When the James Beard Foundation cancelled its annual awards this year, it explained:
The choice comes as restaurants continue to suffer the grave negative effects of COVID-19, and as substantial and sustained upheaval in the community has created an environment in which the Foundation believes the assignment of Awards will do little to further the industry in its current uphill battle. The Awards’ usual positive impact on restaurants and chefs’ businesses will likely not be fully realized due to the current state of the industry, with many restaurants closed permanently or temporarily or operating at minimal capacity.
So, why does this site continue to celebrate restaurants, even as they struggle to survive?
For one thing, now more than ever restaurants need the love. Just as coverage of restaurants’ plight can motivate action by illuminating pain and peril, so too can reminders of why we should care: what we would miss if restaurants were gone. The joy that restaurants bring. Their passion to serve. Their standout dishes.
More to the point, restaurants’ heroic efforts in 2020 warrant celebration. Even while on the brink of survival, restaurants brought moments of light into dark lives of seclusion. When a pandemic blocked the usual outlets for restaurateurs’ passion to spread happiness, they just built other outlets. As they did so, gifts from the Culture of Takeout came in phases.
First, there was the comfort of familiarity. When a pandemic uprooted our lives, continued access to old favorites assured us that not everything had changed. For all the havoc COVID-19 wrought, it would not take away our go-to Bodo’s order.
Next came the excitement of new things, like the chance to enjoy meals at home from restaurants that never offered takeout before, and even new dishes created just for the Culture of Takeout. The dreams of Ivy Inn regulars came true when the Greek-American family behind it finally began selling Greek food unlike any Charlottesville has seen.
The man behind it is Michael Ketola. Even before Ketola transitioned from MAS’s sous chef to head chef three years ago, the dish bore his stamp. Ketola is so tied to it that his bio once read simply: “I cook shrimp good.” Over his fourteen years at MAS, Ketola has cooked upwards of 300,000 shrimp.
Like many great dishes, the gambas are a marvel of simplicity. Ketola credits MAS founder Tomas Rahal with its origin, and says it captures well the Spanish approach to food on which Rahal built the restaurant: source great products, and treat them with care.
Every detail matters, beginning with the best shrimp they can find: wild-caught Gulf shrimp from the same source as long as Ketola can remember. From there, there is no brine. No marinade. Not even any seasoning. All Ketola does is split the back of the shrimp to remove the entrails, and they are ready to cook.
The shrimp sear on MAS’s 375 degree Fahrenheit parilla for about a minute per side, in nothing more than a drizzle of garlic infused olive oil. That’s it.
How can such a simple preparation stir such strong reactions? Ketola cites two keys. One is cooking the shrimp in their shells, a Catalan technique which helps them develop and retain flavor. The other is the shrimps’ unusual size. Typically, the largest shrimp at a grocery or seafood market can be about 16-20 shrimp per pound. At MAS, they are 10-15 shrimp per pound. That size, Ketola says, helps them stay plump as they cook, without drying out.
“No Short Cuts”
If the shrimp are a model of MAS’s simplicity, the alioli with which they are served manifests another MAS guiding principle. Patience. “One of the foundations of everything we prepare at MAS is taking the time to do it the right way,” said Ketola. “No short cuts.” For the alioli, MAS has long followed the same slow, laborious process, combining in a stand-mixer olive oil, egg yolks, garlic, lime juice, sea salt, and black pepper. The use of a stand-mixer rather than a blender may be what most distinguishes MAS’s alioli from other house-made versions. While the high speeds of blenders and food processors can make alioli more quickly, they also create friction and heat, which can begin to cook the egg yolks and alter the alioli’s texture. Whereas a blender can make alioli in seconds, MAS’s alioli requires a full twenty minutes in the hand mixer, or more.
The process begins with egg yolks from Forrest Green Farm’s organic free-range chickens. “Egg yolks are key to a nice alioli,” said Ketola, who lights up when describing Forrest Green Farm’s. “They are the brightest orange and yellow yolks I have ever seen.”
In the bowl of a hand mixer, the egg yolks stir slowly with lime juice and pressed garlic. Next, Ketola gradually adds olive oil, just a little at a time. MAS uses a rich, full bodied blend of picual and arbequina varieties from Los Aljibes Estate, in Albacete. The intensity and bitterness of the picual balance with the freshness and sweetness of the arbequina.
About half-way through the stirring, after the initial emulsification has taken hold, Ketola adds salt and pepper. Finally, he adds small splashes of water as needed for a smooth and creamy result.
Shrimp Sandwich
One Saturday in May, the refrigerator bore the surplus of the prior night’s takeout MAS feast. As was common in 2020, lunch became an exercise in assembling products of the Culture of Takeout. Shrimp? Alioli? Shrimp salad of course.
To serve, it needed nothing more than Gerry Newman’s butter rolls from Albemarle Baking Company, one of Charlottesville’s best vehicles for delivering deliciousness. Like Newman himself, the rolls have no desire for the spotlight, with a pillowy texture and delicate flavor that allow a sandwich’s filling to shine uninterrupted.
2020 tested Charlottesville restaurants like nothing ever has. In response to a harrowing pandemic, the passion and resilience of our restaurants yielded not just bright spots in dark lives but also new experiences that never existed before. None was more delicious than that shrimp sandwich in May.
Thank you to Tom McGovern for the beautiful images.
If food writing could shed one word from its lexicon, there would be few better candidates than “perfect”, and its derivative “perfectly.”
For one thing, the term is so vague that it rarely means more than “very enyoyable.” To describe a dish as “perfect” or “cooked perfectly” inevitably leaves readers wondering how the writer prefers the dish. If a writer says French fries were “cooked perfectly,” does she like them crispy or soft? Heavy or light salt? Thick or thin? Ridged or smooth? Skin or bare? Twice cooked or thrice? In a more extreme example, “the liver was perfect” may mean one thing when written by a food blogger, and another thing altogether if the author is Hannibal Lecter.
With sleight of hand, “perfect” seeks to sneak the square peg of objectivity into the round hole of subjectivity. Yet, there is no Platonic Ideal of a dish towards which chefs are striving, or could ever reach. Rather, a chef’s task is simply to apply heat and other techniques to enhance the flavor of things we eat. We are all wired differently, and so enjoyment of a finished product can vary from one person to the next.
That said, if there is any food which a writer could be forgiven for describing as perfect, it is the Cville Ham Biscuit at JM Stock Provisions. The story of the Charlottesville butcher shop’s iconic biscuit tells how, over time, a team of passionate and patient food artisans developed the rare dish where further improvement seems inconceivable.
Necessity is the Mother of Invention
“Needs” may overstate the reasons JM Stock first created its ham biscuit. But, several objectives did converge to give it life.
A primary purpose was to sell coffee. Shortly before JM Stock sold its first biscuit, it had just introduced to Charlottesville Lamplighter Coffee — a young Richmond-based roaster whose philosophy aligned so closely with JM Stock that the butcher wanted to see them succeed. “They were sourcing beans the right way – direct, fair trade, and they were doing really nice roasting,” says JM Stock co-founder Matt Greene. While JM Stock wanted to support Lamplighter in Charlottesville, early sales lagged. A food option in the morning, they thought, might drive coffee sales. One idea was pie. That didn’t work. Another was biscuits.
A second objective was to sell ham. JM Stock buys entire hogs at a time and breaks them down in-house. While popular cuts like pork chops sell quickly, butchers must find other uses for less popular parts. Coming in at 30lbs a piece, legs are a particularly tough sell. JM Stock’s main way to do this is to make ham, but they had found that even ham sales could not keep pace with sales of other parts of the pig. “We had all these hams,” says Greene, “and we didn’t know what to do with them.”
These objectives notwithstanding, most of all Matt Greene was hungry for biscuits.
A Christmas Story
The JM Stock ham biscuit story begins on December 24, 2014.
‘Twas the morning before Christmas and Greene’s stomach was stirring. “I had a hankering for some biscuits,” says Greene. Besides, it was Christmas Eve, and JM Stock wanted to do something nice for its customers. So, they made biscuits.
For the ones made that day, there was no ham. Instead, with a surplus of butternut squash in the shop, they made butternut squash jam to spread on the biscuits. That was it.
The initial biscuit recipe came from Ean Bancroft, a chef who worked at JM Stock at the time, and has since relocated to Atlanta. From there, the recipe evolved over several months of tweaking and honing by Bancroft and others in the shop. Cut the baking powder in half. Cut the baking soda altogether. Buttermilk vs. whole milk. One buttermilk source vs. another.
“We just kept dialing it in until we got a product that we felt was bulletproof,” says Greene. “As little room for human error as possible.”
Though Greene and co-founder James Lum III sold JM Stock last year to Calder Kegley, the shop continues to make fresh biscuits every morning, and the bullet-proof process has not changed. The task of biscuit making falls each day to whoever happens to be opening the shop. To save time, they combine dry ingredients the night before, so that all that remains to be done the next day is add buttermilk, mix it, roll it, cut out the biscuits, pop them in the oven, and glaze them with butter right before they are done.
The Ham
You can’t have a great ham biscuit without great ham. JM Stock uses its own tasso ham, which was created by meat wizard Alex Import, who has been with the shop since day one. Import has helped JM Stock win several national awards for his charcuterie, including a Best Charcuterie award for the tasso ham itself from the Good Food Awards.
Import’s two-week process for the tasso ham begins with the best product he can find, like Autumn Olive Farms pigs. He removes a whole ham from the bone and breaks it into three muscle groups: top round, sirloin tip, and bottom round. Next, he immerses the cuts in his own brine of water, salt, sugar, chile de arbol, Aleppo pepper, and garlic, pumping the liquid into the meat as well, so the outside does not brine more quickly than the inside.
Following a ten day brine comes a two day dry-cure in a Tasso rub, again Import’s recipe: paprika, chiles, bay leaf, coriander, dried oregano, and dried marjoram, which helps give the final product a flavorful crust. Finally, the ham is smoked for eight hours.
Chill, and slice the ham to order. Pile it high on a biscuit, and add a touch of honey and Texas Pete hot sauce. Voila. The JM Stock CVille Ham Biscuit.
The Cville Ham Biscuit
Last year a panel of food historians, chefs, and others embarked on a search for Charlottesville’s signature dish. After much research and discussion, the panel found it: the Cville Ham Biscuit.
One reason cited was the ham biscuit’s prevalence:
In Charlottesville, ham biscuits are wherever you turn: from the humblest dives to the most sophisticated restaurants, and everywhere in between. We find them in country stores, gas stations, butchers, farms, church suppers, picnics, cookouts, weddings, funerals, coat pockets, and car seats. We eat them to celebrate, we eat them to mourn, and we eat them for no particular reason at all.
Another reason is that Charlottesville makes such good ones. JM Stock’s biscuits have a particular following. While the biscuits were initially meant to increase the flow of ham through the shop, JM Stock now must order supplemental hams just to meet biscuit demand. The shop sells roughly 50 biscuits per weekday, and even more on weekends. Of the 2.5-3 whole hogs the shop receives each week, plus 2-3 supplemental hams, two thirds of all ham meat leaves the shop on a biscuit.
The 2019 Dish of the Year
Fat. Salt. Sugar. Spice. The composition is common. What is less common is the amount of time and thought the JM Stock team devoted to the details of each component. The result is a Cville Ham Biscuit that stands out even among our area’s stellar bounty.
A common reaction to trying JM Stock’s ham biscuit for the first time is to immediately declare it the best verson ever. During the panel’s survey of area chefs for their thoughts on Charlottesville’s signature dish, one top chef wrote: “After eating JM Stock’s ham biscuit the other day, I might say that it’s the signature dish of the universe.”
Indeed, even if you could travel throughout the universe, you could not find a ham biscuit better than the 2019 Dish of the Year: JM Stock’s Cville Ham Biscuit. Some might call it perfect.
The JM Stock Cville Ham Biscuit, as captured by the one-and-only Tom McGovern:
Autumn Olive Farms is a magical place. Hundreds of pigs roam wherever they like on a ninety acre farm and a seventeen acre forest of oaks, hickories, wild cherry trees, black walnuts, hackberries, and, of course, Autumn olives. Stand near the middle of the forest and, above birds chirping and the gentle ruffle of leaves, you will hear the sound of nuts giving way to the jaws of some of the happiest pigs on earth.
The pigs live under the care of Clay and Linda Trainum, who began raising them at the farm in 2010. Not long before that, the Trainums had actually stopped eating pork altogether after seeing videos of the treatment of mass-produced pigs. At their spacious farm near Waynseboro, Virginia, the Trainums were determined to do things differently. “Our pigs live their lives in an environment of things that bring them satisfaction and pleasure, like exposure to the warmth of sunlight, mud, and rooting for the underground forages they love,” says Clay Trainum. “Foraging on green vegetation, nuts, and fruits is deeply ingrained in their DNA, and they derive great pleasure from doing so.”
Caring properly for hundreds of roaming pigs is hard work: building triangular “houses” throughout the farm for their shelter, maintaining good bedding, sustaining fields with diverse forages for year round ground cover, and catching pigs when it’s time to move them from one field to another. Then there is the constant fight against predators that lurk beyond the farm’s edges. “Battling predators is difficult as it takes place when I should be sleeping!” says Trainum.
While it would be easier to confine the pigs to a pen, the labor needed for their freedom is worthwhile. Allowing the pigs to roam on Autumn Olive’s eco-rich farm and forest is not just good for the pigs, the Trainums say, it is also key to the quality of the pigs’ meat. As the pigs root under the ground for nuts, insects, fruits, seeds and plants, they literally eat soil, and the minerals and nutrients the soil contains. The Trainums liken this to the wine concept terroir. Like grapes, the pigs pull up from the ground the unique attributes of the Shenandoah Valley farm.
The impact of nutrition and wellness on meat quality, it turns out, is not just a feel good story. “Nutrition impacts meat quality,” says Dr. Elizabeth Hines, Swine Specialist at Penn State University. “And, animals that are abused or not treated well will generally have poor meat production, both in quantity and quality.”
Whatever the reason, the Trainums’ products are beloved by chefs. “Love, passion, attention to detail, ingenuity, intelligence, organization, reliability, good morals, and good people,” says The Dabney’s Jeremiah Langhorne, a 2018 James Beard Award winner. “If you apply those ideas to raising and selling heritage pork, you’ll understand why they are the best.” Langhorne is not alone in his adoration. Follow Autumn Olive Farms’ Instagram feed and you will see photograph after photograph of the wonders chefs create with Autumn Olive Farms pork. While I have tasted many such creations, never have I encountered a dish that better honors Autumn Olive Farms’ pigs than one I had this year at Fleurie, in Charlottesville, Virginia. At Fleurie, the same respect that the Trainums accord their pigs in life chef Jose de Brito accords them in death.
At Fleurie the same respect that the Trainums accord their pigs in life chef Jose de Brito accords them in death.
Photo by Tom McGovern
Nose to Tail Eating
One cause of the mass production methods the Trainums despise is that so many meat consumers refuse to eat most of a pig. Think about meat displays at a supermarket. Every day they are filled with the same familiar cuts: chops, loin, ribs, and ham. And yet, these cuts comprise just a fraction of a pig. Where do the remaining parts go? You rarely see them because demand for them is so small.
Even the Trainums are not immune to the effects of this. One might think that with a product as extraordinary as the Trainums’, consumers would want it all. Not so. “All parts of the pig can be utilized for food,” says Trainum, “but not enough people choose to consume all parts.” This can leave the Trainums with excess undesired parts like shanks, heads, feet, hard fat, leaf fat, and skin. “We are challenged to sell all parts in ratios that balance out the whole pig,” says Trainum.
The market’s response to this has been to make more pigs. Find other uses for parts humans won’t eat, and make more pigs to produce more parts that they will eat.
But, there’s another possible response. And, that response is at the heart of the story of the 2018 Dish of the Year. Instead of supply changing to meet consumers’ demand, what if consumers were to change what they demand? Many people assume that they would not enjoy eating certain pig parts simply because of the sound of them. But, what if they were to discover that they really would enjoy those parts? Rather than making more pigs to eat, we could just eat more of each pig.
The Origin
The story begins with a decision by Fleurie owner Brian Helleberg to change how he purchases Autumn Olive Farms pork. To align with customers’ demand, restaurants typically place meat orders by the cut: rib-eye steaks, pork chops, a leg of lamb, etc. But, Helleberg believes so strongly in what the Trainums are doing that he began purchasing entire sides of their pigs, which Fleurie’s kitchen staff breaks down in house, from nose to tail. “I’ve visited the pigs at Autumn Olive, and I have always observed them growing whole,” says Helleberg. “So it makes for the most straightforward transaction with the farm if we purchase it whole and add the value in-house. That leaves the farmers more time to do what they do best.”
That said, there are reasons so few restaurants buy entire carcasses at a time. “As the Chef de Cuisine, getting an entire pig seems fun,” says de Brito, “but it is not.” The challenges are many: moving and storing the carcass, butchering it, selling it, and, ultimately, making money with it. “It requires time and serious planning,” de Brito says.
The parts easiest for the restaurant to sell are chops. Fleurie’s beautiful double chops are so popular that a whole rack can sell out in a night. Ok, now what? The rack is gone, but 80% of the carcass remains. De Brito initially set out to work through the pig’s less-desired, primal parts one by one, introducing nightly specials from vintage types of cooking, like pig feet terrine, confit of pork galantine, and paupiettes. Unfortunately, the “strange-name preparations,” as de Brito calls them, did not sell well.
So de Brito looked for another outlet: the tasting menu. “The people who order the tasting menu usually just put themselves in the hands of the kitchen,” says de Brito. On top of that, the number of Fleurie regulars who order the tasting menu had been increasing. “I had the numbers and a better audience,” says de Brito. “Nose to Tail was finally possible!”
Challenges remained, though. Most significantly: planning the right percentage of servings among a pig’s various parts. Like the Trainums at the farm, how would the restaurant avoid having too much pork belly left after it runs out of loin? De Brito’s solution was twofold. First, he would extend the parts’ shelf life with preservation methods of cooking, so he could have parts available as needed. Second, instead of the standard approach of featuring just one cut of meat on a dish, he would create a dish for the tasting menu with many parts of the pig all on one plate. This would also allow de Brito some flexibility in how to describe the dish on the menu, so “strange-names” would not deter diners. De Brito remembered a lesson from his time at The Alley Light when a delicious crispy crepe filled with pork head and feet did not sell. After de Brito changed the menu description from “pork head and feet” to “braised pork,” it suddenly became a best-seller. “People were moaning over it,” de Brito says. If De Brito were to create a dish at Fleurie incorporating many parts of a pig, he thought, it would help to have a similarly vague – but accurate – description. Thus, “Autumn Olive Farms’ Heritage Pork, Prepared Nose to Tail” was born.
The Creation
The great effort required to make “Autumn Olive Farms’ Heritage Pork, Prepared Nose to Tail” is a tribute to the pigs of Autumn Olive Farms and their caretakers. Behold what goes into one single line item on the menu – the fourth course of Fleurie’s tasting menu.
First, De Brito and his team carry the carcass inside the restaurant.
Next they break down the carcass, a four-hour process.
Once the carcass is broken down, the noble parts are separated from the rest. Noble parts are rack, loin, half of the shoulder, ham, and belly. The remaining, primal parts include skin, feet, head, soft fat, hard fat, the other half of the shoulder, kidney, and liver. The noble parts go through an old fashioned French method of preserving meat, petit salé. First, the meat receives thirty-six hours in a brine as salty as seawater, with sugar, bay leaf, thyme, clove, and black peppercorn. Next, the meat is de-brined for twenty-four hours in clean water. These processes tenderize the meat and give it a slight briny flavor and, when cooked, a beautiful rosy color. They also keep the meat fresh for up to five weeks, or until the next pig arrives.
After the brining process, De Brito marinates the racks and loins for three days in orange, lemon, fennel seed, olive oil, thyme, rosemary, and espelette pepper. This boosts umami and tenderness.
When it comes time to serve the dish, De Brito cooks a three-bone chop first by pan-searing both sides in pork fat. Then he stands the chop on its side and turns down the heat to render and crisp the fat around the edges, before roasting it atop a grate, to allow airflow around the chop. Because of the time that searing and roasting require (30-45 minutes), de Brito and his staff do it just before restaurant service begins. Then, to order, de Brito, sears the chop, cuts a slice, and bastes it with a mixture of butter, pork fat, crushed bay leaf, and thyme. On nights when he is short on chops, de Brito roasts loin instead.
Photo by Tom McGovern
Another brined part, the pork belly, de Brito cooks sous vide for twelve hours. At service, he pan sears it and coats it in an agrodolce of mustard seed.
As for the primal parts, still another component of the dish combines skin, feet, head, and blood. De Brito boils the skin in cream, and boils the head and feet in water and aromatics. He then de-bones the boiled meat, chops it all together, and emulsifies it with blood, nutmeg, shallot, and garlic. The result de Brito bakes until set with caramelized onion, thyme, egg yolk, espelette pepper, nutmeg, black pepper, and a touch of cream. At service, de Brito slices a cube of the terrine, and pan sears it to order.
Bones help make another component: sauce. De Brito first roasts the bones, and then covers them in a pot with stock made from the head and feet used for the blood terrine. The broth is slowly simmered and reduced over several days, until very dark. The result: demi glace de cochon. Next, de Brito caramelizes sugar in a pan until amber, and deglazes it with orange, lime and lemon juice. He “confits” the citrus peels by cooking them in a syrup of citrus juice, sugar, water, cinnamon, and cloves. Then he combines the confited peels with the citrus glaze and the demi glace de cochon. The mixture is reduced for several more hours, after which de Brito strains the spice and peel and passes the sauce through a muslin several times to remove any specks. He rounds out the sauce with butter and pork fat, and then removes it from the heat to infuse with a few sprigs of thyme for about twenty minutes. Voila! That’s the sauce for the finished plate.
Another component is pork confit, made by curing shoulder and other odds-and-ends of the pig, and covering the meat in rendered soft fat. The cured meat is roasted slowly at a very low temperature until falling apart. De Brito then shreds the meat and covers it in more fat for preservation, and stores it in a container for weeks, as needed. To serve the confit, de Brito shapes small discs of confit called crepinettes, and wraps them in caul fat, the lining of the pig’s intestines. He sears them to order along with pieces of the pork belly.
Photo by Tom McGovern
Finally, there is lardo, made from the layer of fat between the skin and the loin, called hard fat. De Brito cleans the hard fat and cuts it into two pound blocks, which he rubs with salt, rosemary, and black peppercorn. He wraps the blocks in plastic and stores them in a lightless bin in the walk-in refrigerator, where the blocks are aged for a minimum of six months to build flavor, being flipped every two months. When the blocks are done, de Brito washes them, lets them dry for four days, and then hangs them, wrapped in cheesecloth. For service, de Brito puts some of the lardo in the freezer so it is easy to cut into thin slices to drape across the pork. The heat lamp on the pass-through from the kitchen to the dining room is all it takes to provide the melting each slice needs for service.
Photo by Tom McGovern
The Components
Photo by Tom McGovern
The Plate
What drives a chef to devote such an enormous amount of time to a single plate of food? In this case, to honor the life of the pig. In part that means not wasting a thing. “An animal is not only a belly and a tenderloin,” de Brito says. “I strongly believe that I should do my hardest to use everything.” It also means creating the best product he can so that the pig’s death is put to the highest purpose. When de Brito first considered how to tackle the surplus of unpopular parts of the pig, he thought of turning them all into sausage, where no one would know the difference. But, de Brito ultimately decided that would be “unfair to the pig.” Instead, he set out to create a dish that would show proper respect for the pig.
To that end, it helps that de Brito and his staff are so skilled. When it comes to culinary expertise, de Brito’s decades of study and experience have yielded a chef who can run circles around much of today’s younger guard. “Jose is a naturally gifted, passionate chef whose love of the profession makes him a rarity in our industry,” says Patrick O’Connell of The Inn at Little Washington. Indeed, not every chef has de Brito’s passion for classical cooking methods. “I am so attached to old fashioned preservation and ways to make the most disliked cut attractive because I am amazed of the smartness and skills of chefs of the past, who have more than thousands of ways to make each last cut tasty and usable,” the French native says. “Those skills are now either forgotten or badly used, but I keep them as alive as I can.”
And yet, in the case of “Autumn Olive Farms’ Heritage Pork, Prepared Nose to Tail,” the purpose of de Brito’s application of those skills to the pig is not to mask its flavor. Rather, it is the opposite: slowly coax out the essence of an Autumn Olive Farms pig. Look closely at de Brito’s process for making the dish and, among occasional gentle seasonings and aromatics, you will find that the primary ingredient is time. More than forty-eight hours for petit salé. Twelve hours to sous vide the belly. Several days to reduce broth to demi glace de cochon. Weeks to age the confit. Months to age the lardo. All of this time works gradually to evoke and concentrate the flavor of the pork.
In the end, on the plate is a pork chop (or loin), a piece of pork belly, blood sausage terrine, confit crepinette, and draped across the top, lardo. Richness-cutting acid comes from garnishes of apple puree, braised apple and onion agrodolce. And, perhaps most importantly of all, de Brito says, is the generous pool of sauce. “A good dish is the marriage of different ingredients,” says de Brito, “and the bonding in this marriage is the sauce.”
Photo by Tom McGovern
The result is a lesson for diners who usually eat just a fraction of a pig. Here is a dish that, out of respect for the pig and the Trainums’ care for it, uses almost every part of the pig. And, thanks to de Brito, the dish is extraordinary. “Jose and his team have the drive and talent to make the forgotten odds and ends of the pig taste every bit as good as the center chop,” says Helleberg. “That gives us the best chance to utilize the whole pig just as it is raised on the farm, and to be part of a sustainable and rewarding process.”
So, if you go to Fleurie for the dish, when the plate emerges from the kitchen and is placed before you, before digging in, pause for a moment of gratitude. Thank de Brito and his staff. Thank Helleberg. And, the Trainums, too. And, most of all, like they all have done through their work, thank the pig.
