Razor Back, Arkansas, is home to my latest recipe, the Three Piggy Pork Sandwich. Orn Norville, a grizzled eighty-eight-year-old bachelor from the bogs of Razor Back, shared with me his secret recipe when I ran moonshine with him in the late 1990s. In addition to selling liquid fire, Norville also hunted wild pigs and sold the pork to local markets in Polk County. I’m sharing this recipe because Orn is no longer with us. He was gouged to death last year by a wild boar.

For poor Orn, being bored to death brought new meaning.

Orn was an intriguing character with eyes the color of mud and long, greasy, paper-white hair. Not that Orn was an unclean man; quite the contrary. He bathed regularly in Poopot Swamp. His least attractive feature, however, was his hair. When he skinned the boars he shot, Orn liked to scrape the fat from their hides and fashion a kind of hair gel made of pure hog fat mixed with a little swamp water. He combed it with care through his long, white strands. He said it made him look sexy.

You can imagine the kind of women hog fat attracted.

But I liked old Orn. He never judged anybody and would give you the hog’s hair off his back. (He only had one shirt.) The little bitty pig curls growing in spotty patches really did look like hog’s hair, and he once tried to get me to grease them.

“When pigs fly!” I squealed.

Under his coarse exterior, Orn had a compassionate characteristic that swam with the booze in his veins. One night, as we sipped moonshine fresh from the still, Orn, out of the blue, blamed his mother for his being a bachelor. As a child, he said, she would often recite the tale of the Three Little Pigs. Sometimes two or three readings a night, he said.

He thought that was the most terrible tale ever told.

But Orn never heard the true version of the story. His mother, a little touched in the head, changed the narrative. Her account involved three brick houses, to keep all the pigs safe, and an old, gray, asthmatic wolf that smoked cigars, drank gin, and wheezed when he breathed. Orn thought it was completely callous that the three little pigs never let that sickly wolf into their homes. The little porkers should’ve welcomed him with open pigs’ feet for gin and tonic and an inhaler, he thought. Instead, he said, that poor wolf had to huff and puff and hack and wheeze to try and get in.

Orn said he’d often cry during his mother’s recitation because he thought that surely the wolf would suffer lung collapse. He despised those little pigs for that. I guess that’s why he grew up peeling pig hides for a living.

As for women, well, he never wanted to hear the story of the Three Little Pigs again. And since his mother recited the account religiously, he thought all women did. Yeah, he was a little twisted in that sense, definitely his mother’s son.

But there’s no twisting this recipe. It’s good.

And if you don’t like it, you can huff and puff…

Three Piggy Pork Sandwich

1 pound pork roast (cooked)

3 cups shredded cabbage

1/3 cup sugar

1/2 cup mayonnaise

Italian salad dressing

2-3 hoagie rolls

butter

My leftover pork came from a chunk of meat I cooked in the crock pot the night before. If that’s the route you want to go, simply put your pork in a crock pot with a couple cups of water, cover and cook on medium heat for eight or nine hours or overnight. Or you can bake the roast by placing the pork in a roasting pan with two or three cups of water. Cover and bake at 350 degrees for 2 ½-3 hours or until juices run clear when roast is poked. Once the meat is cooked, remove from heat and let cool.

Meanwhile, add cabbage to a large mixing bowl. The easiest way to get shredded cabbage is to buzz down to the supermarket and head to the produce section. There you should find shredded cabbage packaged for coleslaw. Or, if you’re up for it, shred your own. Either way, once your cabbage is in the bowl, sprinkle the sugar evenly over top, cover with plastic wrap, and put it in the fridge for about two hours to allow the sugar to melt through the cabbage.

Now, if your roast is cool enough, with your fingers or a fork, pull off enough meat for two or three sandwiches and put it in a small mixing bowl. Pour enough Italian dressing in the bowl to coat the meat well when stirred. Cover and refrigerate for about an hour as well. When the cabbage is ready, add mayonnaise, mix well, and return to the fridge. After draining excess dressing from the meat, place it in a frying pan and warm through. Butter both sides of a roll and broil or brown in pan. Add meat, top with coleslaw and enjoy!