Carnicero

Warning: This entry contains graphic descriptions of animal dismemberment and inappropriate alcohol consumption, and is not appropriate for anyone, really.

Saturday is a day when I always go looking for something to do, because there is no school to fill up the day. I definitely wanted to go shopping in Chunchi, but I also wanted to meet up with Nick, the Peace Corps volunteer there, and he was going to be in Alausi for the day. The football campeonato semifinal was scheduled for Saturday morning, but had been postponed to Sunday afternoon. So the day was not off to a promising start.

On the other hand, the wee hours of Saturday morning saw the return of Don Ramon, owner of the house I live in. He and his family live in Spain, but he came back to Tolte on his own. And since about a quarter of Tolte is related to Ramon, it was only reasonable that he receive a big welcome home fiesta. So when I got back from finding out that the football semifinal was postponed, I found a group of five or six women surrounding a medium-sized pig. Being curious, but not knowing anything about pig slaughter except what I had witnessed in Costa Rica over twenty years ago, I kept a respectful distance, but didn’t leave the scene. After some discussion about who should do what, the women pinned the pig to the ground on its left side, and the grandmother of about half a dozen of my students stuck one of our dull, dull kitchen knives between its ribs. I think the idea was to pierce the pig’s heart, but my personal post mortem suggested that this did not occur. It definitely took the poor animal a fair stretch of time to die, but it did so in a quiet, dignified way not typical of pigs. Once they had it pinned down, it sort of gave up.

But wait, there’s more. Once the pig was dead, they brought in a sheep. This animal was slaughtered with the traditional cutting of its throat, which seemed to work a lot better. This, in fact, is what I had seen used for pig slaughter in Costa Rica, and I’m not sure why it wasn’t used for the pig here. I was invited to help carry the pig to the grill where its hair would be singed off, and, in classic gringo fashion, I got blood all over my pants. No one else got even slightly dirty. Of course, I was holding the leg closest to the death wound.

At about this time, Jose and Narcisa came home from an all-night brick firing at the kiln along the highway. This was handy, because, as Jose explained to me, his father had taught him to skin sheep starting from about the age of 10. We hung the sheep up by its hind legs from a carport rafter, and Jose made a series of cuts (incisions would quite describe the process, because the knife was too dull) that allowed us to peel the sheepskin off in one piece. This is not effortless; you have to keep pulling quite hard, and occasionally making additional cuts in the underlying tissue to maintain momentum. Also, the wool was absolutely filthy with mud and shit (again, excrement is not the right word), so we had to work in a way that kept the skin from touching the meat. Jose finished the process by cutting through the spine to remove the sheep’s head with the skin, and then cut the head off the skin. The head and forelegs were then put on the grill to have their hair singed off. Good for soup. After that, Mirian brought out a washtub and we disemboweled the sheep, a process that involved a long cut down the abdomen and then tapping the knife through the ribs by hitting it with a rock. The important thing is that all the guts slide out into the washtub without any rip or cut in the intestines, which would make a big mess. Narcisa and I had to hold everything in until Jose could finish cutting through the ribs. The science teacher in me rapidly identified heart, lungs, liver and intestines. I can’t say I ever say the kidneys bladder, or reproductive system. I probably touched them, though.

Most of the next several hours involved singing the pig’s bristly hair off and scraping the skin clean. The goal was to produce a skin with an even, yellow color. Straw and eucalyptus leaves were brined to produce a high flame, though not a very hot one, and we rotated the pig and scraped at the skin until it was more or less clean and yellow all over. Then it was time to skin the pig, though the goal here was not to get a single piece as it had been with the sheep. This surprised me a little, as I thought that the skin might be sold for leather, but that is probably a different process. Anyway, you get the skin of by making an initial cut at the location of your choosing, and sticking your fingers between the dermis and the underlying layer of fat and lifting the skin off. Everyone came out of the kitchen and we ate “cuero con mote,” leather with kernels of corn. I think most of my neighbors chewed and swallowed the leather, though I only managed to chew it and spit it out for a nearby dog to finish off.

Then it was back to work. Around this time, Damasio came in and was given the job of disemboweling the pig. Because I had been a good assistant on the sheep, and because my pants were already filthy, I got to help with this, too. The process was slightly different from the sheep, in that Damasio made two cuts from the pig’s chin to its anus, so that a larger piece of flesh would be peeled off and more of the inner cavity exposed. He used the same rock to drive the knife through the ribs. We stopped for a moment so that Mirian could ladle out the blood from the cavity. The blood was cooked; some of it was stuffed into sausages and some of it was served out on a plate. But more of that later. E opened the pig’s ribcage and Mirian came back with a bit pots, and we slid all the guts out into that.

Now Damasio got into the main butchering. I held the pig still while he cut off the four legs at the joints, and separated the ribsand head from the spine. We also broke the jaw off of the head. It was at this point that the fact that we had no running water since the night before presented itself as a real problem. There was some kind of cleaning up that Damasio wanted to do, and we needed water for the process. Fortunately, Pablo and his wife Martina arrived then. Pablo is the town carpenter and handyman, and I know Martina as the president of the local equivalent of the PTA. Pablo went right to work fixing the broken water supply, while Martina used a bucket of water that we did have to wash out the sheep intestines. But Damasio left because the pipes needed an hour to set.

On the other hand, Jose didn’t seem to need water for the next step in the butchering process as Damasio felt he did, so I went back to work with Jose cutting the meat from the bones. A pig has a lot of meat, and this was a long process. But we weren’t cutting the meat into cuts of pork the way a butche would do in the States. We were just chopping off portion-sized chunks to be turned into fritada. We started with the surface pieces that had the most fat, which were tossed into a pot to render the lard that would be needed to cook the fritada. Then we got into the deeper layers, cutting off random pieces about half the size of my fist. The funniest moment during this process was when Jose innocently commented that the meat he was cutting off the pig’s hnd leg looked just like ham. He seemed genuinely surprised to learn that what he was cutting really was ham.

Once we got down to the bone, we passed the bones over to Pablo, who busted them up with an axe. We took the bony mass back and cut it into more fist sized pieces, until we had a big pot full representing about half the pig. The lard was ready, but it wasn’t enough, so we added another couple of pounds of vegetable shortening and a couple of pots of salty water, garlic, and cumin seeds to the cooking pot, and then tossed in the content of our meat pot. Mirian and Laura, under the direction of Elena, stirred the mass with a stick every now and again to prevent it form burning.

Jose and I went back to work on the rest of the pig, which had a lot more bone than the first half. We would cut, and Pablo would chop, and then we’d cut some more. I was somewhat surprised that the ribs, which are such a delicacy back in the States, were given the same treatment. Before long, we had another pot of raw meat waiting for the first round of fritada to finish cooking. I expected that we would deal with the sheep the same way we had the pig, but I was wrong. Pablo just battered it with the axe for a while until everyone was satisfied that it could be cooked, and that was that. Elena called Jose and me for lunch.

Lunch was an Ecuadorian dish called Yaguarloca. I have to say that this was the most challenging thing I’ve tried to eat in Ecuador. I thought it was a soup with potatoes and macaroni, but the tubular objects resembling macaroni were actually tripe, or sheep intestines. Jose chewed and swallowed his, but I couldn’t quite accomplish this feat. I chewed all right, but never seemed able to break the intestines into smaller pieces. I thought the soup tasted like something between sweat and urine, but Jose said it was one of his favorite foods. I have a long way to go before I’m and Andean.

By the time lunch was over, it was time to top the first batch of fritada off with a big bottle of beer, which is said to produce a desirable golden color. And the fritada did look pretty good, especially compared to the Yaguarloca. We all had a little, and then got to work preparing the next pot of fritada. Weirdly, I was sort of put in charge of this pot, I think because it was believed that I could follow instructions. Segundo turned up, sort of just in time, because I definitely would have made a mistake or two. I think that the first mistake was that too much water was added, and we had to wait for a long time for it to boil off so we could add the lard. This meant the meat cooked more by boiling than by frying. But, in the end, it looked pretty similar to the first batch. Stirring this batch was more exciting, because chunks or identifiable bones would come to the surface, giving the whole thing sort of a Halloween feeling.

It was now about six o’clock, and I headed over to the computer room to skype Maya. We chatted for a while, and then one of the university boys came in and asked for help with an English assignment. After that, the folk dancers were meeting in the plaza to go over a dance for the upcoming Fiesta de Tolte, which starts this Thursday and will last until next Monday. If I survive that much partying, it should make for a nice entry.

And I say that advisedly, because when I got back to the house, the actual welcome home fiesta was already underway. I was treated to some soup that was not Yaguarloca, and a big plate of fritada. But I had hardly gotten through the door when Segundo poured me a shot of trago. And then  the beer drinking started as well. I knew that the evening was likely to end badly for me, but it was a great party anyway. After we ate, the drinking continued fast a furious, with more and more beer and trago appearing every few minutes. Then the dancing started. I had been concerned that my dancing skills were in no way adequate to Tolte, because my friends in Costa Rica had all been skilled salsa dancers. How wrong I was. The dancing here is much simpler, sort of marching back and forth as a couple in time to the music. And we did this until people were so drunk that they had to go home. Unfortunately, the party was in my home, so I danced around until I had to go outside and throw up. I am “chuchaqui,” (hung over, in Kichua), and I never did get to Chunchi to buy fruits and vegetables. I think there is another market day Wednesday or Thursday, and maybe I’ll go then. I hope it’s Wednesday, because the Fiesta starts Thursday morning, and I can’t miss that. But I was sorry to miss the first semifinal game of the football campenato, even though I did manage to pull myself together enough by four in the afternoon to attend the second one. Tolte teams lost both games, and will have to play each other for third, while Chunchi and Iltus face off for the championship on Thursday.