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Lincoln Café goes whole hog

By Nick Bergus

In the back of Lincoln Café’s kitchen, two men stand hunched over half of a 250-pound pig carcass. It was gutted, washed and split, from snout to tail, perfectly down the middle, then wrapped in plastic before delivery to the Mount Vernon restaurant.

Now, the two men deliberately dismantle the pig with knives and saws. Occasionally they pause to double-check where a cut should be.

“Do I cut before or after the third rib?”

“Through the third rib.”

The scene is one that doesn’t happen in many restaurants; they just don’t have cooks with the time, desire or skill. But every couple of months at the Lincoln Café, chef and owner Matt Steigerwald and his sous chef Andy Schumacher break down a whole hog.

“It’s one way a restaurant like mine, that doesn’t have a million dollars, can play with ingredients,” says Steigerwald.

(Here's a slideshow of their process.)

Despite being in small-town Mount Vernon, the 8-year-old café is certainly no secret. On weekends, getting one of the couple dozen tables without a wait takes some luck (or calling ahead to put your name on the waiting list).

Lincoln Café serves diner fare, but all the fuss is really about just a handful of dishes. Usually three featured entrees and an appetizer during dinner hours, written on a chalk board hanging on the wall, changing every couple of weeks and focusing on seasonal, local ingredients.

“We have a ton of not very expensive, beautiful products right in our backyard,” says Steigerwald. In Iowa, that backyard includes a lot of pork and Steigerwald knows what to do with it. Not that pork is the restaurant’s focus; nor is it the chef’s favorite food to eat (that would be traditional chicken breeds) or to cook (that would be fish).
But breaking down and figuring out what to do with an entire pig offers him and his staff the opportunity to experiment. A whole hog comes with all sorts of pork bits such as cheeks, livers and trotters, that, as odd as it may sound, are hard to buy any other way.

“And it’s really fun,” said Schumacher.

It tastes good, too. Today’s pig was a cross of two older, fattier breeds — Duroc and Berkshire — built to survive outdoors instead of rapidly gain lean muscle (like most of Iowa’s hog lot stock). As Steigerwald and Schumacher break down the pig they start thinking about what to do with it. They’ll use the fat from around the kidneys to cover the prosciutto they made from the first whole hog they bought while it finishes curing. Schumacher wants the liver for pate. The thick fat along the back will become lardo, or cured fat. The loin, which runs along the spine, will become pork chops. The cheeks will become bacon-like guanciale. The scraps get used for sausage. Perhaps a confit with one side of the belly, bacon with the other.

Buying a whole pig is a way to get good pork pretty cheap (this one set him back $330), but it also forces Steigerwald to find uses for its myriad cuts. The ribs will be served as Chinese barbecue, but that leaves much of the hog. It will be cured so it doesn’t spoil,  a simple process that takes little more than salt, herbs and time.
Steigerwald has built a jury-rigged curing cave from a $300 refrigerator he bought off of Craigslist, fans and a humidifier. During my visit, the refrigerator was home to lardo and smokey chorizo, all wrapped in cheese cloth and hung by kitchen string.

These house-cured meats give Steigerwald the ability to serve his pig as more than just a pork chop. A diner at Lincoln Café might eat some cooked fresh pork, a little confit, a few slices of prosciutto and some guaciale, each preparation bringing something different to the plate.

Soon, Steigerwald and Schumacher plan to get the restaurant’s first whole calf. After practice with pigs, neither expects it to be too difficult.

“Once you do this,” says Schumacher, gesturing to the half-dismantled animal in front of him, “you could do a giraffe.”

“The problem,” added Steigerwald, “would be finding a place to hang its loin to cure.”