I was talking with Bill Nye this morning about butchering hogs. It reminded me of all the old traditions being lost.
Today, most kids if they are asked where meat comes from they will say the grocery store. They have not a clue as to how it gets to that point.
My wife grew up more hick-i-fied than I did. When she was 6 or 7, was her job to scrape the hair off of hogs that were being processed. You had to do that so you could render out the lard.
They didn’t use a 55gal barrel. Her Pappy had a 150gal cast iron kettle. They would lower one side of the hog in, let it set and while the other sitting they would start scraping.
Can you imagine the horror of CPS if the saw a 6 year old using a 12” razor sharp butcher knife. OMG!!!
Once they split the hog open, the casing was pulled out and taken to the creek to be washed out for sausage. The head was cracked open for hogs head cheese. The whole animal was used.
The same went on with deer. At the end of the day all the deer were strung up from the 7 family hunters and the processing line began. Again all were used.
The same thing with ducks, rabbits, squirrels, chicken, etc.
One delicacy was the squirrel brains. My wife would remember her Granny sitting down with a plate of squirrel heads and a small metal mallet.
WHACK…WHACK…slurp. I don’t think so.
The traditions of our ancestors are a treasure trove of information for us. All we need to do is take the time to talk to them. Let them mentor us. I have also found that used book stores are a good hunting area for old books that cover these things.
Irregardless of how & where we learn them, we must not let them die.
As a young child, I was fascinated with this time of year and would beg my mother to let me watch. An idea for another re-post.:).
ReplyDeleteWHACK.....WHACK slurp HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA it reminded me of having to blow into the casing to see if there are any holes. I did not pull the short straw this go around.
ReplyDeleteBill Nye
popes was the word verication
My Boss's family gets together every year and has a hog processing weekend.
ReplyDeleteI've been able to do it a couple of times and it's a lot of fun to have 15-20 people, from little kids to the very old all working together to process 6-10 hogs.
I'm looking into making a combo smokehouse/dehydrator using some of the materials I have on hand here already. An old boxwood stove, concrete blocks, etc. Still need to scrounge some more stuff to make it as cheap as possible and figure out a design to incorporate the heat for one and the smoke for the other that will function properly.
Figure it'll take a couple tries to get it right.
Thanks for linking me here. Will reciprocate - Unk