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And Another Thing

Paul Johnson

Wednesday, 16th July 2008

Human beings and pigs have a very peculiar relationship

The other evening I went to a ‘pig roast’ in our Somerset village. It was a tremendous turnout from far and wide. There is something about the idea which stirs up deep guzzling instincts, and certainly this pig on his spit looked, and smelt, gastronomically alluring, despite the fact that six of his live colleagues waited in a nearby pen for their ‘pig race’, another local custom. People sat on bales of hay, eating slices of the pork wedged in buns. There is no elegant way of doing this, I reflected, an observation subsequently confirmed by study of the photographs taken.

So what? I don’t suppose the original feast when the Chinese first discovered roast pork was an elegant occasion, punctuated as it must have been by lip-smacking, finger-sucking, pigtail-pulling and expressions of delight in archaic Mandarin. I take it for granted that Charles Lamb’s noble essay, ‘A Dissertation on Roast Pig’, is founded on some kind of fact. Lamb got the notion from his friend Thomas Manning, who not only travelled in China, and spoke and read the language, but penetrated as far as Tibet, the first Englishman to do so. Though clever and learned, he never wrote a word about his experiences. Diffident? Lazy? We don’t know. But he talked to Lamb. The ‘Dissertation’ was the first grown-up essay I read, aged 12, and I believed every word of it. If you haven’t read it, do: it is a jewel.

Lamb wrote often on the delights of pork. It was his favourite food until, late in life, he replaced it by hare (see his essay ‘On Presents of Game’). He wrote: ‘Socrates loved wild boar, Sophocles truffles, and why should not pig’s meat be my gastronomic vanity?’ There is a tremendous letter to Coleridge who had written to him, in error, thanking him for a present of a suckling pig. No chance, said Lamb: ‘A pig is one of those things I would never think of sending away. Teals, widgeons, snipes, barn-door fowl, ducks, geese — your tame villatic things — Welsh mutton, collars of brawn, sturgeons, fresh or pickled, your potted char, Swiss cheeses, French pies, early grapes, muscadines, I impart as freely unto my friends as to myself. But pigs are pigs. [And] I should think it an affront, an undervaluing done to Nature, who bestowed such a boon on me, if in a churlish mood I parted with the precious gift.’ In fact the publication of his essay brought him many gifts of pork from readers, and there is a magnificent letter to the Colliers, of 6 January 1823, thanking them, in verse and prose, for their munificence, ending ‘Vive l’agriculture!’

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