 for our author talk and tasting with Jeffrey Roberts, the author of Salted and Cured, Savoring the Culture, Heritage, and Flavor of America's Preserved Meats. I'd like to invite those of you in the back to come up and have a seat in the front if you'd like, or stay where you are wherever you're most comfortable. We don't have a mic system, so depending on how the voice carries, I don't know if we can hear in the back. We're very grateful to have Jeffrey here, and we thank him for bringing this amazing spread of Vermont-made meats, although one of them is made in Salt Lake City, Utah, just to have a comparison, so that'll be fun. We'll sample the meats after Jeff's talk, which I think will be both salivating and educational. You'll definitely learn things about the culture and history of meat that you did not know before. As I was reading this book today, I was surprised to learn there was a Roman Catholic Egyptian patron saint of butchers, Saint Anthony the Abbot, who in addition to being the patron saint of butchers, domestic animals, basket makers, and grave diggers, he also protected against skin diseases, which is fascinating, but it makes sense because in that time period, according to the book, which was second century CE, doctors treated skin diseases with a pork fat salve. Just, I thought that was fascinating to learn. And as Jeff writes, the saint reminds him of the role patron saints played when survival occupied daily life for most people. And while we are fortunate to live in a time at a society where we are not so focused on daily survival, it's still nice to think about Saint Anthony keeping watch over the butcher to make sure our cured meats taste delicious and to make sure we remain skin disease free. So this is just one tiny part in this vast and fascinating book, which compares charcuterie to jazz and tells stories of butchers and smoke houses from the beginnings of time. I urge you to pick up your copy tonight. We have them at the front desk. The registers will be open all night and Jeff will be signing books after the event or after the talk and tasting. The talk will be about an hour, including time for Q and A. I'd like to remind everybody to please mute or turn off your cell phones. Also, I'd like to let you know the front door is locked and it will open up after the event and if you need to leave any time before the event is over, the back door is open. There's also a bathroom at the back and to the right of the store. I'd like to thank Orca Media. They're here filming for tonight's event. If you're interested in seeing the video or in learning more about Bear Pond Books events, please sign our newsletter sheet that's been passed around. And now I will introduce the nation's foremost expert on charcuterie, Jeffrey Roberts, who is also the president of Cow Creek Creative Ventures. It's dedicated to developing solutions in the areas of agriculture and food policy, conservation, the environment, and community economic development. His 2007 book, The Atlas of American Artisan Cheese, was the first comprehensive survey of small-scale producers. He teaches the history and culture of food at the New England Culinary Institute, right here in Montpelier. He is a visiting professor at the University of Gastronomic Science. He provides consulting services to a wide array of small-scale food producers and is a frequent speaker in Europe and the United States on artisan food, sustainable agriculture, and the working landscape. We're lucky to have him speaking here at Bear Pond Books tonight. Please help me welcome Jeffrey. Thank you, Sam. That was a very big mouthful. I hope that you can digest some of it. And I'm just blown away that the thing that Sam wants to highlight was San Antonio Abbate. To me, one of the weirdest things that I discovered as I was doing this research. I don't have a structure for tonight, which some of you know me is probably a good thing because the structure immediately falls apart anyway. I was in Italy a year and a half ago, very good colleague of mine at the Slow Food University. Somebody said, you know, he really wanna talk to this guy. He knows a lot about cured meat. And I sat down with Mirko. He was the person responsible for the program I was teaching in. And I'm gonna circle back a couple of times. And I said, I had a question for him. And I said, Mirko, why, you know, what's the whole point of Italian slicing perjuto so thin? And he starts to laugh. And he says, Jeff, that's a 20th century invention. And I looked at him, I said, oh man, I've really gotten myself into deep already. Why, what are you talking about? He said, up till the end of the 19th century, the Italians could never slice a ham. They could, but they couldn't eat it. He said it was too muscular, too fibrous. And he said, I mean, it wouldn't look at all like what you and I would call a perjuto today. And he said it was all about the animals that begin to get introduced to Italy in the late 19th century. So he then says, by the way, if you really wanna see something interesting, go and look up San Antonio Abbate, St. Anthony the Abbott. And he said, you'll see this guy in all these pictures. And there's always one pig around his feet. So I started researching this guy. I mean, if any of you know anyone, maybe hopefully you haven't ever had shingles, anybody know what it's called? There's another name for it. For disaster. And it's related to San Antonio, St. Anthony's fire. St. Anthony's fire, I forgot that. And this is a very long established disease. Historically, people got this and they used pork fat as the staff. Well, people thought this was pretty extraordinary. And they would see pictures of him with a hog. And they figured, well, gosh, that must mean that he's the patron saint of butchers. Where the other pieces come together like the other aspects that San described. I'm not clear about. But this guy was a Christian aesthetic. And he basically lives his life in the desert. He's Egyptian, which is really interesting. Now we're starting to want to just look at the religious side of all this. And he's the one who basically found this aesthetic movement within Christianity. Where you'll have followers who basically swear off everything. And they live in caves, they don't eat much. But the way they serve is to do things for other human beings. And he was dealing with a disease aspect. But one of the things that's about this book is that it is an aspect of human survival. That you and I don't really think about in today's world. Unless you're stuck in a place where finding enough food, having enough food when it's cold or when the supply has shrunk becomes a major challenge. And even going back to hunter-gatherers, we had to figure out how to have food through thin times, as well as the change in season. Any of you ever travel in South America into the Andes? Do you go hiking, Amy? No? How many of you are hikers? What do you travel with to have a snack on the trail? Snacks on the trail. Something's dried meat. Dried meat. Jerky, maybe? Jerky comes from a Cuecha word, which is our population living in the Andes, called charky. And the Spanish corrupted the name to jerky. We figured out, we went on, I'm using this, not using the royal word, the global we, we figure out how to use the climate in order for us to have food when maybe there isn't any. So in the Andes, we could use cold, dry winds to dry our food. The thing that blew me away was not just doing something like dried meat. Their first successful effort was with potatoes, which the Andes are, the origin of the potato, and they are basically drying them. And have you ever been to the Pacific Northwest and eaten any dried salmon? The way that the Inuits, they would catch the salmon during the major runs, they would be eviscerated, scaled and butterflyed, and you basically hang them like on a clothesline, cold wind, dried them out. It's a very interesting taste and texture when it's been dried. So these kinds of things were necessary for us to survive. It's not just meat, it's something like potatoes. We dried grains until we figured out that if the grain fermented, I could do something better than just put it in a grainery, I could make beer. And among the things that you and I first celebrate are cheese, which is an accident, beer, bread, which takes a little bit more effort, but beer and bread are the things that keep us going and it was a way for us, beer becomes critically important, not just because it makes me happy, but it's safer than drinking no water. Soon as you and I stop moving and our waste collects, the water gets polluted. This historically goes back thousands of years. So beer making, where I am boiling water was one way to make it safe. And up until the 1950s in Belgium, school children drank something called school beer. They didn't drink the water. They had beer that was one or two percent alcohol and that's what they drank. Now everybody's drinking milk over there. They didn't drink milk, they ate cheese. So charcuterie, salami, salumi is part of this very large, I want to almost use the word family, of techniques that evolve along with us. One of the other things that evolves along with us is the way that Carlo Pettrini, who is the founder and president of Slow Food, describes we need lots of good microbes. And one of the things that's happening today in our country, not just here, but is this whole research about what we ingest in terms of microbes that are good for us. How we understand the biota that functions in our systems. Our systems evolved over thousands of years. There's fermentation that takes place in our system, not exactly the same way as in a cow, but enzymes that break things down in order for you and me to be able to digest it. Are any of you lactose intolerant? It's okay, I'm not, I don't want to single anybody out, but this is a big deal today. We have a lot of people with lactose intolerance. Any idea why this happens? Pete. Enzymes. Enzymes, which you ain't got anymore. But how did I digest mom historically? Any idea? It's different. It's a different talk. It is and it isn't. Without the enzyme, you died. You had to have that enzyme in order to digest mother's milk, all mammals did. But if you look at the life cycle of a calf or a lamb, and when are they weaned? They're not on their mothers for an extensive period of time. We weren't either. We were weaned off of our mothers pretty early. And so the enzymes that would break down lactose sugars weren't needed anymore and they disappeared. So when we start to eat cheese, we have to get used to this. We basically have to resurrect the enzymes in our systems. We couldn't eat it. It's one of the reasons why in Asia, China, Japan, Korea, that historically, they couldn't eat cheese, they couldn't drink milk. They had no dairy either, which is part of why that happened. So part of this is also how you and I learned to work with those things that keep us going. And one of the things that I remember Carlos saying, this was 20 years ago when I first met him, at a time when what we were aiming for in our country was we got to sanitize everything. Don't touch that. Set wall sanitizers everywhere, which we can have an argument about later in my opinion are useless. And I tease my Necky students, how many of you use that thing and it came in here? And a lot of them put it on, I said, do you feel safe? Are you gonna go into the kitchen after you use that? No, you're gonna go wash your hands. What Carlos argued for was an international society for the preservation of good microbes because what we were doing with our push towards everything should be sanitary was to get rid of some of the things that we evolved along with and that evolution is part of what gives rise to things like great charcuterie and salami. The Chinese thousands of years ago have figured this out and it's really difficult for us because we're not in a place in the States where there's a large Chinese community where we could go and try some of the things which they have done but there are famous hands that have been created by the Chinese. They think that the first dry curing shows up in the deserts of the Middle East in part because it's a very dry environment and you can almost do what the Quechua were doing in terms of just something like freeze dried only in this case the humidity level is so low and if you do it right, adjust a little bit of salt which helps to pull that moisture out and it's so dry that moisture just dissipates almost immediately. The Romans, I didn't know a lot about, I still don't know a lot about Latin but the Romans had more words for pork than any other food stuff that they ate. They also had one market which was basically there for just selling pork. There are two types of animals that the Romans were able to eat. In the south, the animals were sort of looking like thin wild boars and have any of you ever seen a photograph of a wild boar? They're pretty lean because they're constantly in movement. They get fat at the end of a growing season when I say growing, at the end of let's say the summer into the fall when the things that the trees are providing allows them to put fat on. Thin, skinny, tough animals, not what the upper class ate. They had animals that were kept in pigsties, were fed things that came out of the city and the animals got pretty fat for the pretty good cap of fat all the way around. Upper class got to eat those. Our notion of food in Rome is that the Romans if you were rich had the money everybody else didn't eat well. That's not necessarily true. There were times when nobody ate well because there wasn't enough food. But one of the things that happens after the collapse of Rome in the fifth century is that the animals all disappear and they basically revert back to their wild states. And one of the things that Mirko helped me better understand and he said I want you to go and research this because you're going to find animals but they don't look like the animals that you and I would see today to make a prosciutto. So what happened in Italy is they cooked. There are two types of prosciutto, prosciutto da ham. We have prosciutto crudo raw. That doesn't mean that it's unsafe. And prosciutto cotto cooked. He said we were basically doing cooked prosciutto. Anybody know any other hams that we tend to cook? Maybe some of you have eaten some? Anyone? Copa could be but generally that's raw. I'm not even thinking about Italy. Anybody ever have the great opportunity to try Virginia or Kentucky country ham? Yep. Anybody ever go into a restaurant and order it? How do they serve it? So did I hear someone say? Fry. Fry? It's cooked. Baked, boiled, those wonderful biscuits with some country ham in between. Oh man, they're great. All of that's been cooked. And I'm gonna come back to that in a few minutes. So the Italians are cooking all this stuff. And there's this fellow who works for an Italian Agriculture Institute who travels to England and he sees these enormous pigs called the large Yorkshire whites. And he looks at these, he said, they don't look at anything like what we've got at home and they start to bring these animals to Italy. This is in the late 19th century. And it begins to change the way in which the Italians can grow animals and make prosciutto. But there are two more animals that show up, neither of which are from Italy. One comes from Denmark called the Danish land race, an animal that they had worked for years to create because the Danes happen to like bacon. And this animal is a perfect bacon animal. That one comes to Italy. But the key animal comes from the States. From Eastern, from the mid-Atlantic, it's called the D'Uroch. Some of you may have heard of this. It's considered a heritage animal. Beautiful, nice, marbling, fat taste and so forth. Created from animals from New Jersey of all places. The D'Uroch is brought to Italy. They don't use, you and I don't eat the D'Uroch prosciutto. What they use the D'Urochs for are the sires. And now they have the Italiano large white, the Italiano land race and the Italiano D'Uroch. And the D'Uroch is the sire. So you get slight differences depending on who the sow, depending on which breed the sow is, but they're pretty good size. You can also check this on the internet. I was really curious because you go to the websites for the, there are two consortia to essentially organizations that represent prosciutto di Parma and prosciutto San Daniele. So Parma around the city of Parma, San Daniele, which is up close to the Austria-Slovenian border northwest of Triesta. Both in very unique and different environments, which has an effect on how they are produced. And historically would have been a fundamental characteristic on the differences between the animals. Some of the prosciutto di Parma had the opportunity, the hogs had the opportunity to eat the way that came from the manufacture of Parmigiano Reggiano and Italiano. The kind of source that can taste that in the cheese. Maybe they could. But certainly wasn't by the way a strict diet of that. Not good if you wanna make prosciutto. And there are lots of reasons for this. I went to the map, I went to the websites because I was really curious about what happens when these animals get introduced. And you can, and any of us, you can access this. And so what I found all the way down at the bottom, first of all they have the maps. And I'm figuring, okay, prosciutto di Parma Sant'Agnelli, around those regions. The demand for this hand, worldwide, far out strips, the ability to supply. And so you look at a map and they have it done by various provinces and regions within Italy. And it extends almost all the way to the south. Man, that's pretty odd. Because those animals are gonna be different than the ones up north. But the kicker is most of the prosciutto, most of the hogs that go into the production of prosciutto are all confinement operation hogs. Sort of like what Smithfield and Morrell and all the characters in the Midwest do to raise a standard-sized animal that conforms to a set of specifications. I was shocked. But they're not hiding this, which says that they are actually very, they're willing to talk about what they're doing. Now this to me was a real revelation. And how I found my way through it was talking to a chef in Chicago, really well-known chef at a place called Publican Meats, Publican Restaurant, and Cosmo runs the program. And he says, you know, we tend to talk only about the importance of the genetics. He said, I don't deny that that isn't true. They said, I would argue that you could take almost any pig and if you feed it properly, you will get an animal that you can use. Does anybody know what the term is? We use the term for dairy animals or steers and how we would prefer to see them eat. Anybody know what that, you all know this term, especially in Vermont. Not pastured? Not pastured, although we could have been pastured. Say again, Amy. Not brain-fed, but fat-fed. Grass-fed, yes. Ah-ha, be happy eating just grass. So the term is not grass-fed pork, but pastured pork, which argues for a much more diverse diet. And what Cosmos was arguing to me is, if I can get a pastured animal, yeah, they'll be eating grass, but they're gonna be eating all sorts of things and they're being fed a proper diet. He said, that's actually a pretty good animal when I finally see it. That the marbling, he said, yes, there's gonna be a difference in marbling. He said, but there's so many different ways that we can use that animal. That even if it's the other white meat animal, I can still do a better, I can still get a decent use of it. What was America, how did we survive? I don't wanna use the word survive. What fed us? What animals fed us from the time that Europeans arrived? So let's say the Second World War. What did we, anyone? Turkey. Turkey, we could have. Thanks. We could have eaten game, both wild turkey and deer. How many of you, I heard someone say chicken, not so much chicken. You know, you see the old Westerns, John Wayne, we gotta get the cow, we gotta get those steers to Wichita, get them on the railroad. I have to admit that this was my understanding. I think we didn't start eating beef until after World War II. No, we were eating beef. But, I'm gonna pick up on this, but what drove America in terms of a protein is pork, a lot of it. And not necessarily in a form that today you and I would say, oh boy, I'll have some of that. Pigs are not native to the Western hemisphere. There are cousins to the hog found in South America, the Bakari, for example, cousin, but it is a real different hour. The Spaniards, actually Columbus, is the first one to bring hogs to the Americas and they were left on islands, not the first time. Why would you leave them on an island? Well, I'm coming back. Got my food source already there. I don't get, and I may have to chase it down, but pigs eat anything. And one of the things that we know about hogs is that if you have food, they're gonna show up. So there's an argument that really, I found fascinating argument that the domestication of hogs, domestication of animals are really interesting and often sometimes controversial subject, depending on your perspective. Pigs are number one, one of the smartest animals in the world. They, for example, will use a corner as their bathroom, and that's the only thing they will do in that corner. Nothing else. They're very hygienic. A lot of people call pigs dirty because they wallow. But why would they wallow? What's the point? Any idea? Cool. Cool is one, any others? Bugs. Bugs. The origin of prehistoric hogs are animals that roam the forests. They're forest animals. They do not have sweat glands. They're like dogs. They don't sweat. So to stay cool, they have to be under a canopy, or I gotta have a place that I can wallow and bring my temperature down or they overheat. So hunting historically as hunter-gatherers we could find hogs, but we kept moving. The first evidence in the west of domestication is in southeastern Turkey, in actually a fairly recent dig, that there's plenty of evidence of these animals present. But they found something, and this is this argument that I really appreciate this fellow road in one of his books. How could I tell the difference? Think about this as an archeologist between an animal that is domesticated and an animal that's wild. What's the evidence that I have to make that distinction? Think about it as an archeologist, what you might have to work with. Any thoughts? Teeth. Teeth is one. You're on the right track. Bones. So, I got thin bones, I got heavy bones. Which is which? Which is wild, which is domestic? Heavy, domestic. Every way around. Because I'm stressing those bones. When I'm wild, I'm running. I'm walking, I'm constantly moving. I need heavier bone density in order to navigate through the forest or wherever it is I am. Domesticated, hey, they're gonna feed me. I don't need to be so heavy in the bones. What they find is evidence that these animals were not domesticated by us. They domesticated themselves. And the reason that this happens is that once, when you and I are hunter-gatherers, we leave our waste behind and we keep moving. We stop and the waste accumulates. And when I use the word waste, it's very broad. And the animal says, why should I go run around in the woods? There's a predator out there. I can be close to these guys and I'm gonna have plenty to eat. And so part of the interesting argument this man is making is the evidence is that they stop hunting because they now have animals that essentially have domesticated themselves. The animals that are brought from Spain are sort of halfway between. They're heavier in their bone structure. They're left on these islands. One of the things about hogs is just amazing is without a whole, first of all, a sow can give birth at least twice, sometimes three times a year. And that's a lot of animals. It doesn't take very long for you to have a big population any place. And so we knew that there would be food because they'll eat whatever is on the island. They'll eat vegetation, they'll eat birds, they'll eat frogs, whatever's there, I'm gonna eat it. The hog is also nature's most efficient converter of food, writ large, to muscle and fat. We might argue that insects are pretty good at it too, but most of us don't have a diet that involves too many insects anymore. So Columbus leaves these animals and a guy shows up, Hernando Soto, and he's gonna explore the Southeast US. He stops in Cuba, picks up some pigs, takes them with him. This is a two and a half to three year long expedition that goes all the way up into the Carolinas and then all the way west to Arkansas. And the pigs go with him, they keep multiplying. The Soto is responsible for introducing the pig to Native Americans. And they figure out pretty quickly that hey, if we feed them some grain, they're not gonna run away. Native Americans had corn. Oh, brother. Now we have a perfect mix here. The animals have got something that they wanna eat and they get fat on it. And we don't have to chase them so far when we're ready to slaughter one. So the Soto is responsible for that introduction. This is in the 1520s, 1530s. Some of those animals remain, some of them ended up on islands. There's an animal called the Ossobos. Ossobos Island off the coast of South Carolina or Georgia, forget which, they have been able to get pretty close using DNA sequencing to say that this is probably the closest animal anywhere in North America that relates back to what the Spaniards brought. And it's one that is now being grown in, there's some people here in Vermont that are growing Ossoba hogs. Apple cheek farm, I think is one of them. The English show up, they brought pigs. And one of the stories that I was jumping up and down when I finally got all of these pieces together. So country hams. Country hams are a food stuff that is all related to survival. No question about it. Keeping in mind nature's cycle for animals. They're breeding in the fall, they're giving birth late winter, early spring, and that doesn't make any difference whether we're talking about pigs or sheep or cows. You gave birth in the Northern Hemisphere in that sequence because you had to have, your baby had to be strong enough to survive when we got into the fall. For pigs, slaughter took place, late fall, early winter. And there's a wonderful, wonderful piece. I didn't include this in the book. The Rookabee Museum, this is a very old farmstead. And one of the women there kept a diary and she did a seasonal diary and they talk about the slaughter and the putting up of meat in the late fall, early winter. You did this, everybody helped out. So Kevin's got his hog, we're all showing up to help him do it because the next day or two, we're going someplace else. If I couldn't afford a hog, I would give Kevin my scraps and his payment back to me would be a piece of that animal for me to have into the winter. So we put animals up, hands especially. Sausage would not be what you and I think about when we think about Italy. It might be, it could be cooked, it could be smoked. We use smoke and salt as a major component for preservation. Among the earliest techniques is smoke. We hang them up, hang our meat up in the rafters, not even the rafters, in the ceiling of the cave. And the smoke just preserves it. I'm not sure exactly how they feel like double smoked bacon. Maybe we're on that path but probably very heavy smoke, but it'll keep you alive. The English arrive and they brought pigs. Not the, they may have had them in Jamestown but Jamestown disappears. The early 16th, the early 17th century when we start to settle places like Williamsburg, Sussex, Smithfield, these are places where the English were bringing pigs. Didn't fence them in. Let them run free. The only way I need to make sure they come back is to get them a little bit of food. They'll come back. They did. They always knew that their, you know, Farmer Kevin had left me some grain out there and I'm coming back. Next day, Farmer Kevin's there eating the leaf again. You know, you were going to the slaughterhouse. One of the people that I write about from Kentucky is a woman named Nancy Nusum Mahaffee. I've never tasted her ham which is a real sad story in itself that I haven't. But Nancy was so forthcoming and she started telling me about her family and I couldn't think of, geez, you know, where did your people come from? Lancashire, England. Any idea when? We're not really sure. So this is one of those times when the internet is an absolute godsend. There is no way I could have done this in the period of time that I did it without it. And I ran this name Nusum, Lancashire. Bang, bang, all the stuff starts popping up from her ancestors six to 700 years ago who are, and in the documents are talking about them smoking hams. Not enough smokehouse, but they created these sort of little alcoves in the chimneys to smoke, it was a hot smoke, to smoke the hams. One of her ancestors, William Nusum, comes to Virginia in the 1620s and among the first things he does is to set up a way for him to smoke. The real smokehouses, if any of you have been to Williamsburg, there are a few reconstructed smokehouses and then some plots where some of those smokehouses would have been, by 1700 they're everywhere. So Nancy starts telling me about this. She says, well, you know, my people came from North Carolina and I start to trace this, holy crow, some of William Nusum's family leave Virginia and go to North Carolina. And then she says, and so I know that my, something like four grandfathers removed, whatever, Hosea Nusum dies and leaves a recipe for country ham. Really? And I find it, not the recipe, but I found the connection. What made me jump up and down was that Nancy is a direct descendant going all the way back for this Sir William Nusum in Lancashire 600 years ago. And I don't know if there's any place else, certainly in the West, that that kind of a link could be established that clear. And she is considered one of the most proficient, accomplished country ham makers in the world. The Spaniards invited her. This is really unique, because the Spanish probably make the best cured ham in the world. And Pete and I would argue with this, but part of it has to do with the animals and what they, and the prejuto that most of us tend to see, even high end stuff is what I just described a little while ago. Anyway, they have a once a year celebration of Hamon, invited Nancy, she brings one of her hams. They didn't need it, they put it in a museum. They have a museum of ham. And she sends me this picture of this ham hanging in a vitrine in this museum. I thought, holy crap, unbelievable. And they said, you are among, it said, we don't do this very often to put this in. Country ham kept the South going at least in the winter time. But it's not, that's only one, you know, that's only one chunk of the animal. What do we do with the rest of it? Any idea? What would you do with the rest of it? Remembering you don't have much to work with. You might have salt, you gotta feed yourselves. Think about the geography of the Ohio River. Here's Cincinnati, we have Kentucky and Tennessee here. Great places to grow animals. They ran around in the forest, they ate everything. The way I made sure that they wouldn't run away is there was always grain for them to come and cry or eat. How many of you have heard of acorn fed pork? Or peanut fed in Virginia, that's a big deal. Well, in the forest, you got everything. You got beech nuts, walnuts, hazelnuts, not hazelnuts. What are those? Plenty of acorns, all kinds of chestnuts. They ate them all. They all fall. Loaded with fat, immediately they just convert that to more fat on themselves. Problem is, is that an animal would is eating strictly a diet like that. All that oil, the fat's pretty soft. And it's not very good to cure. It's good if you want to make it fresh, but we didn't have that option. Maybe a little bit. So what do they do? For a few weeks before they went across the river to Cincinnati, they were fed corn. Titans the fat up. And you know, when this fella from Kentucky told me this story, I was like, oh man, you know. You hear this story and you think, cripes. It's so obvious when you hear it, but unless you're actually practicing this, it's just not something that comes to mind that easily. So, up until the Civil War, Cincinnati is the most important center. It's called Porcopolis. Literally, tens of thousands of animals would come across the river to be slaughtered. And one of the passages in the book is from Mrs. Trollop, who's traveling through Cincinnati. And she basically is talking about the river runs red for weeks. How did they preserve it? By pickling book work. Barrels, and there are different grades, which I know in the book, from the best to the worst. You put salt on it and it draws water out, draws blood out, creates your brine solution, but then that's an awful lot of salt so that we figure out, hey, I can just brine it. And the barrels went down river, fed people in the south, they were shipped across the world in barrels. The Navy, they called it Navy pork. The expression, scraping the bottom of the barrel, comes from people who were literally looking for the last scrap that they could find. There's one other expression that you all know, eating high on the hog. Any idea what that means? What would you guess it would mean? Better cuts are higher on the animal. Yup, but better cuts for a loom. Well, for those who could afford it. Yes. And probably fresh. So, yes. He's eating awfully high on the hog, which was a statement of derision that you were trying to get beyond your station in life, but it was true. Poor people ate pig's feet or trodders, they ate a lot of bacon, they ate the things, they ate head cheese, which today we consider a delicacy, it wasn't a delicacy, this was a way you preserved that portion of the pig. You chopped, I don't mean ground, you chopped it up, you cooked it in gelatin, and you cooled it, and that preserved the meat. The way in which we preserve hogs is so amazing to me. That's one, there's a, so Louisiana, there's a very long chapter in the book about Louisiana. I wanted to see this one guy who actually had been teaching chefs and others how to do a slaughter, which he has, he takes a very reverential approach to. And I'm not gonna go into this, but one of the things that Toby talked about, growing up in, he's Cajun country, he's German, no, sorry, his family has roots in Spain, his last name is Rodriguez. They were sugar farmers, and he talks about coming home from school and his grandmother would serve him something called sausage grease, fat sausage. And what the heck is this? Well, they would cook, partially cook a sausage, layered in a crock, and pour lard on it. So long as it's above the meat, preserved, sort of like a confit. And he would come home and she'd pull out one of these and fry it up for him, he added a sandwich, the rest of the lard went back into the tub. I found techniques like this in Italy, in the Po Valley, where it was much too humid to dry cure, they did exactly the same thing. And it would keep, you could keep these things sometimes for a year without any risk of spoilage. There's one of the things that I would like to explore even further is that there's this culture of how we see and relate to hocks. And I think what you'll find when you read the book is it's, there will be things that you'll say, my goodness, really. I had many of those experiences in doing the writing. Language, the word botulism, which is a problem sometimes with meat, comes from the French, but comes also from the German and how they name things. So this is part of, to me, this is part of the, that's really unique culture, not just in this country, but worldwide. And the last thing that I'll say, I could talk all night, obviously, when immigrants come to this country, mention a little bit about native peoples and what they did for preservation. The English with smoking and curing, the Germans brought a whole different set of techniques in the mid 19th century, followed then by the Italians, the Poles, the Czechs, the Hungarians, on and on and on, the Jews, all of whom had techniques that are fabulous in terms of what you and I can access today, but what we could eat then. And my fear, one of the things that I addressed is the potential loss of tradition, the loss of what I call slow knowledge, because this takes time, a lot of time to learn to do it right. And when I say that, I'm not necessarily just saying it's about safety, but rather how do I create a great product? Vermont, and this is gonna be my segue into what we have for you guys to taste, Vermont is not gonna be in the same place that it is with craft beer and artisan cheese, where we can boast about where the number one stayed per capita in cheese and craft beer. There are a lot of reasons for this. Part of it has to do with just how many people live here and having a big enough critical mass to support people who wanna produce things. Second is there just aren't enough animals if you really wanna do a business that is going to be profitable. This is not a business for the faint of heart. Unless you got an angel who's gonna underwrite everything you do and Vermont's probably not the place that that's gonna happen. Maybe with cheese, maybe with beer, not necessarily with cured meat. Chefs have been among the people who've pushed this, but now we have people like Pete Coleman, who are looking to do these things as a business, not necessarily connected to a restaurant, but where they are selling to us or to restaurants and chefs. It's gonna take time. While I don't think we're gonna ever be able to say we have the largest or the highest per capita production of cured meat to population, we can certainly have some of the best in the country. And that's a goal that I would very much like to see happen at some point. Let's, we have time for questions, so ask whatever you might like. Oh, over here, let me, let me, we have, by the way, if you haven't been to the new butcher shop down Barry Street called Bo Butcher, make a trip there. We have from Bo two different salamis. One is an Alsatian style dried cured salami. A second is a Sotrasata from Italy that he makes. He took something that Pete made called the prosciutto cotto. It's a coutain and slight to thin like we would be eating regular cured prosciutto. So that's number three. I have another one of Pete's, his fennel salami that's made by Vermont, is it meat or, meat of. Artisan needs of Vermont. Artisan needs of Vermont over in Weitzfield. Vermont 99, which is a collaboration between Jasper Hill Farm and their rowing Wayfed Hogs and a company called Charlitos based out of New York, but the curing is all done in Albany. And did I miss anything? Did I miss anything? Let's ask for a couple of questions. And then I know that Sam will uncover the goodies and please dive in. There's also, I think some brie or camembert from Blythe Hill and a piece of, did I notice a cabin cloth bound? Yeah, it's a Jasper Hill. Okay, great. Do you of course have stocks of this that we can buy from you right now? Of what, meat? All of this. It's the book. Book, yes. Meat, no. You gotta grab Dan Barry's for you. Yeah, I do. What a great addition to our city. If you really like really good fresh, prepared and cured, all of which. Questions? Jeff, where does salami start and come from? I mean, that's also trying to preserve the meat, right? Yeah, and when we talk about salami, we're talking about these torpedoes. The word salami is all encompassing. So it's like the word charcuterie, which could be everything from a cooked pate or terrine to a saucillon that is a drive or an alicization cured hand. So the salami were being made in Rome. I would probably not recognize them, but the region south of Rome, which was called Lucania, is where some of these first originate. These should be the regions of Campania, Calabria, the Ciccata. Again, because there was a need for preservation, really critical. I would like to have had one from that region tonight called Induia. I thought about wearing my Induia t-shirt. It's apostrophe N-D-U-J-A, Induia. And it's a Calabresi, hot, spreadable salami. So basically a salami is, and I'm gonna use very rough figures here, between 70 and 80% meat and 20 to 30% fat. Induia is the exact opposite, which is why it's spreadable. But they also, depending upon who's making it, they can also be fermented in the process. Thank you. Other questions? I think everybody wants a taste. Thank you all. Are there any classes on meat, chur, and local meat? Yes, thank you. Did you go to the one at VTC? I went to the one at the Mad River Hub. Okay, they happened on this past weekend, didn't they? Yes, that was with Bill Kavanaugh. Yeah, Bill Kavanaugh was the general manager of the Mad River Food Hub. Vermont Tech is doing something, and then there's a week-long program in June at Sterling that Jules from Bow will be teaching. Do you know the focus of that? Is it more on technique of actually making the products? No, you're gonna make product with people, with him. So it's both, I think it's both theoretical as well as hands-on. And there are a lot of classes on butchery. A lot of people now are looking at what's the next step. And so, curing, I know that Jules, I mean, they've only been open since December, and Sterling invited him to come up and teach for a week. I don't, so if you go to the Sterling website, you'll see what they're up to. And there are other ones around. If you ran a search, I'm sure you'd find stuff. About the reason wave-fed pigs aren't so good to cure? Yeah, it's probably, they're good to eat. It's all a matter of the amount of fat that accumulates and it can be too soft to process into something. The mangalista hog, which is a hog that comes from Hungary, big, they call it the fat pig, fats like that. You get a hell of a lot of bacon with not much lean in it. So, certain animals can provide you with, depending on what you want to do, with just the right, you're essentially getting just the right ingredients because you have just the right animals to do that. They don't, so the amount of whey that's fed it has to be tested in terms of what is it that you want to make. Great, that's a good question, thank you. Shall we eat? I'm here to talk to you. Thank you again. Thank you. Thank you.