All of the domesticated animals found in Seychelles were introduced during the colonial days. The pigs were reared by individual households and slaughtered at special occasions, including Easter, Xmas and New Year.
Old Abattoir at Grand’Anse Praslin Before Natural Reclamation
As a young boy, I lived next to an abattoir at Grand’Anse , then a small village on Praslin Island. The abattoir is on the far left in the old photo above. During the school holidays, I would wake up in the early hours of the morning to assist in the slaughtering of pigs. In those days, anybody could slaughter his or her own pig. The only requirement was the go ahead from the local health inspector or saniter and this was not hard to get especially if he was going to be rewarded by a piece of meat! My only reward, to which I really looked forward, was to get the pig’s bladder. In the absence of proper football, the bladder was a close alternative. It would be cleaned, pumped up, tied and voila, a perfect football that we would use for weeks.
Pork was sold commercially at Saturday markets and would be more or less all sold out by 8.00 am. The meat was one price irrespective of the cuts you were given. One did not have a choice of cuts in those days. The custom was to fatten the pig and get it as heavy as possible and hence better financial returns.
As mentioned earlier individual household had permission to slaughter their own pig and in my case this was a big event in my younger days. The day would be almost one of festivities. Neighbours, friends and relatives would gather together and have a fun day. There were a few events that rendered the day especially interesting.
The first event was getting the pig to the abattoir. This involved catching the pig, tying its legs and physically transporting the pig to the abattoir. The four legs would be tied together and a piece of solid timber pole would then be inserted between the legs and there would be one man in front and one at the back and the pole, usually made out of bamboo, placed on their shoulder. There was no vehicle then and this was the quickest way to transport the pig. This was usually done the day before because the grunts and squeals of the pig would wake up neighbours if the maneouvre was done in the morning.
The second was the making of the black pudding. The Creole cook throws away only what is not fit to eat or what is condemned by the health authority. As the islands are so isolated we had to make maximum use of any animal we slaughter. The black pudding or boudin is a very common dish in the Seychelles and the basic recipe of which will be described in one of the future posts.
The third event was the making of the pork crackling or graton .Graton is made from the rind of the pork to which some fat is still attached with a minimum presence of meat. The rind is cooked in its own fat until most of the fat is fried off. What made this event interesting was that it took place outside in the yard with everybody who came to help having a drink or playing dominoes until early evening. The preparation of the pork crackling will be described in a future post. As a young boy, we used to cook crackling outside in a big cast iron pot that would sit on trivet of three stones called a touk. We had to use a supersize spatula or paddle to stir the cracklings so that we would not get burnt by the splattering of hot fat.
The lack of refrigeration meant that the meat not consumed on the day of slaughter had to be salted. As the local pigs were usually very fat, some of the fat would not be salted, but smoked into what we would term lard, although it was not the true lard. The smoking was usually done by hanging the fat ,which was cut into small strips, about 2 meters over the hearth . The smoke created by the daily cooking on the hearth would gradually cure the fat. It would be eaten with boiled or roasted breadfruit and used to flavour lentils.
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