Salted bones in the Girona market

“And those?’ I asked, pointing to a pile of white things in the corner of the butcher’s counter.  “Salted bones,” she said, “huesos salados.” This was in a small market in Barcelona a few years ago.  For soup, explained the owner.

So on my salt trail in Catalonia in northern Spain, I mull over salt bones.  They don’t quite fit my culinary expectations.  I’m not sure I have them pegged right.  But here is my mulling for what it’s worth.

Salt bones. Bleached white. Bristling with crystals of salt.

They conjure up images of bones of dessicated animals dead of starvation in the desert. Ezekiel in the Valley of Dry Bones. Dem Bones.  Though none of those are salted, of course.

They hint at a characteristic color of the cuisine.  Funny how cuisines have colors. Not so funny, actually.  There are reasons that I want to post about sometime. Native Hawaiian cuisine is purple: poi, limu, octopus. Contemporary American cuisine is technicolor.

And then there are white cuisines.  North European plates with white fish, white potatoes, white asparagus. Meals of the Mughals on moonlit nights with white rice and white koorma.

White in Catalonia: salt, salt spray, bacalao, white beans, white mold on the cured meats.  White for dessication,  for salt and hot sun, for bare-knuckled survival.

Bacalao and salt fish in the Girona market

All the time in this the most sophisticated of food cultures with its world ranking restaurants (El Bulli is less than half an hour’s drive, el Celler de Can Roca, second in the Michelin rankings, is in town) a barely-forgotten poverty lurks in the background.

So here in Girona I ask the butcher down the block, how many I need for a pot (using hands to indicate the size) of soup.  Two.

And why?  To give flavor and to make color. What color?  White.  Ah. So I exit with two bones (about $3.00).

And next morning I rinse off the salt and add them to a pot of water, reminding myself that in spite of all the hype above, these are not so different from ham hocks, except they are not smoked and have no bits of red meat attached. And that these are used all over Spain, not just in Catalonia, produced on an industrial scale. Recently 20,000 kilos of illegal salted bones, row upon row of hanging net bags filled with white bones, were seized by the government in Cordoba.

And a quick google yields dozens of recipes for using the bones to make caldo blanco (white broth).  That color again. Not a broth color in my culinary history where I learned that onion skins helped make a chicken broth yellow, that browning bones and adding red wine gave color and flavor to a beef broth, and that you didn’t make broth with pork bones in any case.

Anyway, just to see this caldo blanco, I rinsed the bones quickly to get rid of the excess salt, and put them in a pot of simmering water.

Salt bones in simmering water

And after a couple of hours.

Salt bone broth (caldo blanco)

I let the water evaporate so you can see the bones. Sure enough there is a white broth.  It’s salty, to be sure, but not horribly so and besides it would be used to make one pot meals of garbanzos and vegetables and meats that are descendants of the olla podrida (puchero, cocido, escudella in Catalan).  And it tastes surprisingly meaty for two dry bones.  And they have given up a surprising amount of fat, perhaps from the marrow in the bones. It did not gel when cold though.

So there you have it. Salted bones for caldo blanco, white broth. Something that rather upset my culinary categories.  Always a good thing.

One last thought.  So far as I can see, salted bones did not make it to Mexico, either with the original arrival of Spaniards, or with the later waves of migration in the late nineteenth century and then in the Franco era.  One more of the many preserved meats that didn’t.

EDIT. And no, for the various people who asked.  No you do not de-salt the bones before cooking.

“From family farms brimming with healthy, free-range chicken, cattle and hogs, we steadily marched toward a Dickensian, standardized, faceless system in which animals are caged from birth to death in sunless buildings with minimal human contact, no room to move, deprived of their ability to nurse their young, forced to wallow in their own waste and fed a steady stream of drug, animal byproduct and hormone-loaded feed.”

I have to get this book.  I have to visit a modern pig farm to see for myself.   I have no doubt that they are not a bundle of fun.  And the urine problem has to be dealt with.

At the same time, for years I’ve been suspicious about this story of a sunlit past and thundercloud covered present.  As Adam’s link on lambs fed on milk and dried peas makes clear, not all animals in the past wandered freely nursing from their mothers.  Even a passing browse through history or literature is enough to remind us that very many humans in the past (and today) had a struggle to survive and that animal welfare was not at the top of the list of their concerns.

Keeping lots of animals is a difficult and often dangerous job. Anthropomorphizing animals does not help in the effort to get clear about what constitutes good treatment.

And if the underlying agenda of industrial agriculture is to make money (shock), it’s worth bearing in mind that other agendas often lie behind the small farm movement.

I’m watching and waiting.

Chlorox   234

Mayo           27.7

Eggs             12.5

Fideos         21.6

Beans           54

Guavas        40   (on account of their high vitamin C content)

Average number of carts in line for each cashier last weekend     15

Fall in sales of pork    70-90%

Fall in price of live pigs 22 pesos to 11 pesos (per kilo presumably)

Number of people directly employed by the pork industry 350,000

Source: Reforma, AM 6th May 2006

My family is from Zacatecas and they would slaughter a pig twice a year. The skin and extra fat bits were always fried and served the day of the slaughter. So it was a very festive, and delicious, treat with some promise of the meat to follow.

Chicharrones are a very male dish, it is one of those dishes I always associate with men cooking. In fact, my father has his very own chicharron contraption, a metal drum gassed by a propane tank with a huge aluminum pan on top for frying. My brother is an engineer and made him a very sophisticated press for extracting all the fat, this results in a very dry and crisp chicharron.

Even still, my father is 78, at every family gathering he will start his preparations at dawn in anticipation of the arrival of his 8 children and their brood. I was hoping to inherit said contraption but, as is the tradition, it is intended for my only brother.

Oh, do you know the Italian equivalent? While in Fanano, above Bologna, years ago I went to a traditional food fair. There I came across someone selling pork from two large cakes. Both were comprised of bits of fatty pork bits spotted with meat, though one was dry while the other moist. They tasted just like chicharrones, salt and all!

I just love new technology being applied to a centuries-old product. And please, I’ve never seen anything like this about Italy.  Anyone have any more comments on Italian-style chicharrón prensado?

And check out Sonia’s blog at at www.saffronpaisley.com

What I think is different in Mexico is what Mexico Bob pointed to when he called them a major food group, half jokingly of course.  But he’s right. Chicharrón in Central Mexico (and may be other parts too) is not just a snack, though it can be that.  It is made into a huge variety of dishes.  It’s rare to go to a breakfast buffet or a tacquería and not find a a chicharrón dish.  Here’s Ricardo Muñoz onthe subject:

Chicharrón is almost part of the daily diet of Mexicans and almost all of them eat it at least once a week because there are many ways to consume it: in tacos de chicharrón y tacos placeros, in salsa verde, as chicharrón prensado, in salad or with refried beans; some tamal doughs also contain chicharrón.

So my question is partly the economics of this.  Sometimes I don´t think Mexicans consume enough of the rest of the pig to generate enough skin to make it a major meat, essentially.  And I don’t know how it is treated in other parts of Latin America but I don’t think it’s a major way of eating pork, as opposed to a snack, in most other parts of the world. And it’s part of the more general question we have kicked around before about the relative lack of cured pork products in Mexico when compared with Spain and the abundance of fried pork products (carnitas and chicharrón).

And Kyri’s question is the more general one about the popularity of pork in Spain, France and England.  Yes surely part of it is that it was one of those foods that came to be eaten as a badge of Christianity. But I think that reinforced and played on a preference that was already in place.  The Celts (who were essentially all the peoples around the European borders of the Roman Empire including Spain) held the pig in high regard as the symbol of fertility (rather than grain) and for eating.   It may even be that the Roman Empire took its liking for pig (one of the things that differentiated Roman and Greek Cuisine) from the north, first early on from the Celts who lived in the north of the peninsula, then in the later empire when Celts became Emperors and imposed some of their food customs.  This is all back in a pretty murky and ill-documented past of course.

For me it’s the most interesting piece in the much-touted new Atlantic page on food.  It’s full of well known names but for me lacks a bit of edge.  You know before you start the line each piece will take. It will be interesting to see how it develops.

Watching the pig slaughtering slides, though, had a bonus.  One slide shows the skin being cut into strips with Aglai’s voiceover explaining that in the past this was set aside to make shoes.

Now perhaps that’s part of the answer to why Mexicans eat so much pork skin.  They can and they could.

Once the Spanish imported pigs, sheep, goats, and cattle to Mexico they multiplied well, shall we say, like rabbits.  And there was a mass of skin for every conceivable purpose, hence the long standing leather industry in the central Mexican town, León, that I wrote about recently.

That would not have been true in Europe.  Skin had to be carefully saved for shoes and saddles and so on.

Lots of interesting comments that I can’t wait to follow up on.  Quotes on pigs and the inquisition, flour chicharron in eighteenth century Mexico, ditto ravioli and tallarines, and more. Life’s too short.

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And today’s blog is Huevos a la Mexicana. I like with its tart comments on expatriate life.  The specific link is to a piece on the Mexican juice drink Boing and the troubled labor relations its been through.  Whatever your political position, if you’re interested in the history of food and corporations, this is worth looking at.

It’s there in the NY Times because this is where Obama grew up. Here’s my friend Lori Wong on how Hawaii saw Obama’s victory. “Our re-elected mayor summed up Obama’s election in a foodie fashion by saying we will now have a prez in the White House who understands shaved ice, plate lunch, spam musubi, and poi.” One day we’ll have an account of Obama’s life that gives due attention to the difference that growing up in Hawaii made. It won’t come for a while because now is the moment when the nation is celebrating someone who embraced an American black heritage.

Meantime, I have to say, specially after my recent visit, that I am thrilled to have been in the vanguard of those who celebrated, instead of denigrated, Hawaii’s cuisine.

And just to give you a sense of the exuberance of Hawaii’s cuisine, I asked Lori if I could reproduce a recent letter. It’s all hers except for the commentary in square brackets. She calls it Pigcentricities.  Of course, this is just one particular subset as she says (no Japanese, Korean, Portuguese dishes at this particular feast).

The obligatory goat skin found at Hawaiian-Filipino celebrations, ahi poke [raw cubes of tuna] along with sushi and fruit sat on the pupu table as the 350-700 guests awaited “the kitchen” to open. The groom’s father’s band rocked out “Mustang Sally” as the crowd answered back, “Ride, Sally, Ride”. The kitchen in the garage “opened” and the double line grew as guests piled their paper plates high.

It is accompanied by shrink-wrapped “maiz para pozole,” that is, hominy for the classic meal in a bowl, pozole.

To begin with, I agree that carnitas are a special meal. To add to the stories, the first time I had them was when I was invited to the rancho (village) of a maestro albañil. To translate his title as head bricklayer or stone mason doesn’t quite do it justice. These guys work with architects (and often without) to build houses and have a team who are pretty skilled at working with stone, concrete, and brick. It was May 3rd, the feast of the Sacred Cross and the Day of the Albañil.

To celebrate the maestro had killed a pig and polished up the big copper cauldron. He didn’t use a gas tank to supply fuel. He had a trench in his yard in which he lit a fire and then put the cauldron on two small bricks walls that ran along either side of the trench. When I asked him how often he killed a pig, he said twice a year. I imagine, as Bob mentioned in his comment, that the other time was Christmas–or perhaps a wedding or a quincena (15th birthday).

The maestro also volunteered that he killed one of his goats every couple of months. That was meat for the family. Otherwise it was beans, salsas and tortillas. His was a sad rancho, the soil bleached and white and useless for crops. Hence the men sought work elsewhere.

So, for campesinos (poor country people) carnitas are a special dish. And I think they really are a campesino dish. You never ever see recipes for them in the many Mexican cookbooks produced from the eighteenth century on. The well-to-do eat go to carnitas stands and find them delicious but (correct me if I wrong anyone out there who knows more about this than me) with a slight sense of slumming, just the attitude the the well-to-do in England had to fish and chip shops.

But then that raises the question once more that Adam and I are debating in the comments. Why this very unusual method of preparing a special dish? This is not pork baked in an oven (Europe) nor is it spitted pork (the Philippines). Usually special dishes, at whatever social level, have a special presentation. They are large or gussied up.

Nor is the meat preserved but eaten all at once. Carnitas do not last until the second day. They are horrid warmed up (though I do it for just a hint of that original taste). And this raises, tangentially why the Spanish in Mexico (or New Spain as it was in the colonial period) did not go in for the range of pig preserving that one assumes was already common in Spain. Most of the salting and sausage making of Spain just never made it here. When Roberto Santibañez and I were chatting about this a month or so ago, he suggested that the winters were not cold enough for hams and sausages.

I also think that part of the reason was the abundance of meat in New Spain. At least for the well-to-do, beef and mutton and pork were available in quantities unheard of in Europe. Why preserve for the winter when you can have fresh meat whenever you want? (Though against that, the preserved meats have a new taste and texture so why did they not want this, I say, arguing with myself).

Here’s a photo of tiles (sorry, I don’t have notes one where I got this) showing how blood sausage was made in eighteenth-century Spain. There’s that cauldron but presumably filled with water (as it would be presumably for making blood sausage here in Mexico).

So here’s the suggestion. Spain, like many other parts of the world, does have methods not just of salting pork but of preserving it in lard. Now suppose you are in New Spain. Suppose you are a poor person. You begin on the rendering of lard to make preserved pork. The meat that is cooked in the fat is delicious. You throw a feast. Any lard left over livens up beans.

Or does it? I ask, arguing with myself again. My impression is that refried beans (mashed beans enriched with lard) that are emblematic of Mexican food in the United States are rarely eaten even now in the Mexican countryside. There just isn’t the fat so they are a real luxury. I am always slightly horrified when the girls who work for me ask if they can take the frying fat that I am discarding.

So I’m not sure we are farther along. Perhaps, though, some of the outlines of the puzzle are becoming clearer. And I do find in general there is a logic to the way food is prepared. So any help ferreting this out would be welcome.

Here’s a post that just crept up on me. There was mention of carnitas at a wedding in the Mexican countryside. I read yet one more cookbook published in America describing how to make carnitas by cooking chunks of leg of pork in water until it evaporated and then frying. And I returned from a shopping trip to the booming town of León forty miles away and stopped off as usual to pick up carnitas in Carnitas El Ricas. (Aside, if the grammar of this sign bothers you, it’s a joke. . . the owner’s name is Ricardo, carnitas are delicious, rica).

So what are carnitas? They’re little chunks of meat, meat meaning pork, cooked in its own fat, with salt and often orange. Commercial establishments are signaled by happy pigs, as above, but often pigs sitting in the copper cooking pot where they’re to be cooked.

So what place do carnitas have in Mexican life. They are happy food if often slightly guilty food now that Mexicans have had the same anti-fat lectures as the rest of the world. You pick them up for a late Sunday breakfast with the accompanying tortillas and salsas. You go for lunch with your buddies and enjoy a beer or two. They cross classes. When I stopped at El Ricas, I off in the corner were these four business men and that’s their Mercedes you can see parked in the foreground–well Silao, a cow town ten years ago–is, as I said, booming.

Above all they are the celebration food for rural weddings with pigs being specially killed and cooked. This snap that I took at a wedding a few years back gives you an idea of the size of the copper pots.

And of typical Mexican ingenuity with gas tanks.

If you want a good account of the slaughtering of the pig (for commercial use this time) and how you deal with it, here’s a link to Rolly Brook’s description. Check out the rest of his site too, it’s very informative on everyday Mexican life including cooking. Bear in mind though that in this part of Mexico, carnitas are much more than just ribs and shoulder and that chicharron (another topic) is different too.

So supposing you go to El Ricas. If you are not Mexican, you will immediately be asked “macizo?” Do you want solid meat, basically meat from the leg. You can answer yes and get tender and delicious chunks of leg of pork

But you’ll be missing the best bits. What you want is surtido, the mixture. Here’s a picture of a pound of surtido from El Ricas.

And here’s that surtido separated into meats from different bits of the pig. It’s actually missing the intestines and the ribs, but what’s in the surtido depends on who gets there first. You can see I am not a master of lighting, but let’s press on.

So you have five kinds of meat in that one pound of surtido, going round from bottom in a clockwise direction and ending in the center. Here are the cueritos, the bits of skin. Meltingly soft, a bit salty, a mind opening mixtures of texture and taste.

And here’s the buche, a tad on the chewy side from my point of view. It’s the stomach lining.

And here are a couple of slices of pork belly which I ask for as adillo. I don’t have a great ear and this works even though it bears no resemblance to any word in the dictionary.

And here’s the carne jugosa (the juicy meat), or codillo, elbow, shoulder, knuckle. Try to get lots of this, the crispy edges and juicy middles are mouthwatering.

And finally, the macizo, the leg, the white meat.

All these will be piled up and chopped up roughly so that you can roll them up in soft corn tortillas, which are what tacos are in Mexico. Add a few salsas and you are in heaven.

And as I munch away, the historian in me niggles. Where else are whole pigs, even if chopped into large chunks, cooked in fat? This habit clearly comes after the Spanish Conquest of Mexico because before there were no pigs and there was no pig fat. It’s so wildly extravagant in world terms. True it makes sure an entire pig can be used and shared in one day. What’s missing though is the careful drying and salting and smoking of the pig that preserved it for the winter in Europe. A bountiful land in the colonial period was Mexico.