From Head To Toe

With a disposable blue Gillette razor, I’m carefully shaving the hair off a leg; it’s not my leg.

“You need not to be so gentle.” Giovanni the butcher jokes in Italian. “The pig doesn’t feel it.”

From head to toe, nearly every part of a pig is consumed - the exceptions being the bones and shaved hair. I had categorized pork into one of three categories: Easter ham, Sunday bacon, and pork chops. Head cheese wasn’t one of the three, neither was skin sausage.

Starting at the head, the Italians make Testa-In-Cassetta or “head in a box”. After the heads are boiled in a cauldron, the meat and soft parts are separated from the skulls. On a large outdoor chopping block, Giovanni chops, seasons, and generously sprinkles the secret ingredient - grappa - into the mix. Iris’ mother brings an ironed linen pillowcase; the brown mix is poured into the white pillow. (This is immediately followed by banters of the naive American sleeping on it.) The pillow is pressed between two large boards, where it remains until most of the liquid is drained and inside is born Testa-in Cassetta.

Ending at the feet, the Italians make Cotechino, a sausage made primarily of pig hide. The fat is cut away from the skin and saved to make various lard products. In turn, the nearly fat-free skin is diced and run through a meat grinder. After it is seasoned, the stuffing is loaded into one end of a meat-press where it is squeezed into a narrow tube of stuffing out the opposite end. Giovanni blows into the casing of pig intestine making a condom-looking balloon that is secured on the conduit of the meat-press. For a distinguished skin sausage, the casing of pig’s feet may be used instead. As the handle of the meat press is slowly turned, a Cotechino sausage is created.

And in the middle, there is salami, pancetta, and prosciutto. But even these more widely accepted pork fares are wrapped and cured in the pig’s large intestines, colon, stomach and bladder. After the initial shock of this new-found knowledge subsided, I was left in awe at the thoroughness and care that this tradition upholds .

There are numerous accounts of elephants slaughtered solely for the ivory tusks and of bucks shot solely for the above-the-mantel trophy piece. Surely these animals died in vain as compared to the pig that is venerated in the hills of Italy.