Buying pork

Well, it took us about 8 months, but we have finally been to a butcher here in Musoma! We usually send our househelp to buy beef for us (and we come home to it beautifully cubed or ground and stored in 1kg bags in the freezer J) but pork is harder to buy as it is more expensive and less places sell it. In view of the general lack of knowledge of how to buy pork in Musoma, Danny offered to take us all to a good butcher that he knows, and then to show us how to butcher it properly and cook a pork vindaloo from scratch. This meant an early start (for Saturday), arriving at the butcher’s for 8am in order to get there in time to get a good pick of the meat available. Usually the inspector comes round this time as well, and inspects the innards for healthiness before the owners can legally sell them. Since he was late today, and we weren’t interested in the innards at all, we didn’t get to meet him or see him do his inspection, but maybe I will some other day. We arrived to find the pig already slaughtered (which was fine, since I had no wish to see it die) and its head sitting on top of the corrugated iron sheet covering the pen holding the live pigs. The guys were removing the hair from the unlucky pig, and we watched as they also removed all the innards and the trotters. We decided that we would buy the whole thing (110,000Tsh for a young pig, about 17k of meat/bone once skinned) and carted it off back to Danny’s house for carving up. A couple of hours later, we had learnt the basics of skinning and neatly butchering a pig, though of course I’m sure it isn’t as easy to do first time as Danny made it look! We had also watched him make the vindaloo paste from scratch, and after 6 hours of butchering and cooking we sat down to a wonderfully tender pork vindaloo.