Question: Re: Salvaging Meat

It is most likely the pig would be charred but not cooked and so pretty much recoverable after you scraped the char off. But if it lay in some deep smoldering ashes for a few hours it might be cooked. The main risk IMHO would be the fecal tract but if cooked it would be nasty not toxic and would not effect much of the actual meat.

Veinglory is probably mostly right, but another consideration is the size of the animal. A large hog caught in a barn fire probably would be charred on the outside and raw on the inside. A small pig might get cooked through. A piglet might get charred all through.

And keep in mind that uncooked guts rot through in a matter of hours, and even quicker when the outside is charred and there is no way the pig corpse will cool quickly but the bacteria still gets to have a free for all.

At the least, by the time someone went to gut the pig the intestines and stomach would be a bit bloated/fermented. If the butcher is distraught or inexperienced he'd puncture the gut and release a nasty smell along with a fart like noise. If the animal is oriented well, he may not spill any injesta or fecal material, or at least not much.

You could probably salvage the hind legs and forelegs fairly safely after the remains of the building cool off ... but the body meat (loin, ribs, etc, is going to be risky because of the gut contents.

They will undoubtedly need further cooking. A fire long and hot enough to cook them through would also take so long to cool down that the meat would spoil.

Do you need for them to have been roasted?

Maybe the building went up, the villagers managed to put the fire out and/or drag the pigs out, but they died from smoke inhalation. Then you just have dead pig which you can prepare normally.