Mother of All Pigs. Malu Halasa

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СКАЧАТЬ To many in Hussein’s town, the very idea of artificial insemination was outrageous enough, but Hussein knew that if the origin of his latest secret were to become public knowledge, then everything he had worked for would go up in smoke.

      Abu Za’atar was, of course, thrilled by the prospect of such technological innovation. With his good eye and magnifying glass, he studied the thermometer and other equipment with giddy enthusiasm. Poring over the instructions, he displayed a knowledge of Hebrew that shocked Hussein. As Abu Za’atar assembled the catheter, he airily explained that when no one in the wider Middle East was allowed to say the word “Israel” in public without being arrested, he wanted to learn the country’s language as an act of youthful rebellion. His dream was realized after peace was made between Jordan and Israel in 1994 and cheap Hebrew correspondence courses became available from the Knesset in Jerusalem. Then he brushed aside his nephew’s fears once and for all by declaring, “What’s good for pigs is good for politics.”

      Bolstered by his uncle’s confidence, Hussein reluctantly agreed to give the procedure a try. They restricted themselves to working on the big pig until the method was perfected. The first two attempts were not successful, but by carefully monitoring the signs—a certain redness around the genitals in the presence of one of the boars, a rise in body temperature—Hussein was able to choose the opportune time for the third attempt. The resulting litter was small—eight piglets—but it was clear that the benefits of introducing new blood far outweighed a temporary slowdown. As the litters grew in number and frequency, it was Ahmad who christened Abu Za’atar’s pig. When he groomed her, he whispered to Umm al-Khanaazeer, Mother of All Pigs, how she alone had brought them good fortune.

      In any event, there had been a period during the early days when production outpaced demand. This troubled Abu Za’atar, who hated to see waste, particularly if there was a way of turning it into profit. The freezer he supplied was not large enough to contain the surplus, and the fuel costs of running the generator proved to be unnervingly high. So the old man urged his nephew to find some other way of preserving the meat.

      Hussein started visiting culinary websites at the town’s relatively new Internet café and found one that detailed various methods of producing ham. He arrived at the farm with two aluminum pots. To ensure against trichinosis, an incomprehensible but nevertheless unpleasant-sounding condition, the meat had to be treated at high temperatures. Hussein was by no means confident in the small fire Ahmad had built, so he compensated by insisting that the meat be steeped in a brine solution and then subjected to several prolonged applications of salt, sugar, potassium nitrate, pepper, and spices, all of which was supplied from the emporium. The result was then dried in the sun. These hams were hard and waxy; Abu Za’atar was not persuaded.

      Next, Hussein scoured the Internet for smoking techniques. He left instructions for Ahmad to build a small hut out of corrugated iron while he set about finding the right fuel himself. One site called for oak and beech, woods guaranteed to give the meat a golden hue, but not only were these particular species unavailable, Hussein lived in an area where it was hard to find any wood at all. So he sent Ahmad’s sons to comb the countryside. The assortment of zizphus scrub they managed to collect gave the meat an unhealthy blue-gray tinge and made it smell rank and bitter. “No wonder these bushes produced the thorns in Christ’s crown,” Hussein said, disgusted. He was prepared to give up the project altogether but Abu Za’atar urged him on. Through his infinite contacts, the old man learned of an olive grove in the occupied territories that was about to be destroyed to make way for a new settlement. He procured a truckload of olive wood and, at his own expense, arranged for it to be transported to the farm. Hussein protested about the political implications, but his uncle was unimpressed.

      “Surely Al Jid told you the story about the sacred olive,” his uncle explained. “Each leaf bears the words ‘Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim,’ ‘In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.’ If a tree does not pray five times a day, God forsakes it and its fate is to be cut down. Is it my fault the Israelis find every Palestinian olive grove impious?”

      Hussein let the gnarled branches weather outdoors to reduce the tannin in the bark and then carefully built a fire in his smokehouse. At last, he was rewarded. The meat, everyone agreed, gave off the aroma of bitter olive, a rich mellow flavor that became instantly popular with the customers. However, consignments of wood arrived too infrequently for smoking to be economically viable. Apart from one man who provided his own juniper twigs and berries—he had a cousin who sent them from Germany, which enabled Hussein to produce a perfectly acceptable Westphalian ham—he was forced to go back to boiling his commercial product. After much trial and error he hit upon the method of coating the cooked hams with honey, anise, and dried nana mint. The real breakthrough came when he made a thick coating of Mother Fadhma’s za’atar spice mixture and a very Arab ham was born.

      This required time and space and necessitated the construction of a processing house to keep the meat out of the sun and away from flies. Although Hussein scrupulously never tasted the meat himself, judging only from its density and feel, he was not as satisfied with the texture of the boiled hams as he had been with the smoked variety. So he was pleased that Abu Za’atar was able to arrange for most of the farm’s processed meat output to be exported. Hussein made a point of never asking its destination. If frozen boar sperm and olive wood were easily smuggled across the river, there was no reason a cargo of hams couldn’t go the other way. He just didn’t want to know.

      Anything that was not made into processed meat was taken to the sausage machine in the other part of the processing block. Even before the arrival of the machine, Abu Za’atar had insisted that any leftovers too unappetizing to sell be partially cooked, minced with stale bread, and stuffed into intestines. He reasoned that the sheer novelty would ensure sales, and he was right. It was a labor-intensive process by hand. Ahmad’s sons helped out, but it was still too much work. Hussein complained to Abu Za’atar, who responded by turning to his mysterious friend Hani, a former Palestinian fixer and purveyor of the improbable. He had managed to smuggle Umm al-Khanaazeer across four hostile borders, the first of his magic tricks. The second was the unexpected delivery to the farm of an ancient German Wurstmeister.

      The sausage machine was a thing of baroque beauty. Pipes, bowls, pistons, mixers, drums, shakers, grips, and pots exuded a futuristic, functional elegance. The power unit looked like it could drive an ocean liner, and when the machine was working it rattled alarmingly. But it performed its task with flawless efficiency. Brain and brawn, ears and jowls, lungs and trimmings, and Hussein’s failed hams were placed in a large hopper above the primary grinding assembly. Once ground, they were mixed in a moving bowl by a rotary knife blade and then transferred to the emulsifier, a large drum where bread, cooked grain, herbs, and spices could be added gradually from their own separate hoppers. When the mixture reached the required consistency, it was forced by a screw mechanism through a small opening into the casings. The skins were washed, scraped, and treated with hydrogen peroxide and vinegar in a different part of the machine. An automatic tying arm twisted the links into two sizes, breakfast or cocktail.

      The sausages were more popular than the hams. In fact the only by-product that met with outright consumer resistance was the blood pudding. It simply would not move until Ahmad came up with the novel idea of dyeing the casing turquoise, a color that traditionally warded off the evil eye. After that, it sold steadily. The processing building was a monument to Abu Za’atar’s cheerful dictum that there was a use for “every part of the little piggy.”

      Swept along by his uncle’s enthusiasm and seduced by the money he was making, Hussein focused on the positive benefits and suppressed his apprehensions. The morning’s incident outside the mosque caused all the old anxieties to resurface. He would have liked to think of it as an isolated occurrence, but it was clearly more serious than that.

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      Before crashing into the bedroom СКАЧАТЬ