The World Cup reminds us of the animal origins of football

Generations of American kids have been grossed out by the pig slaughter in Little House in the Big Woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s memoir of American pioneer life. It isn’t the killing, but her father removing the pig’s bladder, blowing it up and tying it like “a little white balloon” for them to play, “They could throw it in the air and spat it back and forth with their hands or it would bounce along the ground and they could kick it.”

Kids used to play with a pig’s urination organ? But the start of the World Cup is a reminder that pigs’ bladders were once in wide and varied use.

Their ability to expand and remain impermeable made them the ideal, flexible container of an age before plastic bags or aluminium tubes. Lard (pork fat) was purified by melting, straining and pouring it into bladders to harden. Jars of preserves were sealed with air-tight bladders.

Scientists used bladders to capture and study gases. Doctors used them to administer enemas. Ancient Greek athletes exercised with sand filled bladders. Carnival revellers blew them up like balloons, covering them with glitter.

Musicians used them in instruments like bagpipes. Artists stored paints in them. If flexible tubing had not been invented, we might be squeezing our toothpaste from pigs’ bladders.

Above all, bladders helped develop sports. Games that started with kids playing with bladders, like Wilder and her sisters, became formalised as football and rugby. Since bladders burst with too much rough handling, the balls were stitched together from leather, but a pig’s bladder still had to be blown up inside to give them the right shape.

American football, which borrowed its ball from rugby, still refers to them as pigskins.

Sourcing and processing pigs’ bladders for balls was hardly a pleasant business. Bladders that were used for culinary or other purposes where people were in close contact with them had to be carefully cleaned, inside and outside.

But with balls, where the bladder was enclosed in leather, less care was taken. Even clearly diseased ones could be used, as long as they were intact. Ballmakers realised that rubber bladders could be an alternative, but they were much firmer and harder to blow up, so they stuck with pig bladders.

It took a tragedy to change this. Richard Lindon was a shoemaker based in Rugby, England, where he made balls for the town’s famous school, which originated the game. The job of blowing up bladders was given to his wife Rebecca, who died from lung disease, possibly picked up from a diseased bladder.

This spurred Lindon to develop a brass pump that could blow up rubber bladders. Ultimately, this helped rubber become the norm.Pigs’ bladders are still used in cooking. Culatello di Zibello is a much-prized cured meat made in Parma, Italy, by stuffing a pork leg into a tight-fitting bladder that allows it to age without spoiling.

Perhaps the most famous use is the French dish of poulet en vessie, where a whole chicken is stuffed into a pig’s bladder along with truffles, foie gras and other rich ingredients.

The bladder is then tightly closed and boiled in broth. In Dirt, Bill Buford’s deep dive into French cooking, this symbolises how it takes something earthy (bladders, meat, mushrooms) and refines it with great skill.

Buford describes how, at the start, the bladder seems like “a small rubber sock, and appears too small to put the whole chicken in”. A lot of butter helps it happen.

When it is boiled, hot stock must be continually poured over it to prevent it from drying and bursting.

The bladder expands, alarmingly large: “It has the appearance of a beautifully golden, nearly translucent beach ball…” The meat cooks inside to perfect softness, in an incredibly rich, smooth sauce. Perhaps if France wins this World Cup, the team could celebrate with a banquet of bladders.

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