From their sausages and world famous chorizo to jamón serrano and black and white puddings with either onion or rice added. With wafer thin cutlets and heartier chops, tenderloin and joints for roasting (with the crackling sold separately for some reason), pork is the most eaten meat by far in Spain. And I haven't even mentioned the pork scratchings...
The meat aisle of a Spanish supermarket is generally not for the faint hearted—vegetarians you may want to switch off now—alongside the usual scrawny lamb cutlets and nestled in amongst the hamburgers and other minced meat products, you can find such delights as chicken's feet, chicken's blood, sheep's brains, offal of all descriptions and my particular bug bear to look at—tripe. It was only a few years ago that we had to behead and remove the innards from entire chickens and ducks ourselves! However, it's when you get to the pork section that you really find the weird body parts not normally gracing the chilled cabinets of your average Asda or Morrison's back home.
At Christmas large freezers appear in supermarkets stocked with whole or half carcases of pigs (and sheep) sawn straight down the middle from the snout to the tail—all innards still there in place! Lots of little piglets lay snuggled together in foetal positions in deep chillers. A more emotional person would weep and lament their short lives, but not me. Suckling pigs taste bloody delicious and so long as I don't have to prepare them, I'll happily munch away on them until the... erm... cows come home?
One of mine and t'husband's more childish pursuits is to pick up packets of pig face and wave it at each other in the supermarkets cackling "oi pig face!", or threaten to buy the trotters and place them under each others pillows (or is that the other way round?). We often point at the pre-wrapped trays of ears and say "hear, hear!" to one another, clearly we don't get out much!
What we hadn't done until now, is be brave enough to buy one of these bizarre parts of pork that us Brits don't usually touch. That is until last Saturday, starved of inspiration and bored to tears with the normal cuts of meat that Brits will deem normal enough to eat we decided to be adventurous and buy some pigs cheeks or 'galtes' as they are in Catalan. They were an instant hit, so much so that I have decided to cook them again when the in-laws are over next week.*
There is a probably a very good reason why the diagram of pork cuts available in Spain looks like this, with all parts of the pig being game for a good meal:
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| None of this bad boy is wasted |
Compared to the somewhat more conservative British cuts of pork:
Hmm that'll be whole areas of the pig that are not being eaten. Or... more likely, that'll be the parts of the pig that go into sausages and pork pies and minced meat. At least the Spanish are more honest about their cuts and after tasting the absolute delight that are pig's cheeks I am beginning to find myself wondering about how tasty pig's face, trotters, ears etc. might actually be. Maybe one day I'll be brave and order them in a restaurant before I can steel myself to tackling cooking them at home.
In the meantime I am going to sing the praises of pig's cheeks and urge you all to try them, they are really cheap and apparently available at Waitrose (and probably some other supermarkets as well), or you could badger your butcher to save you some and not send them all to the Michelin starred restaurant up the road who'll probably charge in excess of £30 for a dish of them.
Now if only someone would show them how to rear proper bacon...
*I marinaded mine in cider and some fresh herbs for a few hours in the fridge and then dredged in flour, browned off and chucked in casserole dish with some fried onions and mushrooms, the cider & herb mixture and some chicken stock. The dish went into a 160º oven and cooked for 3 hours. Once the 3 hours were up I took the cheeks out of the casserole dish and kept them warm in the oven while I reduced the liquid down until it was a decent thickness for the sauce. I served them with cabbage wrapped black pudding and honey & mustard roasted parsnips & carrots. Absolutely melt in the mouth amazing!
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