High on the Hog

I've gone to my farm in Kentucky for the weekend. It's a great place to relax, do a little hard physical labor, and forget about the rest of the world. If you don't have such a place, I highly suggest you get one.

In the meantime, here's a little something that I found for you to read with your morning coffee.

See you on Monday.

J. Peterman

From The Wall Street Journal:

Restaurants across the U.S. will at last be able to serve the world's best and costliest cold cut -- legally, that is -- for an expected $50 or so a plate.

Anyone with the time and the euros has been able to fly to Spain and taste jamon iberico de bellota, the aged, acorn-fed ham of black-footed pigs. But here in food-fearing America, official approval for this glistening, fat-streaked delicacy dragged on. At one Manhattan tapas bar, the owner offered contraband portions of bellota and even advertised the ham on his Web site -- until U.S. Customs nabbed one of those precious porcine back legs. That forced the owner to get in line with Mario Batali and other high-on-the-hog restaurateurs who await bellota's legal entry into the country as early as next week.

Early adopters who sent a deposit of $199 to Latienda.com, an Internet source for imported Spanish delicatessen, will be billed the balance of the approximate total charge of $1,500 for a single bellota ham. The Web shipper calculates that will work out to about $96 a pound, or $6 an ounce.

Eager for a taste, I paid a visit earlier this month to Casa Mono, Mr. Batali's inventive Manhattan tapas restaurant. Lacking the real thing, he apologetically served me the cured shoulder of a bellota porker, which became importable sooner than hams from the same animals. Bellota (Spanish for acorn) acquires its complex, profound flavor from the pigs' unusual diet as well as from the two to four years the hams are hung up to air-cure. (Unlike most American hams, bellota isn't smoked or subjected to heavy doses of salt to cure it.) But even the bellota shoulder "ham" was pretty fabulous, or at least fabulous enough to get Molto Mario to sniff it like fine wine.

Both of us had tasted back-leg bellota ham in Spain, and we knew it had an even more elegant texture than the shoulder (paleta in Spanish). But I didn't trust my memory going back several years to a heavenly ham moment in Seville. So to get a jump on the bellota bandwagon, I found a source for the real thing right here in North America -- in Canada, which legalized the importation a few weeks before its lumbering cousin to the south.

I flew to Toronto to check it out. There, on Yonge Street, said to be the longest street in the world, I found a minimal but baroquely ambitious and up-to-date place called Cava. Cava is the name given to champagne-process sparkling wine made in Spain. Cava the restaurant serves an imaginative array of foods inspired by the small-plate dishes one might find in a Spanish tapas bar. The menu proudly lists the essential item in the traditional tapas menu, jamon serrano, the brilliantly hearty mountain ham that has been available in the U.S. for many years now. But Cava also has begun serving bellota, though as an off-the-menu special because of difficulties with supply.

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