Pork chop

Eastside Road, February 7, 2010—

YESTERDAY WE DROVE DOWN to Oakland to pick up ten pounds of pork an e-mail had invited us to purchase. Pig in a poke, you might say: but we trusted the offer: first, it came through the auspices of Blue Bottle Coffee, who we trust implicitly; second, they came from pastured animals, raised by a Slow Food type farm in northern California; third, two of the three breeds involved were unknown to me. I know the Berkshire pig, of course; we raised them when I was a boy, along with Durocs and Chester Whites and Hampshires — we were pretty indiscriminate, I realize now; I imagine we raised whatever Dad could get cheap.

But I don't know the Ossabaw, "a lean, mean pork machine that's descended from famed Spanish Iberico hogs" according to the invitational email; and I'd never heard of the Mangalitsa, "a distinctively wooly pig from the Austro-Hungarian empire known for richly flavorful meat."

At the Blue Bottle address in Oakland we found a table with four or five attendants presiding over cute flat cardboard boxes, each with two packages of pork chops (two to a package), a pound or two of nice fat bacon, and several packages of loose pork sausage. One of these was ours. We were also given a hot Mangalitsa sausage sandwich with some tasty barbecue sauce. (And I took advantage of Blue Bottle's café to have a fine single-origin cappuccino.)

Tonight we had the Mangalitsa chops. In order to taste just them, Lindsey simply broiled them with a little salt and pepper. No garlic; no fennel seeds (a delicious approach to pork chopse), no lemon, no olive oil. We wanted to taste the pork.

Wikipedia says "The Mangalitsa produces too little lean meat so it has been gradually replaced by modern domestic breeds." There was indeed considerable fat: here you see the chops before broiling, with the fat Lindsey trimmed off them:



When we picked up the meat yesterday I sampled some lardo made from this breed, and it was absolutely delicious. This fat is silky, delicate, yet deeply flavored; and its flavor permeated the cooked chop.

But delicious as this Mangalitsa is — delicate and noble; I want to call it "Countess Mangalitsa," after the operetta — I'm a little unhappy about eating it. As I understand it you can't buy breeding stock; you can only buy sterile pigs to raise for slaughter. All the breeding stock in this country is owned by a single American representative. I should be happy anyone supplies them at all, I know; the race was very nearly allowed to die out altogether. But there's something Terminator-like about all this.

Still, if folks like Shasta Valley Farm, who raised the pork we had tonight, keep it up, and if the online media and the in-group foodies continue to stand in line for this stuff, maybe there'll be a breakthrough; maybe somehow a viable pig or two (I'm sure it would take at least two) will make a getaway, striking a blow for the kind of biological diversity our state and nation stand for. It would be a good thing. The pork chop certainly was.

Green salad, of course.

Sauvignon blanc, Viñas Chilenas, 2009