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As our environmental correspondent José
P. Ribas mentioned in his article last week (Weekly Edition
031, 29th September 2001), at this time of the year 'the harder
jobs are over and local farmers look ahead with confidence,
keeping an eye on feeding and pampering the pig that will
soon be sacrificed'. Those of you who managed to delve through
my last article will have gotten a glimpse of the importance
of pigs in the local culture. Pensar es porc in Eivissenc
language describes the routine of fattening up the pig for
the annual matança (pig killing) and this usually begins
anything from two to four months beforehand. As I mentioned
previously, they are given special food, especially es sego,
a mixture of ordi (barley - 'sebada' in Spanish. Ordi, which
grows in relatively dry conditions, was particularly suited
for Eivissa's climate) flour mixed with dried and crushed
garrovas (the carob bean - 'algarrovas' in Spanish), muniatus
(a local type of small sweet potato), beans, pesols secs (dried
peas) and figues (figs). An extra special delicacy for the
pigs are figues de pic, the 'Arabian fig', called 'higo de
Moro' in Spanish. These are the bright red fruits of the giant
cactuses that grow near all old traditional Ibicencan pagès
houses: such houses had no (and some still haven't) internal
toilets, the outside cactus area serving this function. These
prickly fruits ripen at this time of the year and are so beloved
by the pigs that, when the figues de pic are being brought
to them, the sweet smell often alerts the pig, who will begin
to squeal with anticipation and even go as far as to stand
up on its hind legs to peer over its corral or through its
doorway to see these delicacies being brought. Such traditional
foods fatten up the pig in a way much better than the modern
'piensos' animal feed bags that can now be bought, but are,
of course, more time-consuming to prepare. Both kinds are
very successful, though, in assisting the pig to put on weight,
although pagesos eivissencs (Ibicenco peasants) recognize
that the former type gives firmer, sweeter meat.
The pig fattening process can be incredibly
successful, some growing to almost monstrous sizes. Numerous
hilarious stories circulate amongst the rural population of
the island regarding the enormous size of some of these pigs
and the difficulties of getting them out of the small-darkened
corrals in which they are raised. It is said that there have
been some instances where they have grown so big that it was
impossible to get them out through the corral doorway, resulting
in one of the walls having to be broken down to get them out
to take to the matança - although there might possibly
be a bit of poetic license involved here. The well-loved Eivissenc
cartoonist 'Franky' (Francoli) in the popular series of his
works in the daily newspaper 'Diario de Ibiza' has often featured
pigs and peasant life. In one cartoon published at the beginning
of the 1992 pig-killing season a pagesa wife pushes her terrified
husband through the doorway of the pig's corral with the words
"Xicu, a veure si fas via a treure es porc des corral,
que sino es fara es solpost I encara no haurem acabat ses
matansses" ("Xicu, see if you can find a way to
bring the pig out of the corral, because if not the sun will
have gone down and we won't have finished the pig-killing".
A short note is in order here: the matança and the
making of the derived food products has to be done in one
day, between sunrise and sunset). In the foreground, looking
towards the quaking husband (who has dropped his pig-killing
knife and the iron nose hook) growls a gigantic pig. Most
foreigners seeing such a cartoon here wouldn't see what was
so funny with it, but such situations have confronted many
pagesos and many are the stories woven around these annual
tricky situations.
As any tourist knows, everything in Spain
is weighed in kilos and portions thereof - or at least that
is the official story. Not so matança pigs on Eivissa,
who are weighed in the ancient scale of rovas. On Eivissa
one rova equals approximately 10 kilos, and a normal pig for
a matança should weigh at least 20 rovas or more. The
rova scale is also used in other Catalan-speaking areas such
as Mallorca and the neighbouring Spanish mainland, but each
rural area sometimes has its own particular variation. Peasants
in Valencia weigh pigs in 'rovas', but there one 'rova' equals
approximately seven and a half kilos. All is not equal in
the world of pigs. The largest matança pig on Eivissa
in recent years that I know the weight of was one of a massive
42 rovas (around 420 kilos!) that took 9 pagès men
to get it out of its corral to the pig-killing board. There
have been larger ones - some so big they could hardly walk
and at least one so massive that it had to be transported
by horse and cart and its weight and bulk broke one side of
the cart.
Matança pigs tend to be kept slightly
more hidden now than before, especially as in recent years
legislation has been introduced to prohibit pig-killings without
the presence of a food sanitation/hygiene inspector. There
are very few of these inspectors available for rural areas
of the island and as the famous eivissenc sobrassada, botifarro
and botifarra sausages and preserves produced from a matança
performed 'at home' are not for sale and are the home food
protein source for the extended family for the forthcoming
year, many such matançes go ahead without such modern
supervision. As the Ibicencan peasant has been doing matançes
for centuries before the 'invention' of health inspectors
and as there is a typical (and completely natural and understandable)
Ibicencan pagès mistrust and disregard for any kind
of outside authority or control over these traditionally independent
and isolated extended family properties, these annual activities
continue much as before, although diminished in extent.
Such pigs for matançes, though, were
originally not just restricted to rural areas of the island,
but were also common in Vila/Ciutat Eivissa/Ibiza town in
the 19th century, where such pigs were tethered (outside)
to house doors or tethered in the street. As 'modern' ideas
from Mallorca and the mainland crept into the ancient city,
a growing number of Senyors de Vila ('Masters from the town')
complained that pigs in the streets were not good for the
reputation of the city (overseas, that is, pigs in the streets
would not be considered unusual by peasants visiting Vila
from the countryside as they were one of the few things in
the town that made the peasant visitors feel slightly more
at home) and posed a health hazard. Things got to such a state
that one batle (Mayor - 'alcalde' in Spanish) finally introduced
the infamous 'Qui l'agafa es seu' (basically 'finders/keepers')
ban. Anyone finding a pig in the street in Ibiza town could
keep it and eat it with no legal problems. After this law
was introduced Ibicencos in the town had to keep their pigs
for matançes in a series of corrals outside the then
city limits, in the area of ses Feixes. One could sometimes
still see, though, as late as the early 1960s, Ibicenco men
walking their pigs near the centre of the town - usually walking
them to one of the matança slaughter houses during
the cooler time of the year. Before the relatively recent
introduction of the electric icebox/refrigerator into the
island, the pig and its products were essentially, as one
eivissenc de Vila friend told me yesterday, 'Ibiza's icebox',
as its preserved products kept well without rapidly deteriorating.
There seems to be a certain amount of opinion
amongst academics that the pig and the culture of the pig
on this island date basically only from the time of the Catalan
reconquest in the 13th century and have much to do with Christians
repudiating previously-existing Islamic and, in certain cases,
Judaic prohibitions. 'The more pigs we keep to kill and eat
the more Christian we are'. This may be true to a certain
extent in some areas of Spain, at least in such emphasis,
but it is more than likely those aspects of the islands' obsession
with pigs have deeper and older roots. Up until the present
day certain isolated pagès families will still use
specially-shaped pedras fugeras (pumice stones, called 'pedra
pomez' in mainland Catalan) for scraping off the pig's burnt
hair and cleaning its skin once the pig has been killed and
its outer carcass quickly brushed with burning branches of
an aromatic plant. This burning (now often done quickly with
a blowtorch attached to a gas bottle) enables the work of
skin cleaning and scraping to be done more easily. This scraping
is a specialised task and needs specialised equipment, for
which the rare pedras fugeras (also called pedres tosques)
are admirably suited. The original pumice stone was very rare
in these islands in the early days and would possibly have
had to be imported - although there are stories in the past
of pumice stones floating ashore on Formentera (these could
possibly have floated from volcanic eruptions in the central
and eastern Mediterranean). Archaeological excavations at
Ses Païsses de C'an Sorà de Cala d'Hort have uncovered
just such pedras fugeras/pedres tosques as have been used
well into living memory, and these archaeological finds have
been dated to Byzantine times. The Byzantine never conquered
these islands, although they did control them for a period
from the mid-6th century AD. These finds indicate the possibility
that earlier forms of pig matançes were taking place
on the island at this period. If such was the case, then such
activities may be older yet. I should here remind readers
that evidence for human activity on Eivissa now seems certain
to have a history of at least six or seven thousand years.
Over the centuries the pig has had a 'bad
press', being used as a synonym for dirtiness and gluttony.
But not necessarily so amongst the pagès eivissenc,
for whom the animal was and is of great importance. The statue
of Sant Antoni des Porcs (Saint Anthony of the Pigs) in the
church of the isolated village of the area of Sa Coruna (Santa
Agnès/Santa Ines) - a village which only got connected
to electricity last year - is a monument to the respect in
which pigs are traditionally held on the island. Before going
into the intricacies of pig-killing and the preparation of
the preserved foods on Eivissa, we will next week look into
the history of the pig in Europe, try and find out why it
has unfortunately become an animal that many Europeans do
not think highly of (except for food) and look at some other
areas of the world where pigs are highly prized (as in Vanuatu
in the Southwest Pacific). There is more in this than meets
the eye (or the palate).
With thanks to numerous amics eivissencs,
including Xavier Ferari Planas, and to the work of Marià
Torres Torres.
Kirk W Huffman
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