Killing It by Camas Davis

Author:Camas Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-07-23T16:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-THREE

Two days later, after Levi had hung the pig in a friend’s restaurant walk-in and the carcass had gone through rigor mortis, our same group—Guy, Tagg, Porter, Nick, and I—gathered around a stainless-steel worktable at the studio where Robert taught his students.

Levi had a busy few days ahead of him. His to-do list for the weekend read something like this: (1) butcher pig; (2) rabbit rillettes; (3) duck confit; (4) kill roosters; (5) render fat; (6) make sausage; (7) salt pancetta and guanciale; (8) start posole; (9) cut soap; (10) order beef from Larry; (11) feed bees.

He began walking the students through what they would do with the pig liver and head.

“We’ll make pâté today out of the liver. I’ll make guanciale out of the jowls. Jowl bacon, in other words. And I’ll crack open this head, take the brains out, and put the entire thing in a stockpot and make posole,” Levi said.

Levi washed the liver under cold water and then gathered the students around him. He cleaned the liver using the same knowledge he relied on every day as a nurse, offering words like portal, lipase, vena cava, and common bile duct to explain what he was doing.

“This isn’t rocket science,” he kept telling the students. “It’s a body, just like ours. This is a liver, just like ours.”

Not too long ago, Levi said, this was a common annual ritual among communities all over the world: slaughter the hog, butcher it, and then preserve the meat by making hams, bacon, sausage, and pâtés.

“Ask Camas. She just got back from Gascony, where they still do that,” Levi said.

For this group of urbanites, however, it was new territory. For us, a book on slaughter and butchery—which Levi had placed on the worktable in front of us—stood in for a grandmother in an apron and a grandfather with a shotgun.

After preparing liver pâté and finishing off the head, we broke for a lunch of meat, cheese, and bread. Robert arrived and poured us some wine, which prompted Levi to tell us about his childhood.

In Estacada, Oregon, on the communal farm—“a pot farm,” he told us, “that eventually got busted”—where he grew up in the seventies and eighties, with nine adults and five kids, they raised and killed their own animals for food. “The first time I was part of killing an animal, my uncle told me to plug my ears. I was six. He pulled out a pistol, shot a goat in the head, and then hung the thing up and asked me to hold it still for him. I gave it a big hug while he tied its feet.”

Levi’s friend John Taboada, a local chef who did whole-animal butchery occasionally in his restaurant, Navarre, showed up. He’d agreed to show us his butchery method on one half while Levi followed along with a knife on the other half. We all joined them around the table. From a folded dish towel, John unwrapped what looked like a small paring knife and began cutting the tenderloin away from the vertebrae and ribs, just as Dominique had shown me.

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