Pig gracenotes. Wild fennel. Herb nut sauce.

Travel

22 Mar

Across the hushed, green, overcast vineyard just after dawn I hear Hernan’s exemplary falsetto calling the pigs. He has a big voice and can frequently be heard singing on the tractor just as his dad did when he worked here. But Hernan can throw his voice high, letting it soar over the whole property, “Pig, pig, piii-iiiig!!”

Just now I have a view through three windows of the entire spread of fifteen acres of vines. I can see the dramas and seasons and work carried out across it as in a triptyque tableau. Hernan has been working with the pigs for some years now and he summons them like a conductor with a baton. The round black forms come streaming through the trellised vine rows like notes on a stave — only moving, changing lines, swimming across in a lyrical undulation to reach the grain bucket. They strum the musical nodes of the land, plucking here and there — curbing dandelion proliferation, herding earthworms, dropping fertility like punctuation.

The pigs need to be orchestrated so their disturbances are in balance with the piece of land, the time of year, and their numbers. There are twenty pigs now and the pasture under the vines is in active spring growth. It’s not too muddy and the animals are more interested in grazing than rooting. So for twenty pigs, this fifteen acres will last many weeks before they need to be moved onto another area. This breed, the American Guinea Hog, is specifically a grazer, as opposed to a rooter. They are gentle, easily managed, and provide rich, dark-pink pork with a huge proportion of sweet flavored fat. This makes them an efficient choice of breed for our particular farm. They make a double use of the land: where there would be just vines or orchard trees there is now meat, and fat, and mown grass, and a clean-up crew for old fruit and scrap.

The pigs do not disturb the fennel I seeded throughout the vineyard years ago. Unlike the bulbous Florence Fennel, this is a tall straight plant that makes the flavorsome seeds used as a spice. It is too pungent for the pigs to want to eat it and its tap root is too deep for them to dig. This is the moment in spring when its first frilled shoots pop up in anise scented clouds. I send a thumb down into the clump and twist out a few stalks. The bases are thicker and whiter while the tops are frothy green.

I learned to cook and eat this kind of fennel in Sicily and on the island of Ischia where it grows by the roadsides.

On Ischia, on that occasion, it was used as a kind of aromatic thatch over a vast paella cooked outside on a fire. In Sicily it is boiled — and I mean really boiled for a good fifteen minutes until tender and much of the anise flavor is calmed. Squeezed out and chopped, it is then sautéed as a green or famously chopped into a sauce for pasta which includes sardines, tomato, raisins and pine nuts.

I am making herb sauce. The principle applies to a range of gorgeous pastes and spreads and drizzles: a ground base like a nut or seed or dry bread, a pungent element like garlic, salty fish or cheese; an herb, spice or fragrant element (often this makes up the bulk of the sauce, as basil in pesto); and a good amount of fat to carry the flavors. Examples are pesto, aioli, taramasalata, romesco. In Georgia there’s a sauce of ground walnuts, garlic, chile and spices. Tahini sauce from the Middle East is ground sesame, garlic, lemon, olive oil. I love that these sauces can be layered into a dish. Soupe au Pistou for instance, or rouille in Bouillabaisse. The sauce makes a liaison, creates a third taste and textural experience. Or two sauces playing off each other is exciting on the plate.

For this moment, this land, this season, what resonates is roast pork with pea shoot and hazelnut ‘pesto’ and a purée of wild fennel shoots with ‘pangrattato’ or bread crumbs made from my naturally leavened bread, toasted in pork fat with a dash of homemade vinegar I make from leftover wine.