A better part of
the fall was hog killing time (in the local patois—“hawg killin’ time”). With no electricity, no one had a refrigerator
or freezer so the winter supply of pork was laid in after the first frosts when
the meat would keep until it could be cured in the smokehouse. The bacon slabs, hams, and shoulders were
usually salt cured; however, sometimes Dad would sugar cure a couple of
hams. Most folks did not bother cutting
pork chops but simply trimmed out the long pieces of tenderloin—the choice part
of the hog—which we ate fried in slices while it was fresh. There was nothing better for a school lunch
bucket than a slice of tenderloin sandwiched into one of Mother’s biscuits.
Nothing about the
hog was wasted except, as the saying went, the tail and the squeal. I never did care much for pigs feet although
many folks thought them a delicacy. The
brains were cooked with scrambled eggs for breakfast, the fat was rendered into
cooking lard, the ribs eaten barbecued, and all the scraps and leftovers went
into the sausage grinder. A good country
sausage biscuit is the next best thing to tenderloin for a school lunch. Some folks cleaned pig intestines and stuffed
the sausage in them; however, we usually just made patties of the sausage. Just about everyone had their own private
recipe for making sausage, most of them delicious. To this day I think one of the finest breakfasts
in the world is biscuits with good sausage gravy and a sausage patty on the
side.
To get back to the
hog killings, everyone raised a few pigs just for winter meat. Usually Dad would get together with Uncle Coy
Tygart and Uncle Claud Frieze at one of the farms and kill and butcher hogs for
all three families, probably two hogs each.
It was a devil of a lot of work and mostly us boys just stayed out of the
way and helped to carry stuff.
Preparation was mainly
digging a trench, placing a big metal trough over it, filling it with water
(that’s where a lot of the carrying came in0.
Then a fire was built in the trench to bring the water to a good rolling
boil. When the water was ready each pig
in turn was shot between the eyes with a twenty-two rifle and its throat was
quickly cut to bleed the carcass. The
pig then had to be carried to the trough and lowered into the scalding water to
loosen the hair on the skin.
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| Tripod for hanging hog |
A pulley would
have been rigged to a tree limb or an A-frame made out of timbers so the scalded
porker could be hoisted up by the hind legs.
The hair was then scraped off and the pig gutted, saving the heart and
the liver which had to be eaten in the next few days while they were
fresh. The carcass was then split, laid
out on a trestle table made of timbers across saw horses, and the butchering
done.
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| Scraping off the hog hair |
The women and
children would “man” the hand-powered sausage grinder where all the scraps went
and someone had to tend the big black cast iron kettle set up over an open fire
for rendering the fat into lard. There
was plenty for everyone to do. The slabs
of bacon, shoulders, and hams had to be cured with salt and/or sugar before
they were hung up in the smokehouse for the winter (never knew of anyone to
smoke any meat but we still called them the “smokehouses”). The sausage had to have all the seasonings
stirred and kneaded in and then the sausages were put down in big crocks in the
plentiful supply of lard rendered from the fat.
We ate “high on the hog” for a time after hog killin’ on fresh hog
liver, brains, ribs, and tenderloins.
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| Sausage stuffer |
