No, I’m not talking about preparing a meal for myself while Francesco is away – although I suspect he’d go pale if he saw some of the ‘single man’s dinner’ concoctions I’ve cooked lately. Strange stuff I can come up with while home alone, but as Mrs. Feely* would say, ‘sure goes good with the beer.'
One of my weekend projects was de-rusting a few of old metal fixtures around the place and this gave me a closer glimpse of a large object in the four au pain that we thought might have been used for boiling water or slow cooking jams and preserves.
But we’ve been corrected: the huge cast iron vat built into the side of the bread oven was actually used for cooking up pig-sized quantities of savory slop to feed the family hogs. The pot is set into the bricks in a way that hot air from inside the oven can circulate around it.
I’ve looked the process up and found that pig swill in French is called pâtée and ideally consisted of 2/3s scrap vegetables, 1/3 fruit (unfit for human consumption, ie., rotten), corn meal, and sour or diluted milk. This was warmed up in the big lidded vat and served to the squealing, delighted pigs.
Sure goes good with the beer?
*Mrs. Feely, Miss Tinkham, and Mrs. Rasmussen are three main characters in a series of books by Mary Lasswell that my mother particularly enjoyed. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Lasswell if you are interested in reading more about ‘three impoverished but high-spirited and beer-loving elderly women’ in some very funny post-war American lit.
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