Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008 - (Page 36)

Eating everything “but the oink” Louisianians swoon over swine as a dietary mainstay As thoughts turn toward the winter season, I begin to think of meals that are a bit more substantial than my summer fare of grilled meats and fish with salads and my autumnal menus of roast chicken with the last of summer’s bounty. As the calendar pages slowly turn toward the New Year, I begin to think about the animal that is emblematic of the South and of the AfricanAmerican experience in the South — the pig. It seems almost impossible to imagine this hemisphere without the little porkers that turn up on our plates, but that was how it was until 1493, when the first good Spanish hogs arrived in Cuba along with the Spanish taste for Serrano hams and chorizos. Around 1530, it is said that Admiral Alonso Alvarez de Pinna may have run aground and some of the hogs that he carried were offloaded near Mobile, Alabama. However, it was not until the Spanish colonists arrived in Florida with hogs on their ships for the colony that swine officially arrived on the North American continent. More arrived with the Dutch in New Netherlands and alongside the British in the northern and middle colonies. In the Gulf Coast region they arrived with Hernando De Soto. By 1674, pigs were here with a vengeance. Early Virginia colonist and explorer Gabriel Arthur was taken by the Yuchi Indians on a hunting expedition to kill ”hoggs, beares and sturgion.” Swine were easy to care for and multiplied with sows having litters of a dozen shoats or more at a time. In the early colonial era they were prized by Europeans because they would establish themselves and reproduce much more rapidly than larger cattle and they soon became emblematic of the New World. As much as they were beloved by settlers, pigs were despised by native peoples because free-roaming swine destroyed carefully tended MIHCAEL P. SMITH, COURTESY OF THE HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION corn plantings as they foraged on their own in the woods. Hogs were slowly adopted as livestock and by tribes. Timberlake found numbers of them among the Cherokee and by the time of removal west, they had become a part of the economy of all of the Five Civilized Tribes. One African-American saying attests that the hog can be eaten from “the rooter to the tooter,” while another opines that you can eat everything on the hog “but the oink.” Indeed it must have seemed so to those who found themselves anywhere near a farm at hog-killing time. Conditional upon cooler temperatures, the slaughtering season was usually in the fall or winter as the weather allowed the meat to be stored fresh for eating later on. Culinary historian Sandra Oliver in Food in Colonial and Federal America attests that pork, high in saturated fats, “took salt well and hams, bacon, and sausage remained relatively unctuous even after smoking.” Lard was simultaneously rendered and the less noble parts of the meat were also consumed — liver, kidneys, brains, lungs, tongue and more. In the Antebellum South, porcine offal often became the culinary province of the impoverished or the enslaved. Hog maws, chitterlings, Cajun Barbecue, Vidalia, Louisiana, 1978. headcheese and souse meat remind some not only of hog-killing time, but also of the privations of not living “high on the hog.” The expression, universally understood in the South to mean living well, is explained by a “Master and John” story — traditionally selfdeprecating African-American humor from the 19th century. Old Master killed about 40 or 50 hogs every year. He had John to help him. When he was ready to pay him off he said, “John, here’s your 36 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Winter 2008-09

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008 Contents Friends Editor's Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Prospect.1 New Orleans The Historic New Orleans Collection The Enduring Performance of Michael P. Smith Jazz Notes Louisiana Foodways Birds of a Feather: Windfowl Carvings in Southeast Louisiana Louisiana Association of Museums Louisiana Architecture O. Winston Link in Louisiana The Ogden Museum of Southern Art The Colfax Massacre Louisiana State Museum Unlocking the History of Greek Key Architecture Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008

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