All Brawn and No Brain

Snow on Pilsdon Pen this morning

This was the week that five of Pilsdon’s eight “weaners” (read: young pigs) reached the culmination of their lives. 

They had, in fact, already had a stay of execution. They had reached the appropriate weight for slaughter by late December, but Christmas and New Year activities and holidays (for the humans) meant that they were able to enjoy an extra couple of weeks of piggy life, until last Wednesday afternoon three females and two males were shepherded (pigherded?) onto the trailer. There they spent their last night wondering, one assumes, why their accommodation had changed for the worst and agreeing to complain about it in the morning. 

Unfortunately they were never given such an opportunity, as at 6:30am the next day three men got into the truck their trailer was attached to and drove it west for half an hour until they reached C Snell’s, a small abattoir near Chard Junction. It must have been a relaxing drive as they were asleep on arrival. The early hour meant that they would be first in the queue, and there wouldn’t be any distress caused by a long wait in an unfamiliar place. 

I wasn’t there for the drop-off, but it fell to me to collect them on Monday. The intervening days had allowed time for Mr C Snell to kill them, slice each one in two down the middle, remove the intestines and offal, and hang them to let the blood completely drain.  So when Stephen* and I arrived just before 9am the half-pigs we received looked just like meat, not the animals that the community had looked after since they were tiny piglets.  I backed the trailer up to the cold-room door and two Snell-ites brought them out one-by-one, passing them to Stephen who was standing in the trailer, laying them in a pile on a clean blanket, then covering them all with another blanket. We hadn’t brought anything to weigh the top blanket down with, so had to improvise using a pig-half and the bag of offal. A third Snell-ite checked that we weren’t planning to sell this meat; apparently if we were we should have had a refrigerated trailer.  As it’s for our own consumption, on our own heads be it.

Apart from a tricky moment on the return journey having to reverse back to a passing point to let a truck past, I got them home safely and parked up by the new butchering room where a team of Pilsdon folk were primed to begin. The pigs were brought in, two halves at a time. One half of each pig had kept the whole head. They were laid on large wooden chopping boards next to hacksaws, sharpened knives, cleavers and a small axe, and the fun began. We chopped, sawed, hacked, rolled, weighed and bagged. Arthur, an ex-farmer with decades of experience, directed the operations. Out of these weaners came a plentitude of shoulder and leg joints (up to 15lb each), bagfuls of loin chops and cutlets, rolled bellies, and racks of spare ribs. All these have filled a chest freezer.

Heinrich decided that the heads have to be used as well, so he has boiled them up to make brawn, (known as “head cheese” in the States), a delicacy which it is fair to say has not generated too much enthusiasm amongst the community.  And Barry has stated his intentions to make soap from some of the fat we discarded. Waste not want not, I suppose.

A pot of heads

The three remaining weaners are enjoying the extra room in their pen, although wondering where their siblings have got to. We’re giving them a little more time to fatten up more till they’re a suitable size to become bacon, hams and sausages, all of which processing we leave to Mr C Snell and his associates as we don’t have the facilities here. The pigpens will be bare, apart from Truffle the sow, and she is due to give birth in less than three months so the cycle will begin again.

Canasta is making a comeback as an evening activity...

...as are 1000-piece jigsaws

* All names changed in this blogpost.