Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig – Mark Essig

Thoughts: I enjoyed reading Lesser Beasts, which traces the cultural and historical importance of pigs from prehistory to the present day.

One quibble: while Lesser Beasts spends a few paragraphs on pigs’ place in Asian cultures, the arc of the book generally passes from the Middle East, to Rome in classical antiquity, to Europe, to the Americas, to the United States in particular. By the middle of the book, it was clear that the structure of the book was conceived with the American reader in mind. I would have appreciated further discussion of pigs’ places in the history of other parts of the world.

(The notes below are not a summary of the book, but rather raw notes - whatever I thought, at the time, might be worth remembering.)

Essig, Mark. 2015. “Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig”. Basic Books.

• 201-202: “[Pork] packers had once produced [dry-cured/country hams] in quantity even though the cure took months. In the twentieth century, however, they switched most production to the city ham, wet cured in a brine solution much like barreled pork. To speed the process—lengthy cures tied up a lot of capital—packers started injecting brine into the ham with needles. Later they invented ‘vein-pumping,’ which involved blasting brine from a high-pressure hose into a large vein in the ham and allowing the animal’s circulatory system to spread it through the meat. Such methods cut a three-month cure down to a week, then later to just a few hours. Efficiency triumphed, but flavor suffered. Dry-cured hams achieve greatness over a period of months as enzymes break down proteins into dozens of intense flavor compounds. Wet-cured hams tend to be soggy and insipid. ¶ Bacon received an even more thorough reinvention. In 1850, the term ‘bacon’ applied to any dry-cured cut of pork; fifty years later, as packers standardized their terminology, ‘bacon’ referred only to belly meat—and nearly all of it was wet cured. The earlier practice of salt-packing pork bellies for more than a month, then smoking them, required too much time for packers operating on an industrial scale. A sweet pickle delivered better results: bellies were dumped into 1,000-gallon vats holding a sugary brine, then drained and moved to the smokehouse. The method could not deliver the intense flavor of dry-cured bacon, but it did reduce labor costs, produce a more consistent product, and give Americans the sweetness they craved even in meat.”