Pranzo col maiale (lunch with the pig)

It’s not often that you have lunch with a pig, at least not one that is part of what’s on your plate. But Jessica has a pet pig. It all started with Davide, one of the best teachers at the school who has, alas, moved on to other things. In any case Davide introduced me to Jessica who was very interested in having “tandem” meetings. A tandem in this case is an arrangement in which two people with different mother tongues help each other learn a language, so in this case it was an Italian-English tandem. So in the course of 3 or 4 meetings with Jessica I heard about the pig. I was intrigued. Not only that, it’s no little bitty pig the size of a spaniel or something but a pretty substantial pig. She lives somewhere roughly 20 km from Bologna with her mother so they have the luxury of a stand-alone house (villetta) complete with yard and garden. The pig is house trained and doesn’t make a mess inside. So the last day that I was in Bologna I met Davide near Porta Saragozza and he drove us to lunch. So for lunch there were the 3 of us (Davide, Jessica and me) plus Jessica’s mother, and three other friends of theirs.

Jessica fixed a fantastic meal, all vegetarian: couscous, eggplant, zucchini, boiled eggs, grilled polenta, nice ripe tomatoes and some other kind of bread thingie that I have no idea what it is called. It has unfortunately become mosquito season but they seemed to like Davide better than me so I made sure that he was sitting next to me as mosquito bait.

One side miscellaneous note, that evening was the soccer match between Italy and England in the European championship. Somewhat surprisingly Italy trounced England. I saw part of the match at dinner but wanted to go to bed. Still there was no doubt about when Italy scored another two goals. The neighbors were watching and they were very vocal about the goals.

And, oh yes, the pig.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2012 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Culture, Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.