On a cold November day when you could make smoke with your breath I would be up at daylight or a little before. It was my job to get the cast iron wash pots filled with water and the fires built under them to get the water hot. All the water was drawn from a shallow rock lined well by hand. By the time I had this done the rest of the family was up and moving around the house. Neighbors were beginning to arrive. Butchering a hog is a labor intensive process. It was mostly men from the neighboring farms. A couple of women came along. During this hog killing time of year neighbors would go from farm to farm butchering hogs. But I only got to be part of one hog killing and that was the one at home.
Daddy picked up the old .22 rifle, grabbed a butcher knife and we headed to the hog pen. Along the way I harnessed a mule to a small sled. Uncle Jack and I joined Daddy. Daddy was a big man and a good shot with a rifle. He always had the job of killing the hog. The hog was a big one; about 300 pounds.
He said, “If you make like there’s line from the hogs left eat to his right eye and a line from his right ear to the left eye and shoot ‘em where the lines cross, the hog will drop every time.” It must have been true, because they always dropped. Daddy had a gun misfire once and almost got bit by a big hog. Hogs are the only domestic animal that will eat either meat or vegetables and they aren’t very particular about where either come from.
As soon as the hog was killed, Daddy would jump the fence and cut the hog’s throat so it would bleed. I watched the steam rise from the spilled blood and sucked on my skinned knuckle. Uncle Dewey saw me and said, “It’s just skin, Boy! It’ll grow back.” The grizzled, scrawny, seventy-five-year-old spit tobacco juice out between his missing teeth and grinned. He always called me, “Boy”. Daddy always called me , “Son” or “Dan”. I don’t know where he got the “Dan” from, he called my brother that too. Neither of us was named “Dan”.
As a twelve-years-old I gave it my all as we wrestled the 300 lb hog onto the sled and took it to the backyard to butcher it. But before you could start gutting the hog, hair or bristles had to be removed. And that’s where the boiling water came into play. We had a 55 gallon drum halfway buried in the ground at a 45 degree angle. I filled the drum up about half-full while Daddy and the other men used a hoist to get the hog off the sled. We would hang the hog from a tree branch over the drum of hot water so we could lower it into the drum. The hot water would loosen the hair of the hog, and we could pull it off. I got right in there with the men pulling off handfuls of hog hair. The temperature was about freezing so the hot hair felt good on my hands. It would take several dunkings into the water to complete the job. Finally a corn shuck would be set afire and used to burn off any hair that was left. The hog looked shiny white when we had finished. With the hog hung from the tree limb the head was cut off. I carried it in a dish pan with those eyes looking up at me to the kitchen table we had brought outside for butchering the meat. The head was trimmed, eyes and brains removed, etc. Brains would be eaten with scrambled eggs for breakfast. I would never eat them. Mom would have breakfast ready for those eating throughout the morning. Then the whole head would be put in a pot and cooked until all the meat fell off the bone. Mama would then grind it up to make what we called souse meat. It would congeal in a loaf pan and would be sliced and be eaten with mustard and onion in a sandwich. I wasn’t real crazy about it. She’d make liver pudding from the liver. I didn’t like that either. The hanging hog was split down the middle and the entrails removed. The men pulling out the entrails got a chance to get their hands warm. Care was taken not to puncture an intestine. We wouldn’t want to spill hog feces everywhere. The liver and kidneys would be saved and large intestine would be cleaned up for chitlins. Sometimes the bladder would be blown up for the younger kids to use for a ball. Yeah, every part of the hog was used for something except maybe the squeal. After cleaning out the inside of the hog the back bone was cut out with an ax. Each half of the hog was cut up on the table. Each man had brought his own butcher knife, so by noon the hams, shoulders, ribs, and other cuts were done. A lot of work, like cutting up the backbone and ribs, was done with a sharp ax. When the table was covered with bloody scraps it was my job to pour a bucket of hot water over it to keep the tabletop clean. Another job of mine was to keep the dogs away. After all the major butchering was done it was time for making sausage, lard and getting meat ready for the smoke house.
Most of the neighbors left at noon, so the rest of the work was done by family members. Hams and shoulders were trimmed of excess fat and rubbed down with a mixture of salt, sugar and seasonings. The process was simple; the mixture was rubbed into the meat until it wouldn’t accept any more. It was then hung up in the smokehouse with a hickory smudge fire burning. The pork bellies were processed this way also and this would be sliced thin as bacon. In those days hogs were grown fat, and that fat would be rendered out as lard. The fat was cut into two-inch cubes and put into a wash pot. The fat is cooked out and the hot grease is strained through cheesecloth in to lard cans. These left over small pieces of fried meat are called cracklings and used in cornbread for extra flavor. Rendering out the lard is a time consuming process and I had to keep the fire burning hot and stir the fat occasionally with an axe handle. Making sausage is also very labor intensive. Normally we made the sausage from left over scraps of meat. We ground the meat by hand, usually twice. Salt, pepper and sage were usually added. Sometimes we stuffed some for link sausage to be smoked. My uncle made spicy sausage. You could see the huge flakes of cayenne pepper in the sausage.
By the time we finished the hog killin’ the sun had gone down and we had enough meat to last almost a year. And it would be a year before we would be making bacon again. Making bacon was a bit different in those days. But the meat had no additives and the hogs were free range, raised on acorns, corn and table scraps with no added growth hormones. When we needed bacon we went to the smoke house and cut off some of the smoked pork belly, bacon. And I think it tasted better.
Make Your Own Bacon - The Post and Courier
This is wrote up pretty good.
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