Troubling Information

• 1 suckling pig, about 3 weeks old, cleaned and prepared by butcher (about 10 to 12 pounds, dressed, is the best size)
• 6 cups or more, dried bread crumbs
• 3 teaspoons salt
• 1 tablespoon powdered sage
• 3 tablespoons butter
• 1 medium-sized onion, minced
• 1 tart apple, peeled and grated
• 3 tablespoons fresh parsley
• 1 carrot or lemon or apple, to put in mouth
• cranberries
• watercress
• red cinnamon apples or spiced crabapples

For the stuffing, simmer heart and liver together with seasoning in 2 cups water, until tender. Chop fine. Sauté onion in some of the butter. Grate apple. Mix chopped heart and liver with crumbs, seasoning, apple, and onion, and moisten with stock. Fill pig with stuffing being careful not to overfill, as it will split. Sew opening together.

Insert a small block of wood in mouth to hold it open. Lower the eyelids and fasten shut. (The butcher should have removed eyeballs.) Skewer legs firmly in place, the forelegs forward and the hindlegs in a crouching position. Rub whole pig well with melted butter, dredge with flour, salt, and pepper. Cover ears and tail with foil, to prevent burning.

Place roast on rack in uncovered oven in 450°F oven for 15 minutes. Reduce heat to 325°F and roast until tender, allowing 30 minutes to the pound. Baste every 15 minutes with drippings, do not use water. For the final 15 minutes, remove foil from ears and tail.

Place roasted pig on a large platter or board. Place cranberries in eyes, a carrot or lemon or apple in mouth. Drape a garland of cranberries around the neck. Garnish platter or board with bed of watercress and/or parsley and red cinnamon apples or spiced crabapples.

-- The First Ladies Cookbook (New York: GMG Publishing, 1982), 166.

Tree, 20070630, HTML & JPEG, 500 x 350 pixels

A little further down the Passage there was a family of bookbinders. Their children never went out. The mother was a baroness. De Caravals was her name. She didn't want her children to learn bad language at any cost.

They played together all year long behind the windowpanes, putting their noses in each others' mouths and both hands at the same time. Their complexions were like celery.

Once a year Madame de Caravals took a vacation all by herself. She'd go visiting her cousins in Périgord. She told everybody how her cousins came to meet her at the station in their "break" drawn by four prize-winning horses. They would drive together through endless estates . . . The peasants would troop out to kneel on the castle drive as they passed . . . that was the kind of stuff she dished out.

One year she took the kids with her. She came back alone in the wintertime, much later than usual. She had on deep mourning. You couldn't see her face behind the veils. She offered no explanation. She went straight up to bed. She never spoke to anybody after that.

The change had been too much for those children who never went out. The fresh air had killed them . . . That disaster gave everyone pause. From the rue Thérèse to the Place Gaillon all you heard about was oxygen . . . for more than a month.

-- Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Installment Plan, tr. Ralph Mannheim (New York: New Direections, 1971), 69-70.

From Rob Cockerham's cockeyed.com.