Going Whole Hog: A Short Story

November 04, 2009 - 07:45 AM

Going Whole Hog
By Jonathan Miles
From Food & Wine, September 2009
Some years back, when I was living alone in a 12-foot-by-30-foot cabin in the Mississippi woods (Thoreau-like in theory but more Unabomber-like in execution), I shot and killed a 150-pound wild boar. This was a considerable boon to me. In my semi-monastic effort to live off the land, I had been eating a lot of squirrels, and while squirrel meat tastes dandy—cringe as needed, but the hip British chef Fergus Henderson is fond of it as well—the time and effort required for each ounce of squirrel is woefully inefficient. But a freezer filled with pound upon pound of wild boar—that noble delicacy of Europe, that bosky and savage cousin to pork—this bounty would pleasantly sustain me, I figured, close to forever.
Because I was in my twenties and overstuffed with idealism and ambition, I was determined to put every ounce of the boar to use. This included the hide, which I tanned (a complex process that involved vast amounts of salt, odd chemical brines and two tree trunks for stretching out the skin). I’m not sure what use I foresaw for a bristly black boar hide—ultimately, I put it to use as a dog bed—but I was adamant about wasting nothing. I even flirted with making string out of the sinews, as Native Americans supposedly used to do with deer, but the presence of an infinite-looking roll of twine in my kitchen, purchased for something like $1.09, sucked the purpose out of that tedious chore.
But the meat! Ah, the meat. As a hunter, I’m sanguine about gamey flavors and the unruly variations in taste from one wild animal to the next. But the meat of this boar—an elderly specimen that doubtlessly would have succumbed, within weeks, to old age had I not intervened—was beyond gamey. No matter how I prepared it—marinated, braised, smoked, smothered with exuberant sauces—eating it was always like chewing on dirty pennies. Because I had roughly 110 pounds of meat in my freezer, I invited lots of friends over. One of them, politely chewing a bite of roast that I’d glazed with a maple syrup–and–balsamic vinegar reduction, said it tasted like a combination of overcooked liver and pancakes. Like everyone else, he rebuffed all my subsequent invitations. Even when I asked those friends to merely stop by my cabin for a beer, they all turned me down. “You don’t mean beer,” one hissed at me. “You mean boar.”
Here was the unexpected, ugly downside to eating locally and living off the land: The wild isn’t consistent (that’s part of what makes it wild), and while the highs are beautifully high, the lows are... Well, the lows may involve 100-plus pounds of barely edible meat staring at you every time you crack open your freezer.
I eventually ate it all, of course—the purist in me wouldn’t allow otherwise. But it didn’t sustain me forever, as I’d giddily predicted. It only felt that way.
Jonathan Miles writes the Shaken & Stirred column for the New York Times and is the author of the novel Dear American Airlines.