… and call it Cochon de lait rôti. Put a mouth on that green apple and call it Le fils de l’homme. Mash them together in a nightmare and you get today’s Bizarro strip, a Wayno Psychiatrist cartoon that’s a re-play of an earlier Bizarro, but with the dream figure of William Tell’s son (with an apple on his head) replaced by a roasted wild boar (with an apple in its mouth):
(#1) Surrealist René Magritte’s Son of Man on the therapist’s couch (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
Two things here: apples in the mouths of roasted pigs (as in the patient’s nightmare); and the previous Bizarro strip (from 2022), with the same patient and the same therapist (a caricature of the artist Magritte), positioned differently in the strip, and suffering from dramatically different nightmares.
M. Magritte, it was the foul mouth of a gigantic boar. (but: Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound) Roasted pig — unfortunately treyf, but unquestionably crunchalicious. Very young piglets can be roasted whole in an ordinary oven; adult pigs — including wild boars — can be slowly spit-roasted over hot coals. The final flourish of serving the roast pig on a platter with a red apple in its mouth reportedly goes back hundreds of years in Europe and the US, though I haven’t been able to unearth the historical details.
In any case, we get, first, roast suckling pig. Briefly, from Wikipedia:
A suckling pig is a piglet fed on its mother’s milk (i.e., a piglet which is still a “suckling”). In culinary contexts, a suckling pig is slaughtered between the ages of two and six weeks. It is traditionally cooked whole, often roasted, in various cuisines. It is usually prepared for special occasions and gatherings.
No mention of apples in mouths. But turn now to the New York Times Cooking site on “Whole Roast Suckling Pig” (by Gabrielle Hamilton), with this illustration of the oven-roasted product (the actual recipe requires a subscription, so I can show you only the site’s come-ons), complete with apple:
(#2) A textural porcine still life, with fruit, nuts, and red wine (NYT photo by Sarah Anne Ward)
The NYT‘s exaltation of this meal:
A whole roast suckling pig is quite special. No other feast food of the holiday season cooks so easily, and presents so majestically. With its mahogany, crisp skin and its sticky-tender meat, people thrill to be at the party where this is on the buffet.
You don’t see the verb thrill very often, even in food writing (ok, it’s routine in sports reporting).
Wild boar roasting on an open fire. You can do the whole roasted pig thing with adult porkers, but they’re way too big to fit in an ordinary home oven. And they require long, slow roasting to yield tender meat. What they need is hours of spit-roasting over hot coals, as here:
(#3) A pig roasting on a rotating spit (Wikipedia photo)
There are American sources of farm-bred boars, or you can hunt down and dress wild boar yourself (note: the noun boar has alternative plural forms).
In any case, when a spit-roasted pig is done cooking, you plonk it down on a big plank — with an apple in its mouth, if that’s your fancy — for carving.
The 2022 Bizarro. From my 10/13/22 posting “Apple men”:
The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon for 10/11 — Wayno’s title: “Surrealism Syndrome” — brings together the green apple of Magritte’s Son of Man with the apple William Tell legendarily shot off the head of his son Walter:
(#4) Yet another Bizarro Psychiatrist cartoon; the therapist is Wayno’s caricature of the surrealist artist René Magritte
Compare this to #1: the images are close variants of one another, but the nightmares (and thus the text in the patient’s speech bubble) are quite different: the WilliamTell legend in 2022, spit-roasting today; apple on the head in 2022, apple in the mouth today.
A personal bonus. Gratifyingly, the William Tell legend and spit-roasting represent two AMZ themes: Swissness (Helveticality?) and queerness (specifically celebrating male-male sex). William Tell is a legendary Swiss folk hero, and gay spit-roasting is a three-man sex act (in which a man is pronged by one guy while fellating another; the metaphor in the name is to the spitroasting of meat — pork, lamb, beef, chicken). By great good fortune, I happen to be wearing my Swiss flag gym shorts and my aggressively DEI t-shirt. I know, I know, I should get myself one of these TeePublic shirts:
(#5) I like it spit roasted shirt designed by JasonLloyd; it comes in many colors, here’s hot pink
March 23, 2025 at 6:04 am |
My college chorus went on an Asian tour during the summer of 1967, which included nearly three weeks in the Philippines, where we were guests at a number of outdoor festivities that featured pit-roasted suckling pig – enough repetitions of same that we actually grew a bit tired of it. (I haven’t encountered it since, as far as I can recall.)
March 23, 2025 at 7:17 am |
Well, they were treating you to their greatest celebratory feast. But of course it’s easy to have too much of a good thing.