“OFF the PIG!!” with SIGNORE MARCELLINO

During our Italian adventures in 2000, my wife, daughter, son-in-law, granddaughter and I spent time in seven different towns over a five-week period. In at least three-quarters of the places we stayed at we did our own cooking. We were good cooks; the local ingredients were classically superb. Why eat out?

Halfway through our travels we found ourselves renting an apartment high up on the cliffs of Ravello, above the coastal town of Amalfi, and much to our discomfort, we hadn’t yet adapted to siesta hours. One problem was the difference between small towns and large cities. In small towns, all the food supply stores were closed four for hours every afternoon. Consequently, we found ourselves constantly looking for sustenance at times when shops were closed. Since no one was in charge of watching out that we didn’t run out of this or that, supper time was often a frenzied search for crucial ingredients.

On this particular day, the ingredient needed most was meat. Sausage to be precise.

Down the hill from us was a small butcher shop that hardly anyone frequented. From what we could tell, the reason for this was that the butcher, Signore Marcellino, was a man who preferred to drink wine and sit in the sun conversing with neighbors and passersby than actually run a butcher shop. Since there were no other options, we headed down to Marcellino’s. We took a shot.

Sure enough, the place was all but empty. A matronly female shopper had a small wrapped parcel in her hand as she exited, leaving us gawking at empty cases and a merry proprietor behind them, a man who seemed happy, for some reason, to welcome us to his vacant shop. We stuttered a bit in our poor Italian, told the man we’d come back tomorrow.

“No, no!” he insisted, then asked us what we needed. We said we were in need of about two kilos of sausage meat; but we also gestured at the empty meat cases and repeated our promise to return the next day. He would have nothing of it. “Ashpete ‘qui” he slurred, and promised us the meat.

Dragging us by the arm, he led us outside the shop to the two deck chairs he kept there and instructed us to sit and “ashpet” again as he disappeared back into his shop. Moments later he returned with two cloudy glasses and a cool flagon of his home made white wine. He poured us each a glass, handed the bottle to my son-in-law and indicated once more that we should wait. Then he organized his considerable girth atop the seat of a tiny scooter, hit the ignition, stomped on the pedal and was off down the spiraling mountain road that lay before us in broad panorama.

Amused and already a little drunk from the wine and that afternoon’s heat, we watched as Marcellino wound his way down the mountain and out of sight, imagining him possibly driving by a sequestered Gore Vidal, who was living there at the time. We could still hear his engine, though, as he put-putted down to his final destination. When all went silent, we began our second glass of wine.

A few minutes later, as the wine-fueled glow started to become a blur, we heard it down far below us.

It sounded at first like a high-pitched, sharp grinding…until the pitch grew sharper and we realized that it was a scream. A pig’s scream–“squealing like a stuck pig!” And just as soon as it began, it was eerily over.

We looked at each other. “You think that’s…”

“Yep.” We quickly poured and downed another wine.

Twenty minutes after leaving us to our winey indulgences, Signore Marcellino was sputtering back up the hill and winding his way into view. We drank to him silently as he approached. He arrived with a bloody sack over his shoulders, greeted us and went to work setting up his grinder.

Gradually, a heap of pork piled up on brown butcher paper. This would be supper—as soon as we were sober enough to cook it. It was, of course, the freshest pork we ever ate. As the saying goes, so fresh it still had the squeal in it.