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| Pork butchering. | |||||||||||||
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Winter's first cold
snap is the sign to start a tumbera: to kill the fattened
pig, to dissect it and transform it into the local "charcuterie"
or prepared meats: lonzu, coppa, figatelli,
salamis and hams. The old saying goes that everything in a
pig is good to eat, and during a tumbera, nothing is
wasted and everything is used. But there is ritual to be found
in the killing of pigs: the social rituals involved in working
with family and friends, of delegating tasks according to the
skills of each individual, and in sharing the feast. There are
also the cultural rituals involved in using ancient family recipes
and tools, and revolving around the transmission of know-how
from generation to generation. Today the rituals and tradition
of a tumbera are practically extinct in Pietracorbara,
but the photographs below, dating from the 80s, remain as souvenirs
of times and pigs gone by.
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Copyright dadonet for Petra Viva, Spring 2000
