Pig-Tales III: Trial by Fire

Many tales have been told,
Now before you go to cook, eat and make love
Here is a tale of caution
For all intrepid cooks.

The first time was as tension fraught as a primeval hunt. I felt like primitive man crashing his way through a hot and steaming jungle in hot pursuit of his prey – in this case – a wild boar.

Armed with my shiny meat cleaver, it was me on one side and the pile of raw pork belly on the other. The dead pig looked as if it was going to jump out of my colander at any moment and all the chunky pieces would piece themselves together into a ghastly reconstruction of its former self. Terrified by my own flights of fancy, I could imagine this monster pig suspended five feet above the ground, at eye level with me, carrying with it the memory of its recent murder as well as a millenia of stored vengeance.

At that particular moment, I felt as if the burden of the worlds' crimes against this animal rested squarely on my frail shoulders. I stopped short in my tracks. I turned and fled from the kitchen. That, was the first attempt.

Five minutes later, I calmed myself down sufficiently, uttered a little war cry and entered the kitchen again, waving the cleaver in front of me like a holy talisman.

The pork belly lay washed, pink and gleaming in the humidity of the summer evening.

My blueprint for the meal lay spread out in uneven piles of recipes.  A vindaloo and a pork roast with gooseberry sauce jostled for space on my tiny table. I walked towards the sink in slow motion. The whirring blades of the fan blew scraps of paper all around me with pork emblazoned on them in different fonts.

I chose to be ambitious. It was gooseberry season and the vendors had appeared at street corners with baskets of the succulent golden yellow fruit screaming "rasbarry rasbarry" . Hailing from a tropical climate I had never really seen a fresh raspberry. My younger and naiver self actually thought that these orange fruits might metamorphose into the beautiful pinkish red drupelets that were the stuff of English tea parties and European cupcakes.
When I finally discovered that these were an entirely different species, I just scoffed at the vendors for getting the taxonomy of berries completely wrong. I thought that they were just using the more exotic name to trick people into buying the raspberry's relatively plainer country cousin. That was before I had ever tasted a gooseberry.

Many summers later when I finally tried this fruit, I was in love. One bite caused a whole explosion of flavours in my mouth. There was a sharp tartness mixed with a sweet undertone and a lovely musky smell. It was around this time that I also realized that what the fruit seller was screaming was not a vernacular variant of raspberry but the perfectly correct "rasbhari", an apt and evocative term for this juicy fruit that remains quite underrated.
My memories of this fruit had stayed in storage till I decided to cook my first pork dish. In a flash of what I thought was sheer genius, I imagined delicious chunks of well cooked meat with a tangy and spicy gooseberry sauce. I imagined fame and accolades at the prospect of this award winning combination, only to come back to earth after Google informed me about dozens of roast pork recipes with myriad gooseberry sauces, relish, preserves, toppings, and jellies.

A Recipe for Disaster.

Step One:
I was on my knees scraping off a fragrant gooseberry paste infused with an especially piquant, freshly ground red chilly powder from South India, fresh basil and some lovely balsamic vinegar from my cream coloured walls. I had shifted the mixer to my dining table in the living room and somewhere in transit the cap had come loose and well, you know the rest. There was an explosion of gooseberries over my table, my walls, my lamp and my pretty summer dress (it was supposed to be a romantic dinner with the husband).
I managed to rescue 45 percent of my gooseberry sauce.

Step Two:
90 minutes later the top layer of the fat pieces of pork had turned a strange dark brown while the bottom remained a pasty raw pink. My oven was emitting strange sounds as the metal expanded and contracted but the pork refused to cook.  The husband was home by now. Hungry and harassed. The pork was light years away from edibility.
Fried pork could somewhat mimic a roast. Assuming that it could at least finish up the job, I quickly transferred the meat to the frying pan.
I was inspired by an unforgettable pork dinner at this quaint Korean restaurant called Gung.
The pretty girls serving us were from the Northeast, dressed up to look like Korean belles. No knowledge of English and fantastic sign language abilities helped perpetuate the illusion.
One of them came to our table with a portable gas stove, a few pieces of garlic, a handful of mushrooms, and some lovely pork belly which she then proceeded to cook with such skill and speed, that in precisely 7 minutes, we were consuming the softest and most delicious pieces of meat wrapped in tender lettuce and dunked in sauces of our choices.
While that was a dream meal, my own pork looked increasingly like a distant mirage.
My memories of the Gung pork assumed mythical proportions and my tired self began to envision the pretty fake Korean girl gliding through a vast, arid plain carrying a samurai weapon in one hand and a huge dish of the pork belly in the other, conquering all the lands she walked through.

Frying pork in a non stick pan in lukewarm oil is a dangerous idea.
I dropped the pork in and the oil jumped out of the pan and attacked me with the sharp sting of a desert scorpion.
I bounded out of the kitchen like a whipped whelp and made my way into a dark corner to nurse my wounds. However, time and frying pork wait for none and soon I could smell, the terrible smell of scorched meat.
I ran back in to see the pan smoking.
At the speed of lightening, I flipped the pieces that were still unstuck to the pan on to a plate.
I managed to rescue 60 percent of the roast/fried pork.


Step Three:
The twice-cooked pork still remained inedible. I was a second away from taking the half-done meat, tearing it apart with my bare hands and throwing it to the neighborhood dogs.
The meat sat in the pan raw, rubbery and stubbornly refusing to yield to my prodding fork.
Some false hope bubbled through me as I spotted the pressure cooker from the corner of my eye.
I dunked the pork into the water in the cooker, added some fresh herbs, a dash of salt and pepper and fixed the lid.
Hunger often makes you do terrible things. My hunger usually yielded a vindictive self torture mechanism. I was thinking up the best pork curry, I had eaten, Lightly seasoned, flavoured with typically local herbs, shoots, leaves and the fieriest chilli in the world, the Naga Pork Curry with Raja mirchi simmered on the fire till the all the different ingredients diffused into each other and then opened up in your mouth clearing the last clogged sinus in your body.

My eyes glazed over and I had teleported myself into the colourful food stalls of Delhi Haat, when my nose began to twitch. The by now familiar smell of scorched meat filled my kitchen. Cooking in a pressure cooker with inadequate water and the flame on high, is always a bad idea. Today, it was the final nail in the coffin. I yanked the lid open to find ashes.
I managed to rescue 10 percent of the roast/fried/boiled pork.

Time: 1:00 am.
Background score: The constant ticking of the clock gradually growing louder and ominous electronic music by the Flaming Lips.
The scene: The candle had nearly burnt to the wick and the bottle of red wine was empty. The crockery and cutlery lay untouched. The kitchen looked like it had been hit by a tornado. There was an exhausted, greasy and drunk cook standing over the stove. A ravenous and drunk husband was standing behind her somehow managing to be supportive and egging her on to the finish line. The cook's hands moved furiously. Then the two of them stood hunched over what looked like a single plate emitting some kind of an unearthly glow.


There were precisely three pieces of pork, drizzled with a dark orange gooseberry sauce and nestled in a bed of crisp iceberg lettuce. Four herbed baby potatoes lightly roasted along with a slice of mandarin orange and a sprig of mint tried to cover up the empty spaces in the pristine white plate. The sheen of tender fat around the meat truly glowed with an otherworldly light.


I had started cooking at 9 pm. Four hours later 1 kg of pork had whittled down to fifty grams. The intended indulgence in gluttony ended up being an exercise in molecular gastronomy.


Four hours later, we settled down to our dinner tired, weary, drunk and miserable.


We sat with the plate between us and took our first mouthful almost simultaneously with our forks. A strange goofy smile spread across the husband's face and I looked up to see the same expression mirrored in his spectacles.
Roasted, fried and boiled, the pork melted away in our mouths with a slightly charred top. The gooseberry sauce was perfect and everything was as fresh, tiny and perfect as a newly unfurled leaf.


We went to bed wondering why some of the best things in the world came in extra small sizes. 

Postscript:
I still struggle with pork. Maybe I shall write a fourth pig-tale when I win this battle.