Last week, more than ten pounds of pig arrived on our doorstep, shipped from the kind people at Heritage Foods. This is a very honorable organization or charming farmers, whom Tamara is going to run off and marry a couple of, because their meat is so tasty. They’re the ones who made heirloom turkeys hip–they even put webcams in their pens before Thanksgiving, so you could be assured they were living a beautiful life before they got the axe.

My pig meat is not just any pig part: It’s guanciale, or cured pork jowl. Pig cheeks. There were three of them in the package, which is a little unsettling somehow. I gave the biggest one to Tamara for her birthday, and the other two have been lurking in the bottom of the fridge since they arrived.

I ordered this jowl because I’ve been looking for a good pork experience ever since 2003, when I smuggled some pancetta back from Italy (concealed in dirty underwear in my luggage) and it was the porkiest pork I’d ever had. I didn’t really think about what I’d do with ten pounds of jowl, except maybe make some bucatini all’amatriciana, which is a nice little tomato sauce with onions and jowl bits.

Yesterday Peter broke the seal, in service of a hot-and-sour soup, with not-so-thrilling results–but he hadn’t cut off the rind. “That stuff is really fatty,” he said. Which isn’t something he typically complains about.

Indeed, when I cut another wedge off the jowl tonight, I saw that it was all fat with wee pink streaks. Not a bad thing–it just requires careful slicing and browning. So I cut my little jowl wedge into long, skinny bits, alternating stripes of pink and white. I tossed them in a pan to let them brown up slowly and render a little. A sort of carbonara was the plan.

That was going fine, but then as I was lifting the bits out one by one, I saw something I wished I hadn’t:

At one point in my slicing, I had noticed a small black vein of something just under the surface–probably some spices, I thought. No–in fact, it was hair. Boar bristles, really. I tried to look away, but that stubbly black bit was already imprinted on my one working retina.

So I turned to my little pea shoots that I’d picked up in Chinatown the other day. Benign vegetables. Hairless. But as I was scooping them up from the steamer and putting them on a plate, I noticed a smushy little gray thing on the tong. Looking exactly like what a waterlogged worm would look like. Now two nasty images in my retina.

Damn. My dinner was objectively delicious–all salty and peppery, with tender fresh pasta, and with the sweet buttery pea shoots mellowing it all out… But just as I would start to savor a bite, getting a little excited about the winey flavor in the onions HAIR would pop into my head, then WORM, then HAIR HAIR HAIR WORM. HAIRWORM. HAIR. By the end I was just choking it down. HAIR.

Please, oh please let the next wedge of guanciale be bristle-free.