw materials for a culinary artist, the various parts of the pig have been sculpted into a veritable masterpiece in charcuterie.
A cook's dream, the pig is smoked, boiled, dried, roasted, baked, broiled, fried, steamed, chargrilled, and pickled into perfection.

So eating one pork sausage ( I was allowed only one) was as precious as a bite of the forbidden fruit. The pig was much worse than a dirty word in my house. It was a monster from a medical nightmare in my hypochondriac family. It was a creature of disease, The harbinger of the deadly tapeworm and ringworm. Till date, every time I share a pork recipe with my mum, recount a particularly excellent meal where pork figures in the menu, or talk about a fantastic neighbourhood deli selling excellent ham and salami,  I inevitably have to listen to the oft repeated warning against tapeworm along with the oft repeated horror story which i shall now share with you. However it comes with a warning. And those with a weak stomach should stop reading now!

So this is the legendary tale of caution in our family. Embellished over time but true in its essence. It is about a distant cousin. A carnivore with a penchant for the pig, he travelled far and wide sampling some of the best pig in the country. And one fine day, he vanished. Rumours came flying out of different parts of the country. Some said his hair had grown till his knees, some said he moved around with a harem of tribal women and some said he was afflicted by some strange disease that gave him the power of foresight. However, it was a terrible gift they said, every time he had a vision, little white snakes/worms would burst forth from under his skin and medusa like crawl over his body to that of the supplicant (yes he supposedly had supplicants now).

Six months later I saw him. He was bald and thinner and had a scar across his temple. And well,  no sign of the rest.
The white snake/worm bit was true. the tapeworm travelled through the pork into his bloodstream and right to his brain. Whether they broke through the skin and hurtled through a short distance before landing with a gooey splat on his wife's dinner plate during a particular romantic dinner (another rumour), or created a medley of activity in his brain and gave him the gift of vision: that will remain a mystery forever. Meanwhile it was good enough to be the grande dame of old wives' tales in our house.

Thus, we never ate pork in my family. Never entered a meat shop selling pork.
I longingly eyed sausages on distant plates.
I occasionally tasted an unfamiliar,  elusive taste in the Chinese food we often consumed while eating out. Drowned in virulent red or brown gravies that destroyed the flavours or textures of any of the individual ingredients, pork was sometimes unknowingly slipped in to the melee of meats in the seafood or mixed meat soup/noodle/broths.
Plagued by the fear of the omnipresent tapeworm, the piggie remained dirty and forbidden.
And just like adolescent teens lusting after the lamest porn, even this sliver of pork disguised in its Indian-Chinese avatar was the stuff of drool-worthy dreams.