Here's a dish you may have seen in films. The sort of film that features a damsel in distress and a hero swashbuckling his way to her heart. The couple hold a wedding banquet at the castle and there, amid flickering torches and goblets the size of football trophies, is the centrepiece of the feast: a suckling pig.
You might not want to reconstruct a knight-in-armour rescue fantasy but if you're in Spain, you could indulge in suckling pig. There's nowhere better to do it than the ancient city of Segovia, an hour's drive north of Madrid.
As a tourist in Segovia, you can hardly move for asadores (rough translation: "roasting house"). But to enter any old asador is to overlook the rule that tourist trap equals bad food; and a bad pig is one where "suckling" doesn't mean "succulent", or one with so much sub-cutaneous fat that it looks in need of liposuction.
If you must indulge, look out for the marca at restaurants and branded on the pigs themselves. Just like champagne or Parma ham, Segovia suckling pig has to be certified authentic. The marca is applied by a board of 110 farmers, abattoirs, butchers and restaurants, and sets out strict criteria for how each piglet should be fed, killed, stored and cooked.
My guide to the farm-to-table process was board manager José Ramon Marinero, who drove us to a farm run by Manuel Genique. On the way, I raised the uneasy question of the piglets being slaughtered at a mere three weeks old.
"Yes, it's cruel," he admitted. "It hurts to separate them from their mothers." But, he added, suckling pig had existed for centuries in Spain, long before the emergence of modern concerns over animal welfare.
Genique's farm is a business inherited from his father and grandfather. On arrival, I changed into wellies and boiler suit to protect my civvies as we squelched around the mud-and-manure-spattered barns of squealing sows and piglets.
Only 40-odd farms are certified to rear authentic suckling pig, all of them in Segovia province. Like the others, Genique adheres to the marca's exacting stipulations that the sows be fed only cereals; that the piglets be fed only mothers' milk; that they be slaughtered at three weeks; and that their gutted carcases weigh no more or no less than 3.8kg to 5.8kg.
After the piglets reach the fateful age of three weeks, the quality control continues to ensure they are delivered from farm to abbatoir within a few hours and from slaughter to kitchen within six days.
For all this monitoring, the way the pigs are reared is a far cry from free-range. The mothers are hemmed into pens, with fore and aft space only a matter of inches; under their snouts are their feed troughs; at their rears are the manure chuts. The piglets - born 15 to 20 to a litter - can be crushed to death if their mothers inadvertently sit on them.
Genique was matter-of-fact about such deaths as he picked up a piglet corpse by its rear trotters and disposed of it. Those that avoid being crushed can starve to death if they don't manage to claim a teat - each sow has 12 or 14: not always enough for all her piglets.
I started to regret having come. Here I was, balkingat the cramped, manure-smeared pens and the cruelty of taking three-week-old piglets from their mothers - and even worse, I was scheduled to taste the meat of these mothers' babies.
A couple of hours after visiting the farm, I was shown the kitchens of Restaurante José Maria in Segovia, one of only 14 restaurants authorised to serve authentic suckling pig. All 14 are in and around Segovia: even in Madrid the suckling pig is not of the certified variety. José Maria Ruiz, its owner and president of the suckling pig board, is a formidable man.
Ruiz showed me the oven in which our lunch was to be cooked. Inside, on a shelf exposed to the wood fire below, were the piglets I'd been cooing over only hours earlier, their snouts facing me and their front trotters drooping. Laid out on a rotating platform, they take four-and-a-half hours to be fully roasted. And tradition dictates that true Segovia suckling pig be seasoned only with salt and water, Ruiz told me: no herbs, no spices and certainly no apple in the mouth.
Another tradition is the ritual serving-up of the cooked suckling pig. For this, Ruiz donned ceremonial chains resembling those of a small-town mayor and demonstrated the legendary ability to carve the piglet with nothing more than the edge of a china plate. The crackling should be crisp and light, and the flesh so white and tender that it falls apart at a chop from the plate.
The moment of tasting arrived. By way of comparison, Ruiz presented another, non-certified piglet, cooked the same way but not reared to the exacting standards laid down by his board. It had darker skin and pinker flesh, and was a little chewier and greasier. But I'm no expert taster and it was hardly sub-standard.
And the certified, authentic suckling pig? Given my squeamishness, I feel like a total hypocrite for tasting it but am forced to admit it was pretty good. But I won't have it again.
Suckling pig is a hearty, age-old, carnivorous indulgence. If you're after that medieval banquet taste, remember that attitudes to pig welfare are pretty medieval too.
There could be one tiny consolation for the ethically conscious consumer: being reared, slaughtered, cooked and eaten all in the same province means that at least Segovia suckling pig clocks up few food miles.
