SIDE PORK AND SAUSAGES
Around two weeks ahead of Christmas, every year for many years, my mother would open her mailbox to a familiar aroma. This was not a cyber mailbox as in the euphemism “You’ve Got Mail,” but the real thing: a little cubby among a wall full of cubbies in the U.S. Post Office, Orangeville, Utah. In late life, my mother walked to the P.O. every day to get her exercise. There and back, maybe eight city blocks, but this was no city. People in Orangeville still kept livestock in town. The tiny metal postal door opened with a key. The aroma would hit her, and she would recognize it immediately, and perhaps utter a name:
“Tony.”
He was Tony Logar, my father’s hunting buddy through the years we lived in Johnstown, the little city made famous by fatal floods and Bethlehem Steel in western Pennsylvania. We moved there when I was four; I started hunting with my dad at age ten.
Tony was a no-nonsense guy with a nonsense job – he supervised the ice cream plant down at Gallagher Diary. Wore a snow-white uniform to work every day to signal sanitary conditions, piloted thick streams of cream and milk through the plumbing, made the adjustments of sugar and flavorings, oversaw a small crew of workers who mostly tended dials and gauges in a mostly automated shop. I say it was a nonsense job because it never seemed like a job to me. More like a sinecure in some kind of Willie Wonka fantasy. Tony brought home a lot of free ice cream.
The dairy was his living but his passions lay elsewhere. Meat and orchids. Out behind his and his wife Renee’s house in the Ferndale neighborhood stood two tiny buildings. One was the meat shack, the other a tidy greenhouse packed with orchids. Tony won all kinds of prizes for his deft touch with family Orchidaceae – something I could not much comprehend or appreciate as a child, but now wish I had known more about. If you met Tony, you would immediately realize how incongruous was his love of these demanding zygomorphs. Delicate he was not, this cigar-chomping, taciturn male – but perhaps that’s the reason he so loved his gorgeous, fragile flowers with their arresting vaginal daintiness.
I knew Tony the nimrod a lot better than Tony the florist, and that’s where the other outback building made plain sense. He loved the sporting aspect of hunting, as did my father, but he was really in it for the meat. Wild game pranced across Renee’s dining room table in virtual herds. Tony wasn’t terribly particular about the species he collected. Cottontail rabbits, grey squirrels, ruffed grouse, woodcock, the occasional whitetail deer – all of them were welcome at a Logar family supper. Renee and Tony had no children of their own, but she brought a son into their marriage – a youngster named Butchie Wechtenheiser from her first husband, deceased. Butchie, a lot older than I when our families met, enlisted in the army but some weekends on leave came to hunt with us.
The meat shack out back lay outfitted like a miniature commercial butcher shop. A power saw and flesh grinder stood on a maple bench in the center of the room, with a stainless-steel sausage stuffer off to one side. Wicked-sharp knives jutted from a square lump of hardwood beneath the room’s lone window, and there were two chest freezers in that shack, the mark of a serious meat man. Attached to the place was Tony’s compact smokehouse and alongside it, stacks of shagbark hickory and fruitwood. Tony gathered meat from all over. Like my father, he was a fan of on-farm slaughter, so in the cold months there were ample supplies of fresh pork, beef, and lamb to blend with the wild game. Tony kept a trove of clean leaf-fat in his freezers.
The aroma my mother enjoyed in the Orangeville P.O. wafted from the annual packages of Tony’s dark, smoked sausage links – the pinnacle of his skill. He knew we loved them, treasured them even, and sent them through the mail every Christmas, years after we had moved away. I want to call them kielbasa as a convenient shorthand, but they were not kielbasa. They were Tony’s own recipe, a secret of course, and more delicious than any sausage I have had since. He made lots of them and loved to share. On our trips afield, he and my father and I, and sometimes Butchie, would sit in the woods and wolf down a lunch of two or three apiece. Cold, rich things eaten with savor in a quiet forest – pork and wild game, they were, blended, and unusually dark. I always suspected they contained a bit of blood, but Tony would never say. If asked he would just smile his mysterious little smile, and wink. He carried a military issue metal canteen attached to his belt, and drank nothing but water with his lunch. Ice-cold and refreshing, often spring water found in the woods, followed by a few puffs on his ever-present White Owl cigar. A trio of scents are burned into the deepest layers of my memory. Gunpowder, those dark, smoky sausages, and Tony’s cigar. Cold air on an autumn morning in the woods blended them into a sublime olfactory symphony.
Tony died in 1987, not surprisingly of a heart attack. The sausages stopped coming; the memories never ended.
I’m thinking about this meat-man because I’m about to fix some pork belly tonight. It’s an experiment for me, a very simple one but meaningful because of my father’s love of that cut. The thing we now call pork belly, found on every fancy restaurant menu in every fancy restaurant in America, had no special name when I was a grade schooler, and there was nothing fancy about it. Everybody called it side pork; we knew it was nothing but uncured bacon, and that’s how we found it in the stores and butcher shops, already sliced.
My father would eat bacon but much preferred side meat, his name for it. He loved it the way I do now – fried crisp in its own fat, served hot and lightly salted. It had a cracklin’ quality and flavor like no other meat.
An artisanal butcher shop here in the wine-soaked town where I live carries it regularly in the case. “Pork belly,” $8.99 a pound. Solid slabs, never sliced. I have tried cooking it several ways, including some graceless attempts at Thai recipes, but I can’t get the hang of it. Tonight, I’ll go back to an old trick, harkening to the simple pan-fries my mother did. But I’ll do different – and that’s the experiment. Line a sheet pan with parchment. Heat the oven to 400. Slice my slab into 3/8" thick ribbons, season with salt, pepper, and a touch of smoked paprika, and lay them side by side atop the parchment to roast confit-style in their own fat. Eighteen minutes on each side. Since we’re now getting European about it, and it has to be “pork belly” instead of “side meat,” I’ll adjust the thickness of my slices to 9.525 millimeters. Cut with my own hand, a wicked-sharp filleting knife my mother brought home from Finland, her only visit to her homeland, nearly fifty years ago.
After supper, I might have to step outside for a cigar, but I’ll keep the shotguns locked away where everybody’s safe. Especially the fat neighborhood grey squirrels.