„Acorn fattening - years ago“

„Acorn fattening - years ago“

Publicado el 20/11/2020
„Acorn fattening - years ago“

„Acorn fattening - years ago“, told by Manuel Duque Álvarez (member of the family who owned the Dehesa San Francisco before)

All Saint’s Day, the 1st of November, on my family’s farm, we used to form herds of about 60 pigs each and a swineherd who would guide them through the dehesa to eat acorns from the holm, cork and Portuguese oaks. Each herd had its sleeping place in a hut and an assigned area which they were not allowed to trespass. There were severe conflicts among the swineherds when of them invaded the other’s area. Goro, the foreman, had forbidden to let the pigs out of the huts before 10 o’clock in the morning since they were close together in the small huts what kept them warm. If they had left their huts too early, they could have caught a cold and in those times, there was no vaccine for pneumonia.

With a very, very long wooden stick at the end of which another shorter stick was fixed, they would beat the acorns out of the trees https://www.fundacionmontemediterraneo.com/es/p/galeria-de-videos#Video-1 – today, I guess, this is forbidden by the Nature Conservation Authority. The long stick, as well as the short one had special names: : “la zurriaguera” and “el trangallo”.

Times were different and they way to approach life too: now days, unthinkable! One swineherd for 60 pigs. Today the herds consist of 150 animals and one single person attends 600 pigs!

 

 

The pigs were weighed on a steelyard (roman type: statera romāna) and it took a whole week to weigh the whole herd: it started with sunrise and ended by noon – when the pigs started defecating. During the weighing, “migas” [fried breadcrumbs with garlic, sausage or bacon, etc.] were prepared in a big pot like pan [perol] on the open fire and was eaten according to the principle “take a spoon full and step back”.

 

Some pigs would weigh up to 22 or 23 @ [old measure to weigh acorn fattened Ibérico pigs: 1 @ = 11,5 kg] and had been eating lupine fruit during the summer. They would eat it greedily and then become thirsty and drink a lot of water which should widen their stomach so they would be able to eat a lot of acorns later – this, at least, was the current belief in those times. For the last fattening period, work crews of women would collect acorns – supervised by a foreman [manijero].

 

All this would not be economical now days and a ham with 25 kilos with much too much fat would not be marketable.

 

 

 

 

On the photos, you can see the father - Manuel Duque Calderón - and his foreman, Goro Gonzälez.



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