Free Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig by Mark Essig Page B

section called “Quadrupeds” contains four recipes for beef and veal, eleven for lamb, and seventeen for suckling pig.Other sections of the book offer recipes for adult sows and boars and nearly all of their parts, including brain, skin, womb, udder, liver, stomach, kidneys, and lungs.Archeology confirms that Romans carved up pigs more carefully and thoroughly than they did other creatures: pig skulls found in Roman dumps contain far more butchery scars than the skulls of sheep and cows, evidence that butchers excised the tongues, cheeks, and brains of pigs but not those of other beasts.
    More than half of the dishes in On Cooking are relatively modest—barley soup with onion and ham bone, for example—and within the means of much of the urban population, but others demanded greater resources.Apicius is credited with inventing the technique of overfeeding a sow with figs in order to enlarge the liver, much as geese were stuffed with grain tocreate foie gras. In Apicius’s recipe, the fig-fattened pig liver is marinated in liquamen —a fermented fish sauce central to Roman cuisine—wrapped in caul fat, and grilled. The recipe for pig paunch starts with this salutary advice: “Carefully empty out a pig’s stomach.” The cook is then instructed to fill the stomach with a mixture of pork, “three brains that have had their sinews removed,” raw eggs, pine nuts, peppercorns, anise, ginger, rue, and other seasonings.Finally, the stomach is tied at both ends—“leaving a little space so that it does not burst during cooking”—boiled, smoked, boiled some more, and then served.
    Some of the more elaborate dishes in On Cooking fall under the heading ofellae , which literally means a morsel of food. In one recipe, a skin-on pork belly is scored on the meat side, marinated for days in a blend of liquamen , pepper, cumin, and other spices, and then roasted. The chunks of meat would then be pulled from the skin, sauced, and served, forming bite-sized pieces that a diner could eat by hand while reclining, the preferred posture for Roman feasts. Another of the luxury dishes involves boiling a ham, removing the skin, scoring the flesh, and coating it with honey, a preparation that would not be out of place at Christmas dinner today.
    Romans had a taste for blended milk, blood, and flesh that could make even a Gentile shudder.The Roman poet Martial had this to say about a roasted udder of lactating sow: “You would hardly imagine you were eating cooked sows’ teats, so abundantly do they flow and swell with living milk.” (Elsewhere, after a meal, Martial suffers the glutton’s regret and remarks upon “the unsightly skin of an excavated sow’s udder.”) This preference veered into the bizarrely cruel. Some cooks, Plutarch claimed, stomped and kicked the udders of live pregnant sows and thereby “blended together blood and milk and gore,” whichwas said to make the dish all the more delicious.The womb of this poor sow was eaten as well, with the dish called vulva eiectitia , or “miscarried womb.”
    Seneca, the Stoic philosopher and statesman, decried such dishes as “monstrosities of luxury,” and he was far from the only critic. Roman rulers passed sumptuary laws limiting the amount that could be spent on meals and forbidding the consumption of items including testicles and cheeks. But the wealthy flouted such rules because the social hierarchy couldn’t function without feasts: feasting provided the only way to learn who had grown richer and who had lost money, who was in the emperor’s favor and who had been cast out. To curtail extravagance was to deny the very reason to feast.
    Eating well had become central to the Roman self-image, and not just among the elite. Meat was so important that the empire got into the business of supplying it to a broad swath of the population free of charge. The emperor Augustus had started the practice of distributing free grain and bread as a way to ensure that the citizens