The Strange Case of the Hanging Pork
Early one morning in the spring of ‘06, Violeta asked me what the deal was with the cocoon hanging from my bookcase.
“That’s a little weird,” she said.
This was no cocoon. It was, in fact, a culatello from Trattoria La Buca in the town of Zibello in the Po River Valley of Emilia Romagna, Italy.
In the pantheon of prestige cured pork—a rarefied category of food that alone can make life worth living—culatello (the meatiest, sweetest part of a ham, carved off the bone and wrapped and tied and aged in the humid cellars of Zibello and a handful of surrounding towns) is surpassed only by Jamón Ibérico de Bellota; and among culatello producers, few are revered quite like Miriam Leonardi, the proprietress of La Buca, the curer-in-chief of the restaurant’s celebrated pig bottoms, and the exceedingly charming lady from whom I purchased my hanging beast in September 2005, on the road to Slow Food Cheese in Bra.
It’s just that I have never really settled on the right moment to crack it open. Maybe I have become attached to the idea of it being perpetually unactualized. Friends always encourage me to get on with it, yet there it hangs just above my computer.
It came with instructions in Italian. Apparently a red wine application and some sort of pre-slicing brine soak are called for. I couldn’t really tell.
In January 2006, I thought I had found the perfect occasion. My idea was to bring it to Chanterelle and invite Peter Kaminsky, author of Pig Perfect, for a sumptuous lunch that would begin with plates of mille-porky-feuille, sliced culatello stacked like pancakes and topped of with a few shavings of butter (not my idea—it’s how Miriam serves it at La Buca, I swear.) I had met Peter twice and he was totally down for it. Only, when I finally proposed a date, Peter happened to be in Patagonia that week. We could never find the right time after that first misstep.
And so it has become a conversation piece, an albatross of sorts, a cocoon, my porkyprey noosed, netted, and hanging like a trophy.
The question is, should I decide finally to make it happen this winter, is the thing still going to taste good?
I recently approached my friend, Babbo Wine Director Colum Sheehan, with that very question, pushing the indecipherable instruction sheet under his nose. Even he, a fluent Italian speaker, had difficulty with some of the terms employed therein.
“I might have to show this to Mario,” he conceded.
“I am willing to barter with this pork, if it’s still in good shape and he wants to serve it,” I answered, “I just want to make that perfectly clear.”
Until Mr. Batali chimes in, anybody out there proficient in cured pork longevity issues?
Give me advice and I’ll save you a slice.
February 7th, 2007 at 8:15 pm
It looks like a little alien pig with insect wings and gleaming fish-teeth might sprout from that thing if the proper incubating environment is met.
I hear nothing tastes as succulent as alien pig fresh from the cocoon.
February 26th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
Very descriptive language and imagery, oe.
Sadly, it’s still there, unsprouted, so I cannot yet comment on its succulence.
I am shooting for early next week.
June 3rd, 2007 at 3:42 pm
I believe this is one of the funniest and most entertaining Adrian stories I have read. I remember seeing the now famous trophy hanging from the bookcase, and it never occured to me to ask about it, since it really is a rare and unusual site. Since I never looked at it in detail, at first, I thought it was a big hunk of Italian cheese, as the ones you see hanging in small town Italian restaurants, but now that I know its true identity, I would love
you to save it, perhaps we can have it for Father’s Day.
Great piece!
Papi