A Cook's Tour Read Online Free PDF

azeito cheese. I’d visited the open markets in Oporto, where I’d met fishwives whose skills with profanity would put any cook of my experience to shame. With José translating, I’d listened for a while to the back-and-forth between fishwives and customers, amazed that sixty-five-year-old ladies who looked like Martha Washington could make me blush.
         On the day of the slaughter, we drove to the Meirelles farm, a stone and mortar farmhouse with upstairs living quarters, downstairs kitchen and dining area and adjacent larder. Across a dirt drive were animal pens, smokehouse, and a sizable barn. José’s father and cousin grow grapes, from which they make wine, and raise a few chickens, turkeys, geese, and pigs. A few hectares of grapevines and multiuse plots of land stretched over gracefully sloping fields beneath tree-covered hills and mountains, a few church spires and smoking chimneys just visible among leaves and branches.
         It was early morning when I arrived, but there was already a large group assembled: José’s brother Francisco, his other brother, also Francisco (remember the wedding scene in Goodfellas , where everybody’s named Petey or Paul or Marie?), his mother, father, assorted other relatives, farmhands, women and children – most of whom were already occupied with the early preparations for two solid days of cooking and eating. Standing by the barn were three hired assassins, itinerant slaughterers/butchers, who apparently knock off from their day jobs from time to time to practice their much-called-upon skills with pig killing and pork butchering. They were a likable bunch: a red-cheeked old man in vest and shirtsleeves, sporting a black brim hat and dapper mustache, two younger men in sweaters and waterproof boots. Looking amiable and unthreatening, they shook my hand over early-morning glasses of vinho verde , a barely fermented white wine made from the family grapes.
         Cousin Francisco positioned a sequence of bottle rockets and aerial bombs in the dirt outside the farmhouse and, one after the other, let them fly. The explosions rocked through the valley, announcing to all who could hear news of the imminent slaughter – and meal to follow.
         ‘Is that a warning to vegetarians?’ I asked José.
         ‘There are no vegetarians in Portugal,’ he said.
         The mustachioed man I took to be the chief assassin – he was holding the knife, a nasty-looking blade with a slot in the middle and a wooden handle – began his approach to the barn. Everyone joined in the expedition, a look of neither sadness nor glee on their faces. Only José’s expression was readable. He was watching me, a wry smile on his face, curious, I was guessing, as to how I’d react to what was about to happen.
         At the far end of the barn, a low door was opened into a small straw-filled pen. A monstrously large, aggressive-looking pig waggled and snorted as the crowd peered in. When he was joined in the confined space by the three hired hands, none of them bearing food, he seemed to get the idea that nothing good was going to be happening anytime soon, and he began scrambling and squealing at tremendous volume.
         I was already unhappy with what I was seeing. I’m causing this to happen, I kept thinking. This pig has been hand-fed for six months, fattened up, these murderous goons hired – for me. Perhaps, had I said when José first suggested this blood feast, ‘Uh no . . . I don’t think so. I don’t think I’ll be able to make it this time around,’ maybe the outcome for Porky here would have been different. Or would it have been? Why was I being so squeamish? This pig’s number was up the second he was born. You can’t milk a pig! Nobody’s gonna keep him as a pet! This is Portugal, for Chrissakes! This porker was boots and bacon from birth.
         Still, he was my pig. I was responsible. For a guy who’d spent twenty-eight years serving dead animals and