Pork & Sons: a cookbook from pork connoisseur Stéphane Reynaud
- Chef Stéphane Reynaud has never forgotten going to his first pig slaughter with his grandfather
- A firm believer in nothing going to waste, he provides multiple pork-focused recipes for home cooks
The author of Pork & Sons (2005) was seven years old when his grandfather, a butcher in Saint-Agrève, in the Ardèche department of France, took him to his first pig slaughter. Now a chef and cookbook writer, Stéphane Reynaud remembers his grandfather, Francois Barbe, as knowing everything about animals – at least, the cattle, calves, lambs and pigs he sold in his shop (small, inedible animals were another thing: under his watch, the young Reynaud’s pet guinea pig froze to death from being left out in the winter cold).
Reynaud, who now has a bistro, Oui Mon Général!, in Paris, continued to go to pig slaughters as he was growing up, graduating from drinking hot chocolate to white wine, but even as the years passed, the pigs continued to be made into the same products: black pudding, fresh sausages, cured sausages, pâté, hams and fresh meat.
Reynaud looks back on the episodes with great fondness. “The ritual when a pig is slaughtered still has many good years ahead of it,” he writes in the introduction to the book. “It is fortunate that the standardisation of flavour in today’s food industry has not yet reached the high plateaux of the Ardèche region, where tradition mounts a good defence.
“Slaughtering and butchering call for precise organisation. The team forms around the slaughterer – truly, the conductor of the orchestra. He makes incisions, cuts, saws; his assistants bone the meat, cut it up, chop it. The rhythm keeps going, interrupted only for good white wine and a few sausages that would make even the most ardent vegetarian’s mouth water. Everyone lends a hand and shares in the spoils. It’s a great experience!”
Unlike with modern, big-city meat processors, where much of the animal is wasted because it’s not profitable, the butchers of Ardèche make use of every bit of the pig, starting with the blood. The recipe Reynaud gives for black pudding won’t be useful to many of us, since it isn’t easy to find fresh blood at your local supermarket (you need six litres of it, along with other ingredients such as 3kg of pork fat, a litre of crème fraîche and 300ml of cognac, marc or brandy).
