The drying of sweet chestnuts coincided with the preparation of the pork-butchery. In each Corsica family,

around Christmas, one put at dead the pig that one had just fattened with sweet chestnuts. When the animal was bled, one made it flame on a bed of ferns dry in order to remove it from his silks. The pork-butchery was prepared as one prepares it everywhere but with some differences: dry grapes were added to the roll; wine in which had macerated a peeled head of garlic was added to the preparation of sausage of liver, the “
figatellu”. The nets and the sirloins, salted, peppered rubbed rosemary, were carefully tied up in bowels: it was the “
Lonzi” and "
Cope”. The hams remained three weeks in the salting tub then were washed with wine, were covered with pepper and were suspended by the leg, which one never cut, and without being wrapped in linens as one can do it in other areas of France. Sausages, figatelli, sausages, lonzi, coppe, hams, hung with bars in a corner of the drier or the kitchen, where there was not other heating that wood fire of the chimney, and all the pork-butchery was thus smoked and took a taste which it does not have nowhere elsewhere, more especially as the pigs, having lived in freedom in the maquis until the gathering of sweet chestnuts, their meat was tasty and did not have excess of grease.
In all this set of pork-butchery, a good piece of “
figatellu” piqué in a pin (U spetu) and roast above embers, was a true delight. It was turned and one turned over it until it is well roasted but one avoided letting run his grease on fire, one tightened it between two bread sections which soaked thus with juice and hot grease progressively with cooking.


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