day of reckoning

Two weeks left to go in Belgrade, and it was time for the much-anticipated pig slaughter. Milutin had been feeding the pigs a diet of acorns, barley, and rye, for the two months leading up to the fateful Sunday, and I had hatched out a plan to turn all of the meat into various cured meats, sausages, and the like. I have slaughtered my share of chickens (maybe I should write about that sometime), and killed a few fish in my life, but I have had no experience participating in or watching the slaughter of a large mammal. I sketched out a rough map, we toasted with some herb-infused rakija, and we lit cigars; the next few hours would be in the trained hands of the butcher and his assistants.

The lighting for the morning event was surreal and perhaps prescient: fog-thickened still air, rays of sun bursting through silhouetted oaks. The trees were long since stripped of their seeds-come-forage, but this morning was unseasonably warm, despite my numb fingertips. The nearby geese heard Milutin’s offer of one of their carcasses; they seemingly wanted nothing of it.

While I saw the butcher’s work on all three pigs, I witnessed the actual slaughter of only one. I will not make it out to be a beautiful thing to see. Put bluntly, it was rather difficult to watch. Instead of a relatively peaceful shot to the head in the pen, the butcher and his men wrestled with the pig to bring it out into the open for the kill. Stress, even just these few minutes, affects the flavor and texture of the meat and is to be avoided to the point of delaying a slaughter if a pig gets too spooked. It was all the sadder since this pig had heretofore lived a wonderful life on pasture and acorns.

When finally out in the yard, the pig was positioned, and a bullet fired into its skull. The death was instantaneous, though the convulsions lasted several minutes. As the heart continues to beat for several seconds, the carotid artery is quickly severed to drain the blood into a bowl. Next the carcass is scalded and rolled in hot water to facilitate removal of the outer layer of skin and hair. The men scrub until most of the hair is removed and then finish by burning off remaining hair and skin with a large propane torch. The pig is hoisted up from the branch of a tree, eviscerated, beheaded, and hacked in half lengthwise. Shoulders for coppa and sausage, loins for lonzino, jowls for guanciale, legs for prosciutto, belly for bacon, and remaining fatback for lardo. Hearts, lungs, and blood would make a blood sausage recipe I learned in France. Liver would combine with some extra belly to make a rich pâté.

As the last of the parts were carried into the outhouse to continue to cool (this would be difficult today, as the sun had broken through the fog and it was 8C and rising), we headed up the hill to the home of Milutin’s parents-in-law for some offal goulash. The variety meats for this stew came from the first pig slaughtered earlier that morning. It quickly became clear why this stew is a slaughter day tradition: we were chilled from the cool air and famished from a lack of breakfast since we had awoken six hours earlier. It was hearty, well-spiced, fatty, and even for me some of the textures were somewhat difficult to handle. Still, I scarfed down several helpings. The ubiquitous cabbage salad, tangy with apple cider vinegar and seasoned only with salt and sunflower oil, was a great counterpoint to the rich goulash. We loaded up over 150kg of pig parts into the car, the bulk of work still ahead of me.