Admittedly not whole pigs roasted over a fire at the cave entrance, more’s the pity, rather a few little pig-bits sourced from the supermarket, but the pig is just as dead.
And the tastiest bit on the pig remains the same as it was when those distant forebears lugged the carcass home from the hunt — to wit, the belly.
I buy my belly sliced into strips by the butcher, then I roast it in the air fryer.
I was tempted to say that I fry it in the air fryer but that would be to fall for a cunning bit of marketing. We all like fried food — the crunch, the fat, the primitive indulgence of it — but have been persuaded by the forces of puritanism that it is bad for us.
So some cunning entrepreneur came up with the name air fryer to imply that it was possible to fry something in air rather than fat and thus banish the guilt.
So there I was last night, seasoning strips of pig belly and laying them in the bed of the air fryer to roast for 14 minutes on one side and a further eight minutes or so on the other. (Feel free to take recipe notes. You will not be disappointed.)
I pressed go and the machine made its cheerful little hunting-horn noise which indicates it’s about to get cooking, when whoa, I reached with some urgency for the on-button and turned it off.
For I had inadvertently set the cooking time at 13 minutes, and there was no way that this 21st century rationalist, heir to the enlightenment and the wonder of the scientific method, was going to programme anything to cook for 13 minutes. It would be asking for trouble.
Why the number 13 is considered unlucky I cannot tell you, and I don’t for one moment believe that it is. Yet I have inherited the superstition and I abide by it. And it is not the only one.
I will not open an umbrella indoors. If I notice a black cat ahead I will go out of my way to avoid it crossing my path.
And if I idly assert that such-and-such a matter will turn out well in the end, I will add the rider ‘‘touch wood’’ and do so.
And it has to be direct contact, skin to timber. Tapping a Formica benchtop which I know to be wood underneath just will not do. Formica blocks the magic that I don’t believe I believe in.
In other words my inner pagan trumps the voice of reason.
And as the pork belly cooked and I fried a panful of onions, peppers and mushrooms to go with it (sweetcorn is good too), I asked myself why.
The ancient pagan felt embattled. Pork belly was hard to come by, the weather was harsh, and life was short, painful and dangerous. In other words, he had abundant evidence that there were forces out to get him.
We now know those forces to be evolutionary pressures, the iron rules decreeing that the fittest survive and the rest go to the wall.
But he did not know that and saw only malign spirits that needed to be appeased. So he made offerings and conducted rituals and if they seemed to help he persevered with them and out of that grew superstitions.
My life, however, is easy and long and barely impinged upon by evolutionary pressures, so why should superstitions persist?
Is it that our apparent sophistication is largely an act, that beneath the fine clothes of the rational man there still lives the naked hunter-gatherer? Or are those superstitions still, perhaps, an antidote to powerlessness?
Because for all our cleverness we remain subject to things that we cannot control, like the weather, and random chance and the date of our death.
I don’t know. All I do know is that if you add Worcester sauce and sweet chilli sauce to the fried peppers and onions and mushrooms, and cut the roasted pork belly into half-inch pieces and mix the lot in a bowl and eat it with a spoon, it remains a pleasure as old as our species, and just as tough on the pig.
- Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
