Cochon de lait — suckling pig

A few days ago I wrote about the first time I arrived in France, in December 1969. I was a college student. We flew from New York City to Paris and stayed in the Hôtel Monge in the 5th arrondissement. And the director of our study program, a native Belgian who was a French professor in the U.S., took us as a group to a restaurant where we were presented with a suckling pig, a cochon de lait, as our dinner.

I remember that eating the meat of that suckling pig reminded me of eating pork and pork barbecue in eastern North Carolina, though the cochon de lait was not cooked with a very spicy sauce. The meat was very tender and tasty. I knew at that instant that I was going to love French food and cooking.

Last week, one of our Saint-Aignan supermarkets included a full page in its weekly advertising booklet advertising cochon de lait for sale at special prices. The first three items on the special sale are a small ham (jambonnette,) a shoulder (épaule), and a crown roast (couronne) of suckling pig.

The ham and shoulder will each serve eight people, and the crown roast will serve six. Each comes with a "free" bottle of Bordeaux wine as part of the price, which is approximately 20 euros a kilogram. That would be about $12.00 U.S. a pound.

A little more surprising from an American point of view is the whole piglet (un porcelet — a pig is either a cochon or a porc) that you can get for the same price. It comes with four bottles of Bordeaux. The piglet weighs in at about six kilograms and will serve from 18 to 20 people. You are told to cook it in the oven for 1½ hours at something over 400ºF.

If you are not having dinner for 20, you can get a demi-porcelet — a half-piglet — for the same price per kilogram. It comes, of course, with two bottles of red Bordeaux wine.

My mother says she thinks the pork in France is especially good, and she has credentials — she has lived her whole life in the Carolinas, where people raise a lot of hogs and eat a lot of pork. I believe I read, though, that the French consume more pork per capita than people in any other country. With all the ham, sausages, pâtés, rillettes, and other charcuterie products people eat here, that wouldn't surprise me.

The Larousse Gastronomique food encyclopedia says a porcelet or cochon de lait is a two-month-old pig. The de lait part of the cochon de lait name indicates that the animal has only been fed its mother's milk (it's a suckling pig, and lait means milk). The encyclopedia says the cochon de lait is often served stuffed (with forcemeat), and is usually spit roasted, but can also be braised or poached.