...an introduction

Orvieto raises breeds of pigs of very high quality and has a thriving industry of delicatessen products... In 1931 the famous “Italian gastronomic guide” of the Italian Touring Club “certified” a status of excellence which has never changed. The pig is truly at home in the Orvieto countryside. Indeed sometimes it was literally in the home. Up to a few decades ago it was quite normal to raise pigs in the cool cellars of the smaller historical villages. Orvieto raises breeds of pigs of very high quality and has a thriving industry of delicatessen products... In 1931 the famous “Italian gastronomic guide” of the Italian Touring Club “certified” a status of excellence which has never changed. The pig is truly at home in the Orvieto countryside. Indeed sometimes it was literally in the home. Up to a few decades ago it was quite normal to raise pigs in the cool cellars of the smaller historical villages. Promiscuity was not in the least indecorous: there were no refrigerators  or freezers and the pig was thought of more or less as a four-footed “living pantry”, ready to be turned into food as the need arose. References to pigs are found everywhere, even in the Cathedral frescoes where a medieval kitchen is depicted with what looks like a ham being smoked by the fireplace. Historically pig farming is the distinctive feature of early medieval economy. As cultivated lands were abandoned, the abundance of oak woods and the Celtic and Germanic cultural influences helped bring pig farming into areas where the diet had been  prevalently vegetarian. Even so the introduction of pigs did not do away with previous customs and the result was a sort of  nutritional pax where game, fish, and livestock  furnished by the resources of the saltus, the uncultivated lands the Romans abhorred, took their place next to the fruits of the land, cereals, legumes and vegetables. The early medieval pigs were quite unlike those we have now both in size and weight. The pigs in medieval iconography had dark coats and upright bristles, short upright ears, and a “pointed snout with highly visible canines”. These animals were raised mostly wild in the woods and frequently interbred with the wild boar. Their continuous roving made for a lean animal that was fattened up on the farm before being “sacrificed on the food altar”. Even recently the raising of pigs in the wild was quite common in the area around Orvieto. Before the introduction en masse of the Large White (a breed suited to intensive breeding and with a high yield of meat) the most usual breeds in these areas included the Cinta Senese or White Belted,  the Grigi (crossbreeds of Large White and Cinta Senese), and other black breeds that are hard to identify and which were all raised out in the open, in other words left free to roam through the countryside. The many Italian breeds of pigs – Cinta Senese, Calabrese, Casertana, Emiliana, Sarda, Macchiaiola, Mora Romagnola, Perugina, Nero delle Nebrodi – have been replaced by  imported breeds including the Large White and the Landrace. The Large White  yields a considerable amount of fat and meat. Prevalently used to produce sausages, this animal is slaughtered when it is a year old and weighs 140 kilos. The Landrace is preferred when the meat is to be consumed fresh. It is slaughtered at 10 months and weighs 100 kilos, for it is leaner than the other breeds (the amount of fat in the meat is close to that of beef). However as time passed the two were crossbred and nowadays the general term used is Italian heavy swine. The pig is highly esteemed in the rural culture for it costs little to raise and has an excellent yield (pigs on an average convert 35% of the plant matter eaten, sheep 13% and cattle only 6.5%). “Nothing is produced, nothing is destroyed, all is transformed". In this case think of the pig, of which nothing is thrown away. The French, with reason, called it an “encyclopedic animal”.  (T. Gregory,  professor of History of Philosophy at the University of Sapienza in Rome and author of the philosophical menus). No part of the pig is wasted: even the pigskin, feet, ears and blood are eaten. Traditionally in Italy though most of the pig is used to produce sausages and this is why pig farmers prefer the heavy pigs. The meat of the heavy hog or pig must be mature and able to retain liquids and have an appropriate quantity of fat. A meat that is too lean would make the sausages or hams  too dry and salty after curing. Thanks to years of genetic selection, appropriate care and carefully controlled diet, the meat of the lean pig has even less fat than beef, with lower percentages of cholesterol and saturate fats.