I don’t want to be yet another one of those food fetishists who’s unduly obsessed with pork, and I know everyone’s got to carve out a niche, and pork is pretty well carved by others…

But pork really wins all bouts, except maybe when pitted against the occasional fiesty lamb, and it seems disrespectful not to admire that properly.

In this mindset, I took advantage of the recent Heritage Foods special on quarter hogs. I’d ordered a Duroc, for variety, but due to the fact that all the Durocs had been killed by the time I clicked ‘Buy’–talk about real-time transactions!–I wound up with a Berkshire instead. And considering how all I know of Berkshire pork is that even its pure fat (and there’s a lot of it) is something I could eat for three meals a day and bathe in, this is really not so bad.

So our freezer is full–minus the osso bucco (which promptly went into pea soup), a smidge of breakfast sausage, and some sirloin steak, which got candied up Vietnamese stylie for our second go-round on the banh mi. And for anyone who’s following the Winslow Place Pork Inventory at home, we still have a substantial portion of the Spanish ham, chillin’ in the pantry. In fact, our kitchen is so imbued with the spirit of pig that yesterday I licked a spatula coated with lime curd and said, “Hm. Tastes like lard.” (Fire the dishwasher!)

I like this feeling of massive yet controlled potential. We have a lot of one tasty thing, in an array of shapes, which opens the door–but not too wide–to an even more dazzling array of possible things to eat. The challenge is to not let any of it go to waste, and to revel in the variety so that we are not sick of pig by the end of it all. In fact, we should love the pig as much in the last bite as we did at the first (and it was great pea soup!).

Robert Farrar Capon wrote the brilliant Supper of the Lamb–maybe it’s my job to write the Smorgasbord of the Pig. I wouldn’t be coming at it from quite the same religious angle, but who knows how I’ll feel when I open that last vacu-pack of meat? I’m open-minded, and if the Lord is going to speak to me, it would be cleverest of him to get at me through food. Epiphany (or even, choke, a revelation?!) or no, we are set till spring.