This week Part 1 of a trip I took to live one of those weekends to experience when, as winter approached, and the farmer was faced with a lot of animals who wanted to be fed when there was less food for all. Hence the few days of slaughter, especially of pigs, and geese then the feast of the most perishable parts of the animal, sausage making, then the salting, curing, smoking and so on.
Next week, Part 2.
access to archives.
you will receive weekly publications and news, as well as menus, recipes, and full
access to archives.To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Six months to the day before the September 11th attack on New York there were bears knocking over the beehives, but no wolves in sight as we drove out of Laza up the mountain to Cerdedelo, a remote village in a part of Galicia unchanged in centuries.
It hadn’t been light for long as we found our way up the hill, and came in sight of an old fortress surrounded by walls covered in ivy dripping from the early-morning mists.
All of us in the van had grown quite silent, the total quiet made apparent only when someone wondered aloud about the similarity of our surroundings and Transylvania.
In the midst of nervous laughter some wag voiced our worst suspicions.
“Peter Cushing and the Count (Dracula) must be around the next corner!”
This was the ruined castle of Monterei, one of the hundreds of properties of the Duchess of Alba.
She had refused permission to turn it into a parador because she didn’t like the current minister of tourism. Or so we were told. We all sensed this wasn’t the real reason. We could see where mere mortals had once lived, and knew that this was not a place inhabited in the daylight.
We quickly opened our bottle of Spanish “cava” and started to eat our almond cakes. It was cold, raining, and steel gray, and the mention of Dracula still hung heavy in the silent air. When someone made the first move to get back in the van, there was a stampede.
Leaving the cakes behind.
After another turn in the country lane we saw the village of Cerdedelo, a handful of slate roofs covered thickly in emerald green moss and golden lichen. We pulled into the main part of the village and looked around for inhabitants. Seeing none, those English vampire films of the ‘50’s came to mind again, with travelers arriving in a village to find all the doors barred shut against the dangers of a vampire-infested countryside.
Then a door opened, and showed half a face. Then another door, and another face, a full one this time. Encouraged, I got out of the car and called out a hello, then “buenos dias.”
Only then the villagers trickled out of their houses, along with a Siamese tomcat, two German shepherds and a couple of mutts. We were expected, but I suspected so was anything else for that matter. With no garlic braids, holy water, sacramental hosts or silver crucifix obviously at hand, it must have been my American accent that first broke the fear.
Minutes later it was completely dispelled by the roar of twin exhausts. The mayor of Laza, in his reassuringly twentieth-century Alfa Romeo, had arrived.
Now as the whole village and the twelve of us gathered in this main ‘square ’the size of two cars, an old farmer gestured for me to follow him up a tiny street. I saw open manger doors.
Above them was a wall of hundreds of bright yellow corncobs hanging against the brown timbered houses made even darker by the days of incessant rain. Inside them I saw a deep gloom and nothing else, but I certainly smelled cow and heard the cowbell. Then I heard a Minoan-sized snort.
Just a few feet away was the biggest cow I have ever seen.
It had horns that spanned the room and would have done a Texas longhorn proud. And proud she was, standing guard over a new calf, which was the second thing I saw as the understanding hit me of what the snorts and all the stamping meant.
She was coming for me.
This total realization took just a couple of seconds, but it was long enough to send terror through my heart and adrenaline through my legs which, then in fast retreat, propelled me to the ancient smooth slate cobblestones onto my ass into a whole winters’ worth of cowshit.
As the purple-faced villagers picked themselves up from laughing, the ice had been broken along with my dignity, and now the festivities could commence with honor.
Everyone needed a drink. It was ten a.m.
On the way to the drinking shed the old farmer introduced me to more cows in more mangers, explaining that none of them had mad cow disease ‘which is more than he could claim for some of their owners.’
I started to love the village.
We were ushered into a cellar empty except for old barrels covered with bottles of orujo. As I practiced rolling my R’s around “orr-rroo-ho,” the mayor told me it was the local version of spirits, distilled from the must of the crushing of the grapes like Italian grappa or French marc. Beside the bottles were two enormous rectangular cakes that looked fabulous in light of the cold and the grumbling of our early-morning “café zero” angry stomachs.
After hand-shaking all around, we all dove into this superb “angel food” like cake that was made from egg white, flour, sugar and quarts of the local thick unpasteurized cream.
In the bottles were four flavors of orujo: the chartreuse-colored one was herbal and tasted like Chartreuse; the coffee-colored one was exactly that and made by infusing orujo in coffee grounds; the pale beige ‘clear’ one was coffee using only the beans for flavor; and the totally clear one was orujo unadulterated.
So unadulterated that this aguardiente checking in at around sixty percent alcohol would be unjustly accused, if translated into English, as mere “water of life.” This one was a men-from-the boys separator, guaranteeing to keep you regular if you could ever get it past your throat. I stuck to the clear coffee one, happy to remain uninitiated at least until the next step, beyond spiritual boyhood, by the death of a pig.
We walked outside into the street that sloped down to the fields several hundred feet below us, and gathered expectantly in a circle while some villagers hauled out an eight-foot long cart. When four farmers and a young man in red overalls opened an old gray door, we saw the face of a pig. Then the pig saw them, and knew four men purposively approaching her could not be normal. When she saw the rope, she guessed her normality was gone forever.
She screamed.
And kept on screaming as the four men lifted her onto the cart and bound the rope through and around her mouth. Her screams turned into a steady keening, a plaintiff’s wail that had some of us leaving, most of us pale, and all of us quite quiet, quite in awe of this taking of life.
The red-overalled young man took a long-bladed knife, snapped two fingers against her throat at the jugular vein like a nurse preparing one’s arm for taking blood, and in one beautifully executed thrust, sliced the vein in two and then penetrated her heart.
Seventy kilos of young pig kicked as hard as it could against the farmers groins and bellies, having her revenge on at least one of them, who doubled-up white-faced against the side of the cart.
She protested one more time, but the sound was resigned, and her eyes turned dim as they rolled into the back of her head. The blood gushed out into the pail, or at least half of it did. The rest formed a small lake on the cobblestones, and ran down the steep alley to the waiting cat and few dogs, who up to this moment had been hanging back at the far ends of the gathered crowd, thinking it could be their time this time, but gambling it wasn’t.
Next week part two and the feast.
You write in such a poetic yet earthy style. As authors, you and Bourdain are truly unique.
You are an outstanding writer and story teller!