What's In Your Freezer?

If you go back and read the comments to my post on the Kenneth Maue book, and further back to my post on the 14 year old grapes that I baked into a pie, you'll find that the same person twice confessed to having a bat in her freezer.  

I have a pig tail in my freezer.  It's not the kind of pig tail that you see on cute little girls.

A couple of years ago, we bought a whole pig. The whole thing - snout to trotters. We got the pig from someone we know, and visited it while it was still standing. He had it slaughtered for us, we had a butcher cut it up, and some of it got smoked. It was a bargain, and it kept us in pig for a good while.

All of the porky goodness is long gone, save the tail. The tail is still in the freezer, nicely vacuum sealed into sturdy plastic, looking for all the world like a pig's tail.  I'm kind of loathe to part with it, but what the hell do you do with one pig tail?

The other day, I checked my many cookbooks. I was sorely disappointed that the 1953 Joy of Cooking doesn't even mention pig tails (especially since it does tell you how to skin a squirrel), and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall just glosses over them in The River Cottage Meat Book.

But, as one might expect from a book subtitled "Nose to Tail Eating", I hit the jackpot with a recipe for Crispy Pig's Tails in Fergus Henderson's The Whole Beast.  He waxes rhapsodic about the tail of the pig:

On other pages I have sung the praises of how the pig's snout and belly both have that special lip-sticking quality of fat and flesh merging, but this occurs in no part of the animal as wonderfully as on the tail. Like an ice cream on a stick, a pig's tail offers up all the above on a well-behaved set of bones.  By the by, dealing with any slightly hairy extremities of pig, I recommend a throwaway Bic razor (hot towels and shaving cream not required). You must ask your butcher for long tails.

The problem is, the recipe calls for "8 long pig's tails" to serve four people. To get eight tails, we'll need to buy seven more pigs.  We haven't got enough freezer space.