Pig-Tales II: Initiation

Pig (noun): An animal (Porcus omnivorous) closely allied to the human race by the splendor and vivacity of its appetite, which, however, is inferior in scope, for it balks at pig.

Edible (adjective): Good to eat and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.  

from Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary (1906)

The pig has remained a curious creature, wallowing in the no man's land between the sacred and profane. On the one hand the pig and the swineherd have St. Anthony as their patron saint. The same religious canon declared the pig as unfit for consumption in Book of Deuteronomy which laid down acceptable food habits for the people of Israel. Confusing contradictions seem to have coloured this animal's often tragic and bloody history. 

Early Chinese dragons had faces resembling those of wild boars. Pigs were symbols of the fertility in Celtic mythology with the sow goddess Henwen. Pigs were associated with the worship of Demeter and ritually sacrificed at her altar. The Egyptians feared the pig as a creature of the underworld. The chosen sacrifice for Thoth, God of Wisdom and the Moon and Osiris, God of the Afterlife, this animal became associated with the gods on whose altars its blood was spilled. Nuit, Goddess of Night was often represented as a sow.

Why did the sacrificial lamb become the greater icon? Why did 'scaping' the goat become the practice rather than the pig? After all the pig did carry the greater burden of the sin of human gluttony since the beginning of time.

As a religious icon and the favourite sacrificial animal,  the history of the pig remains one that has bloodied the annals of time. 

However, like all transitions from the sacred to the profane, the pig as a lesser deity vaulted its way through the multi-hued warps of time and space and fell from the skies right on to cold steel tables of "Porkopolis" Cincinnati around the early 19th century. 

Demystified and far away from the inner precincts of any temple, the pig now appeared on labels stuck on cans of luncheon meat and cocktail sausages.    

Meanwhile, my own history with pork was yet to be written.

On a hot summer day in Delhi circa 2004, I visited a shop that would help heal my tapeworm-ringed nightmares forever. 

It was a particularly lazy and aimless afternoons just after classes had ended. Impending boredom made me accompany my environmentally conscious, vegetarian, conservationist friend on his jaunt around the city running errands for his mum. It was slightly ironic that his chores included buying the family's weekly supply of meat. The journey through the city wound its way through my friend's shopping list, with stops for dog food, laundry and other sundry domestic items. 

Finally, we reached a little shop tucked away in a quiet, leafy neighbourhood in Jorbagh. This was an elegant neighborhood, home to little blue-eyed American babies on their tricycles; tall German sophisticates with little dogs in their handbags; grey-haired Indian writers taking an occasional walk in the neighborhood park, chewing on the end of their cigars.

It was a charming market selling carpets, books, cheese and pork. Lots and lots of pork. One could miss the little shop altogether if you didnt stop to actually peer in. The door swung open and I was inside Pigpo. 
I remember thinking that "Po" seemed the perfect oriental suffix to be tacked on to the pig. 

This is the shop that brought the western concept of a charcuterie and a deli into the culinary vocabulary of this city. No butcher shop I knew was this inviting. All the whispers of "dirty animal" in my head got left outside Pigpo's door. All the fears of tapeworm somehow got exorcised the moment I entered. 
The clear glass shop windows overlooked a pretty children's park with animal shaped swings and slides. Nestled in between a eclectic stationary store and a quaint furniture shop, Pigpo like its grand old neighbours reeked of character. 
The room inside had gigantic freezers, cool marble table tops and warm woodwork on the walls. Woodwork in a meat shop! The only wood I had ever seen a meat shop before this, was the roughly hewn stump of a tree that was used as the butcher's chopping block.

While my friend buried his nose in the shopping list and tried to avoid making any kind of eye or body contact with anything in the shop, I simply soaked it all in. My pork-starved self was suddenly in pork paradise. Every imaginable cut of the meat, sausages of various shapes, sizes and flavour, salami, ham, frankfurters, pepperoni, was laid out in all its nude glory.

 

Always overcome by a slight wave of nausea upon entering a meat shop with its cloying odour, its flies and my proximity to the chopping board, this was the first shop that didn't overpower me with its raw smell of death. A big framed picture on the wall had a fat porker drawn on it with arrows pointing to the different parts of its body and the corresponding cuts it would yield. It was a big picture chart designed to catch your attention. I stared at it with all the wonder of a ten year old entering the science lab and viewing the human skeleton for the first time.

This was the first time a meat shop made me feel hungry. I wanted big bagfuls of all the goodies.
I felt like a child in a sweet shop where I was only allowed to look and smell. I remember leaving
empty handed that day but Pigpo remained a firmly embedded memory. 

It was a cold and bright winter day in Delhi circa 2008, when I returned to the shop. Christmas was around the corner and I wanted to replicate just a little bit of mother's grand Christmas lunch that had been an enduring family tradition back in Calcutta. Armed with a good old-fashioned recipes from Julia Child and other stalwarts and dreaming about honey glazed ham and sausage stuffing, I entered Pigpo.

However, I braced myself for the now familiar disappointment that I had faced upon returning to this city since my college days. I had seen the slow death of favourite corner stores, standalone bookshops, age-old restaurants and movie theaters as the malls overran Delhi. We had become a generation of mall rats scurrying through bright glass and chrome corridors. 

Nothing had changed. The shop stood frozen in time gathering its unique character and serving dilliwallahs quality fresh pork that completely surpassed its frozen cling-film wrapped counterparts in swanky department stores. These icy cuts of tenderloin and pork chops looked like alien body parts that had lain frozen for centuries in deep underground vaults in secret locations in the middle of a desert. Or, they could be a potential murder weapon for a neurotic wife. They were so far removed from Pigpo's  fresh and tender pork that they disappeared from my horizon of fresh meat altogether.

   

Pigpo's display made my eyes light up with joy. The prospect of those fat and fresh sausages, chunky cuts of healthy pink meat edged by layers of snow-white fat, succulent bits of tenderloin, elegant strips of lean pork, gigantic pork chops, peppered salami, twice cured salami, incredibly plump bacon wrapped sausages, honey-glazed ham during Christmas and much much more made my brain go into overdrive. I did a mental flip across the pages of my cookbooks skimming over the the vindaloos, the brandied pork chops, the pork roast, and other exotic half remembered names and leaving a dribble of spit on my imagined flight across the glossy delectable photographs accompanying the recipes. 
I felt like a star chef in a Corsican village market waxing eloquent about the freshness and quality of the meat. This time I did leave with an armful of goodies. 

Since then I have returned to this shop many a time.

The men behind the counter are fast with their blades. They handle the meat lovingly carving the fatty layers into gourmet cuts with a few deft motions and occasional flashes of steel. They are quick with advice and even quicker at closing a an exceptionally large order, especially one that you did not plan to buy.

There is one particular man behind the counter who is a permanent fixture here. He is a nondescript man of indeterminable age. He offers advice about the best cuts for a curry or roast. Shares trivia. Sometimes scoffs at you if your purchase doesn't meet his rather exacting standards. 

He claims that he is as old as the shop. Since I can never quite guess his age, I don't know exactly how old Pigpo is. What I do know is that it has survived the turning tides of time.