Our ancestors considered the pig a cult animal, to use modern parlance. Among the reasons ethnographers suggest are nutrition, the absence of wastes, and quite a witty desire to hurt the unfaithful. Fatback has been the most-revered delicacy for Ukrainians. Have we changed our preferences today? And can one claim that fatback is something more than a foodstuff?
The ukraine.ru site has recently conducted an interesting survey among Ukrainians as to what they themselves consider their national symbol. The results were quite predictable: first come the anthem and the flag (10%), then wheat and bread (8.5%), language and song (5.1%). Only a narrow margin (2.8%) agreed that fatback could be put on the list of national symbols. Yet, this result is in line with the viewpoint of ethnographers. For they claim that fatback is just a superficial ethnic symbol for Ukrainians, rather than one fostered by history and the collective subconscious. We are doing our best to keep this symbol afloat, which is additional proof of our quest for national identity. At the same time, a poll conducted by the Democratic Circle Center showed that only one out of thirty five Ukrainians associates his country with fatback, by contrast with the residents of former Soviet republics. According to the survey, the latter’s vision of present-day Ukraine is based on Taras Shevchenko, soccer club Dynamo, and fatback.
An all-out effort is being made inside Ukraine to support the edible symbol. Suffice it to recall People’s Deputy Serhiy Teriokhin’s tongue-in-cheek half-joking proposal that a law on fatback be adopted. This proposal was immediately trumpeted by the Russian media which quoted the deputy as saying that fatback was Ukraine’s strategic resource and anyone who maltreats it should be punished severely. A no less interesting story evolved around such a gem of Ukrainian cuisine as chocolate-coated fatback. A Lviv cafe’s attempt to introduce this dish was dubbed unprecedented because they were the first to try to put a popular joke into practice.
Our forefathers would only have laughed at this, says Lydia Artiukh, senior research associate at the Institute of Ethnography.
On the other hand, they did not, in principle, mind resorting to irony on their own weakness for this product. Otherwise, they could not have composed a limerick saying, “I whet my lips with fatback and forgot to wipe it off, so boys will kiss me till I die.” Fatback was also part of some rites. For example, it is known that marriage parties in Volyn Polissia prescribed that the newlyweds be led around a wooden barrel with bread, salt, and a piece of fatback on top.
The common perception was that only in this case a marriage will be happy and the newlyweds’ home be full of everything. The secret of the magic lay not so much in the product’s caloric content (a yardstick to gauge the extent to which a household was well-off) as in its cult status. However, ethnographers are still in two minds over what brought about this cult: Ukrainian mythology, oddly enough, associates the pig with the evil spirit.
Some put all the blame on Muslims or, to be more exact, on Cossacks’ eagerness to outrage the former by eating a foodstuff tabooed by the Prophet Mohammed’s followers. Unlike the Russians, the Ukrainians were indifferent to beef, considering it wasteful (containing too many uneatable parts) and tasteless food.
Slaughtering a pig was a true feast for a peasant. Although any household master was able to commit this act, an experienced specialist was invited to conduct the ceremony. Moreover, the butcher was a symbolic figure: to keep his professional purity unblemished, he was strictly forbidden to flay dead cattle and kill “unclean,” i.e., inedible, animals. According to Ms. Artiukh, this care was brought on by the fact that the feast was not held very often. In spite of all the Ukrainian gastronomic predilections, pigs were slaughtered three times a year at most. What kept peasants from doing this more often was strict observance of fasts which covered almost half the calendar year.
Had it not been for religion, pork would have far more often appeared on Ukrainian tables — first of all because it leaves no waste. Yet, history traces a certain hierarchy of pork dishes. For example, fatback was an indisputable leader: it was usually cut into squares and cut on top, salted down so-called bodni-salnytsi (large wooden or clay vessels). This actually played the role of canned meat, which helped restore balance in the human body weakened by fasts.
Next on the list of Ukrainian peasants’ priorities comes sausage, including blood sausage. Ethnographers say these were cooked with great pleasure, fried in a pan, roasted in the oven, and seasoned with various spices, including, by all means, garlic. What would have surprised our contemporaries was the cool attitude toward pork as such. It was usually bought piecemeal at a fair on the eve of a major holiday. There were very rare instances when pork was left for domestic use after a pig had been killed. For example, small quantities of this meat might have been used in the season of fieldwork, when peasants required heavier meals. In such cases, Western Ukrainians would smoke pork, as did the Czechs, Belarusians, Poles, and Hungarians, while residents of other regions simply salted it away.
Interestingly, today’s diet specialists believe that the supposedly unhealthy nourishment of Ukrainians was almost correct. Despite consuming a large quantity of fat, they stuck to an otherwise sound diet. It is common knowledge that, to avoid hardening of the arteries and other cholesterol-related diseases, one must eat fatty food together with antioxidants. Fatback always came out on the table “in the company of” onions, garlic, cucumbers, and pickled cabbage. Doctors claim that, naturally or accidentally, precisely these items are the strongest antioxidants. Therefore, consuming these together with the arachidonic acid which is part of fatback and an irreplaceable element of the body’s life cycle, the Ukrainians led quite a wholesome way of life.
On the other hand, many consider now that fatback will soon cease to be part of the Ukrainian diet. Valentyn Mordkhilevych, manager of the Hostyny Dvir Restaurant, claims that prestigious restaurants of the world have not served high-fat dishes, let alone fatback as such, for a long time now. The idea is clear: nobody needs too much cholesterol. Yet, none of Hostyny Dvir’s distinguished foreign guests has so far refused to partake of bread-and-fatback, Ukraine’s national sandwich. On the contrary, they say that now that they have tasted this Ukrainian gastronomic invention, they will perhaps prefer it henceforth to the cult of Pepsi.
