Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig (7 page)

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The Forest Pig

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an army of Goths swept from the Balkans into northern Italy. Soon other Germanic tribes forded the Rhine River and invaded Gaul, a region first conquered by Julius Caesar 450 years earlier. The invaders—Romans called them “barbarians”—roamed freely through the empire, capturing more territory until they finally deposed Emperor Romulus Augustulus in 476
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. The Gothic tribes then divvied up western Europe: Anglo-Saxons in England, Visigoths on the Iberian Peninsula, Vandals in North Africa, Ostrogoths in Italy, Franks and Burgundians in France, Alamans in Germany. The Eastern Roman Empire—ruled out of Constantinople and often called the Byzantine Empire—survived for another millennium, but the Western Roman Empire was dead.

The fall of Rome, in the traditional view, plunged Europe into the Dark Ages—a period devoid of art, literature, fine dining, clean water, and other luxuries—from which it emerged
only with the first glimmers of the Renaissance 1,000 years later. Historians more recently have proposed that there was no sudden fall from civilization to barbarity but rather a gradual transition in which the Roman and Germanic worlds blended to create new, not necessarily inferior, cultures. The jury is still out on that larger argument, but this much is true: the fall of the Roman Empire brought rapid change to the world of pigs.

Only one type of Roman pig survived the collapse.
Rome’s complex networks of Mediterranean commerce disintegrated alongside the empire itself. With the disappearance of that trade and of the concentrations of wealth it had produced, there was little market for suckling pigs or large white swine. It’s hard not to see such pigs as symbolic of Rome as a whole, grown fat and lazy on the spoils of empire.
Archaeologists digging in post-Roman sites don’t find any bones of large swine. Only the rangy black pigs survived. In the chaos of the empire’s fall, they snuck off into the woods to shift for themselves and soon reemerged at the heart of European culture—as the staple source of meat and fat for both rich and poor.

P
igs had long been at home in northern Europe. The region enjoys the benefits of the North Atlantic Drift, a powerful ocean current that brings ashore warm winds and year-round rains that encourages the growth of hardwood trees. Before agriculture and metal axes reached Europe, Paleolithic tribes huddled along riverbanks and seacoasts because the rest of the landscape was thick with forbidding forests, home to wolves, bears, and the Eurasian wild boar,
Sus scrofa
.

By about 7500
bc
, those wild creatures had come to share the northern European woods with domestic animals imported from the Near East. The populations of that area’s first farming
communities had grown quickly, and only migration could relieve the pressure. One group of Near Eastern farmers, traveling by boat, hopscotched along the northern coast of the Mediterranean, rounding the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth millennium
bc
.
Another group moved overland out of Turkey and Greece, following the valleys of the Danube and Elbe Rivers and settling in central Europe at about the same time. These farmers, who soon wiped out or absorbed the local hunter-gatherer tribes, brought with them the full range of Near Eastern livestock: the bones of sheep, goats, cows, and pigs have been found at the earliest sites where they settled in Europe. Not all of these animals, however, survived in their new habitat.

Genetic studies tell us that the first wave of imported Near Eastern pigs died out and was replaced by a new strain domesticated from the wild boars native to European forests. This domestication event likely mirrored those that had happened earlier in China, the Near East, and elsewhere, when wild boars crept out of the woods to scavenge in human settlements. With guidance from Europe’s farmers, who had prior experience tending livestock, some of these wild creatures evolved into an entirely new—and yet not new at all—variety of animal:
Sus scrofa domesticus
, almost precisely like their cousins in the Near East but descended from a different stock of wild boars.

Livestock, pigs included, sifted themselves by climate and terrain in this changing European landscape. Goats and sheep predominated in highland regions and in dry Mediterranean lands. Cows grazed on the thick grasses of Europe’s northern fringe. Pigs reigned wherever forests remained intact. The pig-based fertility religions of the ancient Mediterranean—the same ones that gave rise to the cult of Demeter—traveled north with the first farmers. Among the Celts who occupied much of Europe, swine became symbols of war, fertility, and feasting. Celtic
warriors adorned their helmets with boar bristles, and in
Beowulf
the hero wears a golden helmet ornamented with images of boars. In Norse mythology the fertility god Frey sports a mighty phallus and rides a golden-bristled boar, and at the festival known as Yule—later merged with Christmas—worshippers sacrificed a boar to Frey to ensure a good harvest.
An Irish myth tells of pigs that were slaughtered and devoured and then, a day later, sprang back to life to be killed and eaten again—a fantastical exaggeration of the genuine fecundity of pigs.

T
he historical record contains a few traces of the pig-keeping practices of early Europe. In northeastern Gaul—parts of the Netherlands and Belgium today—a people known as the Salian Franks came to power and established a legal code just after the fall of Rome. They had two laws for goats, five for sheep, fourteen for cattle—and twenty for pigs. The code specified the fine for stealing more than fifty pigs, indicating that swine rustling was no minor problem. It imposed a higher fine for stealing a pig from a sty than from a field and a higher fine still if the swineherd was present when the theft took place. Other laws addressed “he who steals a leader sow” (presumably one that led other pigs into the forest to forage), “he who steals a bell from another man’s troop of pigs,” and “he who steals a sacrificial gelded boar [that] had been consecrated.”
From these laws we can infer that the Salian Franks sacrificed boars to their gods, kept pigs in sties to protect them from thieves and predators, and herded them through fields and forests.

The Anglo-Saxons, the Germanic tribe that had swept into England in the fifth century, wrote laws to protect both pigs and their forest grazing lands.
Anglo-Saxons valued a pig at twice the price of a sheep and fixed severe penalties for destroying
acorn-producing trees. Mast—the fruit of oak, beech, chestnut, and other trees—was the most valuable forest product.
In a practice known as
denbera
in Saxon and
pannage
in Norman, the nobles who controlled the forests charged for the right to fatten swine in the woods each fall. Throughout Europe the size of a forest sometimes was judged not by its acreage but by the number of pigs it could support.
In England’s Domesday Book (1086
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), a sort of census of the kingdom, designations such as “wood for 100 swine” served as measurements for some forests.
In ninth-century Italy a monastery’s forest was judged to be 2,000 pigs big. Whether the forest was five or fifty square acres mattered less than the number of swine it could feed, because that determined its worth.

Some pigs spent their entire life cycle in the woods.
The tips of stone arrowheads have been found embedded in the bones of domestic swine from Neolithic England, suggesting the animals were kept in a semiferal state and hunted down when needed. In Europe “hogs run wild,” wrote the Greek historian Strabo, whose
Geography
describes his travels in the time of Augustus. These free-ranging domestic animals could be every bit as fearsome as their wild brethren, which in their various habitats were known to fight off large predators like tigers, crocodiles, and bears.
“It is dangerous for one unfamiliar with their ways to approach them,” noted Strabo, “and likewise, also, for a wolf.”

Some forest pigs were closely managed.
In the forests of Kent in the ninth century, pigs lived for most of the year on the manors, then were driven in the autumn to seasonal settlements known as
denns
—the tradition survives in place-names such as Tenterden—where they grazed on mast. The swineherd contracted with farmers and gathered up five or six hundred pigs, for which he was paid by the head. Assisted by a herding dog, he drove them to the forest, where he built a rough pen under
a large tree and filled it with straw and ferns for bedding. Then he would feed the pigs, blowing a horn while they ate so they would associate the sound of the horn with food. He would turn them out to forage during the day, then call them back to the pen for the night with a blast of the horn.
Swineherds carried either a long, slender pole for smacking branches to bring down acorns or a short, stout stick, flung up into trees for the same purpose.

A Roman farmer who raised suckling pigs for banquets might have looked with horror upon such methods, but the forest pig was perfectly adapted to the conditions of the Middle Ages. The European forest was no place for coddled sty pigs. Husbandry here was defined in roughly equal measures by human intervention and natural selection. Pigs competed with each other for the nuts that dropped to the ground, and wild boars still roamed the woods, muddling the gene pool by interbreeding with their domestic cousins.

I
n their embrace of swine, medieval Europeans had much in common with ancient Romans. Nobles saw Rome as the pinnacle of civilization and sought to establish a similar heavenly empire on earth. They hunted boar as the ancient Romans did and feasted on pork just as ravenously.

Above all else, the era’s warrior culture valued courage and bravery, which noblemen could demonstrate on the battlefield and in the hunt. The most prized quarries were boar and deer, and only nobles were allowed to kill them.
An English law of 1184 decreed that commoners who poached these animals would be punished with blinding and castration. European hunters viewed boar and deer as polar opposites. The deer was elegant and swift, a test of the hunter’s speed and cleverness.
The boar, powerful and ugly, was impervious to pain and fought fiercely at bay, demanding strength and bravery from the hunter. Gaston Phoebus, in his fourteenth-century treatise on hunting, called the boar the fiercest of all animals.
Lions and leopards kill with claws and teeth, while “a boar kills with a single stroke, as one might with a knife.”

Swineherds depicted in a fourteenth-century English manuscript knock down acorns for their pigs, bristle-backed animals that roamed the forests and sometimes interbred with their wild-boar cousins. Medieval Europeans rivaled the Romans in their love of swine. (Courtesy British Library)

Classical Greece and Rome had shaped those views through legend and myth, such as the tale of the Calydonian Boar. The king of Calydon, the story goes, made offerings to the gods but neglected Diana, who expresses her fury by sending a wild boar to ravage his kingdom. When the greatest warriors of Greece gather to hunt him, “the boar rushes violently into the midst of the enemy, like lightning darted from the bursting clouds,” Ovid writes in
Metamorphoses
.
The boar slashes at an approaching hero, and the man’s “bowels, twisted, rush forth, falling with plenteous blood.”

King Arthur too hunted a mythical boar. In a Welsh tale from early Anglo-Saxon times, Arthur and his fellow warriors
tracked the boar across the Irish Sea and then engaged him in a nine-day battle that “laid waste to the fifth part of Ireland.” After the fight the boar swam back across the sea, shook the saltwater from his bristles in Wales, and again began killing men by the dozen. Finally, in Cornwall, Arthur cornered the boar and drove him into the sea, never to be seen again.
Arthur became known as the Boar of Cornwall for his bravery.

As Arthur’s epithet suggests, killing a wild boar came to be considered a mystical act that transferred the strength of the animal to the hunter. Domestic pigs—which, in their tusked, shaggy, semiferal state, looked much like the wild boars with whom they shared the woods—basked in the reflected glory of their wild cousins.
In present-day Belgium, bones dug up at castles and monasteries show that nobles and monks consumed a lot of pigs, while peasants, when they could afford meat, ate mostly cattle and sheep. Archaeology in England shows the same pattern: commoners ate beef and mutton from older animals culled after the end of their productive lives.
The trash heaps of the elite—in castles, palaces, monasteries, and convents—were piled high with pig bones.

Medieval cooks also mimicked Roman styles of preparation. Many recipes were derived from Apicius, whose manuscripts were copied in medieval monasteries and courts. Meat was boiled or spit-roasted and served with heavily spiced sauces. Because the spice trade with the East had expanded enormously by the high Middle Ages, European noblemen had far more potent spices at their disposal—such as cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg—than did the Roman elite. (
Medieval Europeans ate spices because they liked them, not to mask the taste of bad meat: an entire pig could be bought for the price of a pound of pepper, and anyone who could afford spices could also afford fresh meat.)
Medieval cooks also borrowed from Rome
the habit of cobbling together strange creations: they would cut both a suckling pig and a capon—a castrated cock—in half, then sew the forequarters of one onto the hindquarters of the other. The Count of Savoy’s chef presented a boar’s head set between its disarticulated feet, with one side of the head covered in gold foil and the other glazed with green sauce, like a heraldic symbol.
A camphor-soaked wick was placed in the boar’s mouth and lighted, so the boar was served breathing fire.
One cookbook offered a recipe for a roasted rooster, wearing a tiny helmet and carrying a lance to match, sitting astride an orange-glazed suckling pig.

The pig also played humbler roles in medieval kitchens.
In noble houses, the pantry of preserved foods became known as the “larder” because lard, which at the time referred to rendered fat or any fatty cured pork, was the most important item it held. This was another miracle of pigs: they were not only suitable for feasting but also, when preserved, provided a store of food for lean times.

Curing, at its most basic, involves nothing more than drying meat. Bacteria requires moisture to grow, so the drier the meat, the less likely it is to rot. In arid climates meat can be cut into strips and left to cure in the air; Norwegians preserved cod this way, and Native Americans did the same with venison. Usually, though, curing involved salt. Coating a piece of meat with salt creates osmotic pressure: water rushes out of the animal cells toward the salt, drying out the meat. Salt is also directly toxic to bacteria, killing them through osmosis by sucking the moisture out of them.
Sometimes the salt gets an assist from wood smoke, which deposits a variety of bactericidal compounds on the meat’s surface, along with delicious flavors. Any meat can be cured with salt, but lean meats like beef tend to become tough when so preserved. Cured pork, with its generous veins of fat, remains tender.

The ancients understood the practice of curing, if not the science behind it.
Greeks used the same word to describe both the curing of pork and the Egyptian practice of mummification, because drying out a dead pharaoh was not so different from preserving a leg of pork. Roman farming manuals record the earliest detailed instructions for treating the latter: pour a layer of salt into the bottom of a large pottery jar, place hams, skin side down, on top of the salt, and cover the meat with more salt. Then add alternating layers of hams and salt until the jar is full. After five days, remove the hams and repack them, with the top layer of hams now on the bottom. After twelve more days, remove the hams, brush off the salt, dry “in the breeze” for two days, rub down with oil and vinegar, cold-smoke for two days, and then hang in a meat house.
According to Cato, “No moths nor worms will touch” hams prepared in this way.

During the height of the Roman Empire, some of the most highly prized cured pork on Roman tables was imported from the European provinces.
Varro insisted that the Gauls of southern France made the best bacon. Cato reported that a Gallic group from northern Italy cured 3,000 or 4,000 hams annually for export to Rome.
These Gauls lived around Parma, now famous for its prosciutto, which suggests that the region has enjoyed a continuous tradition of ham making for two millennia. The same is true for Iberia and Germany.
Varro recommended pork from what is now Portugal, and Strabo reports excellent hams from the Spanish side of the Pyrenees.
Martial gave a nod to hams made along the Rhine, in the same region where Westphalia hams are now made.

For the millions of farmers who cured pork for their own use, lard was as important as meat.
Living things need to eat fats, which help create the membranes of all cell walls and provide an efficient food source, packing twice as many calories as
an equivalent weight of sugars or starches.
Ancient cooks often boiled their meat because this method, unlike spit-roasting, preserved the fat for later use.
Fat was so rare and precious that an old Hittite law code specifies that if a dog eats lard from a man’s kitchen, he can legally kill the dog and rescue the lard from its stomach—and then, presumably, eat the lard.

The Mediterranean world harvested most of its dietary fat from olive trees. Since northern Europe was too chilly for olives, the pig functioned as
a sort of olive tree on the hoof. A lard belt stretched across Europe, just north of the olive oil belt and overlapping with the butter belt along the cow-heavy coast of the North Sea. Pigs feasted on nuts in the fall, putting on a few inches of subcutaneous fat to live on through the winter. Humans intervened in this process, killing the animals and using the fat and meat as their own winter provisions. Medieval calendars, decorated with illustrations depicting the usual occupations for each month, devoted the fall to pigs. The October illustration typically showed a swineherd in the woods with his pigs, the oak branches heavy with acorns. November, known as “blood month” in Anglo-Saxon, depicted a pig slaughter. The feast day of Saint Martin, November 11, became an important holiday because it marked the start of the slaughter season, when the weather turned cold enough for meat to cure before it spoiled.

For medieval Europeans, the seasons of the year were a bumpy cycle of warmth and cold, abundance and scarcity, but pigs smoothed the ride: they were fattened on the fruits of summer and fall and then slaughtered for winter sustenance—while a pregnant sow, bedded down in a warm shed, promised a fresh crop of piglets in the spring.
Many proverbs indicated that a supply of salt pork represented safety: “He who has barley bread, and fatback for his gullet, can say that he is happy.”

Not everyone, however, felt quite so positively about the pig. As Europe’s human population grew and trade expanded, the region’s forests gradually disappeared, and the acorn-loving woods hog was forced to find other ways to sustain itself. Its new food source mirrored that of the very first domestic pigs: human waste, scavenged from the streets. In the cities of Europe, as in those of the ancient Near East, people found such habits troubling—and the pig’s reputation suffered accordingly.