The aperitif had just been abruptly interrupted for a rather incongruous reason. “We shot a wild boar!” », exclaimed my friend Bastien as he parked his 4 x 4 at the edge of a small mountain road, just in front of the village house in which I had come to spend a week’s vacation, in Haute-Corse . It was around August 15 and, on the island, the hunting season had just opened. For several days already, rifle shots had been disturbing the silence of the maquis and we could hear their loud booms thundering here and there, at irregular intervals.
Out of curiosity, I temporarily abandoned my glass of pastis and my slices of lonzu to go and observe the beast more closely. She was lying with her paws in the air, stretched out on a tarpaulin, right in the trunk of the all-terrain vehicle; a large hole located where the heart was made me say – out of pure awareness – that death must have been quick, that the suffering was brief. A few hands were then responsible for transporting the brown mass inside the old building and, with the help of oilcloths, the kitchen was summarily converted into a real little artisanal butchery laboratory. In the space of thirty minutes, the nearly 80 kilo boar was quickly gutted and then dismembered.
Using a marrazzu (the name given to butcher’s leaf, in Corsica), someone worked to cut the animal into different pieces: the legs, the shoulders and the ribs. Finally, most of the carcass was wrapped in bags and left to cool in a large fridge. Two days later, after it was verified that the meat was indeed fit for consumption, what remained of the wild ungulate was ready to be cooked. For dinner, my hosts were going to roast a few pieces of loin in the oven for a long time with potatoes, bay leaves and wild oregano, before sprinkling everything with a delicious cooking juice. “From the maquis to the plate: we can’t do a shorter circuit than that”, Bastien pointed out to me quite rightly, as he tackled his first bite. It was the first time I tasted meat hunted by someone close to me.
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Back on the continent, the memory of this meal haunted me. I remembered the experience: surprisingly, the meat seemed relatively tender and juicy; moreover, I did not find it to have a particularly pronounced taste, as one might expect with game – the wild boar from Upper Corsica tasted like some of these farmed pigs, from rustic breeds, that it had already been given to me to taste. The dish resonated with me because, in my imagination, game meat still seemed reserved for an elite: that of the large ceremonial tables run by these chefs who know how to prepare and prepare it.
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