The Pig's Gotten A Bad Rap

In front of the class, Chef Allen demonstrated the turkey breast fabrication that he walked me through last week, which gets you two nice plump tied-up roasts, ready for slicing. Party food. Then he reviewed the carving of a whole turkey: "Now that you're in culinary school, you'll have to do it next Thanksgiving, and maybe forever." His main advice: show off the beautiful whole bird, then take it into the kitchen for carving. It's masochism to carve in front of your assembled relatives.

Before I began work with the Seafood team, we finally finished our duck confit. The legs and thighs, and a bunch of extra duck skin, have been marinating since last Tuesday in olive oil, thyme, peppercorns, and bay leaves. We started by preheating the oven to 350 degrees, and melting seven pounds (two 3-1/2 pound buckets) of duck fat in a large braising pan. We seasoned the duck with salt, then placed the pieces, skin down, into the melted fat. You need to have enough fat to completely submerge the meat. The pan then went into the oven for about three hours.

We took the separate pieces of duck fat and rendered them, with a little water, over a low flame on the top of the stove. After a couple of hours, we had a pot full of duck fat plus cracklings. We poured the fat in with the legs.

While the duck cooked, I worked on fish: sea bass, petrale sole, and salmon. The bass still had scales on it, and the skin is very tough. The sole is flat and there's a nice smooth symmetry to taking it apart ("the fish shows you right where it wants to be cut"), but the yield is pretty low, only enough for one or two servings. I only had time to skin and fillet one salmon, but it's very gratifying: you end up with two big beautiful halves, many individual portions.

Jen gave me a present (for no reason: always a delight): a thermos bottle, which works incredibly better than the travel mug I've been using. My Peet's, brewed at 5:30, was still hot at 11:00, when we ate our duck legs and talked about pigs.

The duck was super rich. We each got a leg/thigh piece with succulent soft skin. Once the duck is finished (falling-off-the-bone tender), you can keep in a cool place (as long as it's completely covered in duck fat) practically forever. To serve, you dig it out of the fat and warm it through, under a broiler if you want to crisp the skin. I imagined my duck on a plate of tender white beans, with some fat white sausage slices, some crispy thyme-flavored bread crumbs sprinkled over it all, a little pot of Dijon mustard nearby. A glass of chardonnay. Instead: coffee, a paper plate, and a plastic spoon. But it was still delicious.

Chef Allen is enamored of fat and so of course, he loves the pig. We talked about trichinella, a roundworm that can infect domestic pigs and wild game. The requirement to cook pork to "well done" was established to guarantee that any parasites would be rendered harmless. However, Chef noted that the last case of trichinellosis in the US tied to the consumption of commercial pork was "in the late 70s." (According to the CDC, there were actually 11 cases, none fatal, tied to US-raised commercial pork between 1997 and 2001. The point is the same, though: the risk is very low.)

"Remember what your mother used say when she told you to clean up your room? 'It's a pig sty!'" Pigs are low to the ground, and they do roll around in the mud, but only because they don't sweat, and cool mud helps them to regulate their body heat. "And what do we call pig feed? 'Slops.'" Pigs will eat anything, and that's what they've been fed, by and large. "Slops" — kitchen scraps — would inevitably attract flies and rodents, adding to the impression that pigs are dirty. But the quality of commercial pig feed has become increasingly regulated, standardized, and improved, so that now pigs are leaner and more nutritious than ever, and a sty is what you make it.