And Another Thing | 16 July 2008

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.