I have fantasized about roasting a large animal on a spit ever since I attended a lakeside Fourth of July jubilee at Hords Creek Reservoir in Coleman County, Texas. I was spending a working summer with my Aunt Mable and Uncle Leon on their ranch. The smoky aroma and meaty taste of caramelized slabs carved from a twelve-hundred-pound roast ox, mixed with the sounds of squealing kids and the inspiring speeches by Southern politicians in white suits, chalk-white shoes, and Colonel Sanders–type black ribbon ties, have stayed with me a long time. A stream of patriotic marches, fresh field corn slathered in churned butter, along with peach cobbler, ice cream, and tears streaming down my aunt’s face further imprinted the scene on my young mind.
Mable started crying when the band struck up “Johnny Comes Marching Home.” Her only son died a few years earlier after he returned home from the Pacific War. He flew P-38 Lightning fighters, known to the troops as “fork-tailed devils” in the South Pacific and was an ace who downed many enemy aircraft. Billy Jack rented an aging biplane and was doing celebratory aerobatics in front of a welcoming hometown airport crowd. A wing strut failed under the G forces of a tight loop, and his plane augured into the ground while the band played. The jubilee that I attended was six years after the end of the war. I was 10 and had been sent to the ranch where my father was raised to give me a country education and to give Mable a surrogate son to look after. She was a rugged plains woman. She dried her tears away quickly with the rim of her faded sun bonnet and went on to enjoy the celebration. Native Texans are as patriotic as it gets and feel equally strong about their barbecue and the comfort food that goes with it.
I’ve never eaten roast ox again, much less seen one, but I have enjoyed fresh whole lamb cooked on the iron cross in Chile, a red stag quarter done over a bed of outdoor coals in Argentina, spit-cooked turkey at a fly-fishing club lake outing, and roast pig done in a pit in the Philippines. All were memorable experiences. I will never forget the taste of the food, but in addition to the delicious fixings, all the experiences involved the company of great and good and friends.
This understanding of such roasts as social events is reiterated in Francis Mallmann’s description of roasting an entire beef cow on his Argentine ranch in his classic book Seven Fires. Mallmann is Argentina’s greatest chef and writes of the Argentine culture of Sunday meals that always involve the cooking of meat outdoors, whether it is succulent sausage and chorizo or larger cuts of meat and whole animals. Argentina consumes more grilled meats per capita than any country in the world, and as far as I know, the population has no disproportional cardiac issues. Mallmann recently came out with a new book, Mallmann on Fire. The reviews, including one by Anthony Bourdain, are very good.
Although I’ve never cooked a pig on a spit myself, in March, I learned how to do it. I had a speaking engagement at the Shasta Trinity Fly Fishers club in Redding and asked a friend to drive up with me. We had a good visit, then dinner afterward with their president and president-elect, and were impressed with the leadership, vigor, and hospitality of this organization. We also had booked Tim Fox, the creator of the highly successful and often copied Fox Poopah trout fly, for the next day’s guided float trip fishing on the lower Sacramento.
In addition to fish talk and instruction, as well as talk about the fly-fishing industry, we got into food. It turns out that Tim and his brother run pig hunts in
Dye Creek Preserve and on other nearby properties, and the hunts sometimes are followed with by roasting the pig on a spit. I wanted to hear first-hand how Tim roasts a whole pig. Here are Tim’s instructions for a 60-pounder that will fit on the spit.
Keep the pig whole and run a spit rotisserie rod through the body cavity. Attach adjustable, sliding stabilizing arms (some rods come with the spit) and use bailing wire to keep the legs from flopping while the carcass rotates over the coals. Wrap the carcass in chicken wire to stabilize it further and to make it as concentric as possible. Secure it with more bailing wire and remember to have gloves and wire cutters handy for removing the trussing wire from the hot cooked pig. Tim likes to slather the carcass with nothing more than Lawry’s Seasoned Salt and coarsely ground black pepper.
He puts the whole prepared pig on a large rotisserie barbeque that is big enough to tow behind a vehicle. He uses a 1:1 ratio of charcoal to pig meat — 60 pounds of charcoal, for a 60-pound pig — and positions the carcass a foot and a half to two feet above the coals. He adds hickory, oak, mesquite, alder, or apple wood chips periodically and cooks the pig for approximately three and a half hours, but checks the temperature with a digital meat thermometer placed in the ham or shoulder. Pork cooked this way should be around 160 degrees to be safe and will be a higher temperature than needed for a much smaller pork loin or tenderloin done on the barbecue. The whole pig will be very juicy and moist. Outdoor cooking times vary with outside air temperature, wind, and humidity. You will need a sturdy table of some type to cut up the cooked pig. Sharp knives and a heavy meat cleaver help. A plywood sheet cleaned with a mild bleach solution is a good idea.
Fat that is under the skin and marbled in the tissues will render during cooking and baste the carcass as it rotates. Likewise, the bones conduct heat inward and give flavor that can’t be obtained when cooking a pork roast.
I’ve found that a cooking committee is important in these endeavors. Their freely given advice will become more profound with the consumption of adult beverages. Tim lives on the family ranch near Orland in the northern Sacramento Valley and says that for a 60-pound pig you need to invite a group and all your neighbors within the sound of gunshot.
It’s a good venue for a potluck.
Although I’ve never done a pig on a spit, I have been part of a team that cooked four pork shoulder quarters — picnic hams — in a buried pit. It was for the second day of a wedding feast in Charleston, South Carolina, and we were making pulled pork. The big wedding-day reception was held in a waterfront community center and featured blue crab cakes, fresh Low Country shrimp three ways, boiled crawdads, Southern deviled eggs, hush puppies, baked sweet potatoes, grilled dorado, freshly shucked oysters, and tables filled with finger food. The second-day celebration is a Southern tradition and was for extended family members and close friends. In a pit dug in the backyard of the home of the bride’s father, we burned hardwood down to coals, then buried the wrapped picnics to cook and steam all night and well into the next day. We removed them from the pit in the early evening and allowed them to cool enough to be handled, then placed them on a large kitchen counter for the “pulling” part. It turned out that pulling pork in our family is considered women’s work. The men, including several revered ministers and a priest, stayed outside, sipped adult mountain dew, and told stories around the fire pits while fireflies danced in the trees. Since the bride was from a musical family, a fiddle appeared, and everybody started clapping their hands and stomping their feet to the music. A grand old time was had by all.
After some dancing and a bit of the mountain dew, I decided that I wanted to learn how to pull pork and asked if I could join the ladies. Initially, they weren’t totally sure that an expatriate Southerner from sinful California should be included, but after a number of harrumphs and glances passed back and forth, I was invited to join in. I suspected and soon found out that the ladies had a little mountain dew of their own hidden underneath the counter. Dealing with the stress of a wedding is hard, and it was a time to let down their hair. We had a great time gossiping, and I learned some family secrets.
The pulled pork, which is picked from the bone into stringy shreds with fingers and forks while steaming hot, was mounded on a huge platter. Next to it was a big bowl of bread-and-butter pickles, another of coleslaw, and bottles of barbecue sauce — mustard-based sauce for the South Carolina folks and vinegar-based sauce for the North Carolina ladies and gentlemen who came to the wedding. On the other side were stacks of paper plates and piles of basic grocery-store hamburger buns. Which was better . . . the fancy reception that included Baroque harpsichord, opera arias, and champagne (the groom was a Spanish tenor from Barcelona, the bride a soprano from London), or the down-home pulled-pork sandwiches and foot stomping the next evening? I vote for both.
I’m not adventurous enough to tackle a 60-pound pig right now, but I just got a lead on a local farmer in nearby Chicago Park who sells free-range heritage pork. Heritage pork is from older pig breeds that haven’t had the fat and flavors bred out of them in high-volume commercial production. Most are hormone free and antibiotic free, just like a wild pig. These pigs are returning to production and gaining in popularity as a farm-to-fork commodity. We will have to pay a premium for a smaller animal, but are ordering a 25-pounder to roast on the spit.
We’ll do a potluck and pick up some zinfandel from down the road at Bent Metal or Ghost Pines. It will go well with the spicy food. I’ll get my friends from the Ragged but Right group to come over. I’m thinking that I’ll ask them to play “Shenandoah,” “The Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia,” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” There could be some foot stomping, and we might just crank up some homemade peach ice cream to finish the evening. The Fourth of July is long gone, but not the memories of those Texas jubilees. I’ll put an American flag on the porch and another down on the barn for Labor Day.
Wine in a Can
I dropped by the Pour House here in Truckee the other day to pick up my usual summer beverage, a light and sassy pinot grigio “deck wine” that I love to chill with ice cubes. A row of out-of-place-looking containers on one of the shelves caught my eye — good golly, cans! With wine in ’em! I bought two on the spot, a pinot gris and a rosé (the vintner, the Union Wine Company of Oregon, also offers a canned pinot noir). Seven bucks each, with around two glasses of wine per can. And the contents tasted pretty darn good for the price. I’m not sure I’d carry one in my fishing vest — two glasses of wine on the river might get one a little clumsy — but then again, a friend of mine freezes the rosé and takes it on hikes, giving him sort of a slushee treat after an hour or three on the trail. And with the can’s very light weight compared to glass, it is certainly backpackable. Hmmm ….
First we get wine bottles with twist tops, and now we have wine in cans. Geez, I love this country.
—Richard Anderson
