The smell of pork in the morning

By Todd Stadler · Wednesday, December 10, 2008 11:40pm

I woke up yesterday morning smelling pork.

Not in the sense that I had just had a dream about pork, and the imagined smell was still lingering in my nostrils — although that would be just fine.

No, our house apparently still smelled like pork from the previous night's red beans and rice. Or, as I suggest we more appropriately call that particular recipe, "two-kinds pork and rice, oh, and also red beans".

You see, like all good red-beans-and-rice recipes, this one called for one or two (and therefore two) smoked ham hocks.

Now, if you don't know what a ham hock is, I will refer you to the Wikipedia entry on same. If however, you simply don't like the idea of a ham hock, whether because it's gristly or merely because you, like many Americans, prefer your meat to be as abstracted from the idea of any particular animal part as possible, well ... I can't really help you. Ham hocks add some mighty tasty flavor.

But these ham hocks were remarkably meaty, in addition to being tasty. And on top of that (literally?) we added some smoked Andouille sausage. I, as they say, gua-ron-tee!

All of which, perhaps, explains the many pork particles (would those be bac-ons?) floating around the house this morning, including into my nose.

But here's what struck me as odd: I'd been breathing los puercos aires (as the Spanish say, or ought to) all night long. You'd think that, as happens with any smell one is exposed to over a long time, my brain would have become accustomed to the smell, as it eventually did after I'd been awake for a while.

This caused me to wonder if the brain's ability to block out constant, background smells is mainly a function of the conscious mind, and if so, what that means about what we smell and what there is to be smelled.

I'd ponder more about this, except that, in talking it over with Julia, she suggests a much simpler mechanism: she'd gotten up earlier than I did and had opened the bedroom door, allowing the porkier air to flow, according to the principle of equilibrium, into our relatively pork-free room. As such, I may not have been breathing in le parfum de porc all night. Oh well.

But can I note that this isn't the first blog entry I've done about the smell of pork products?