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Living High On the Hog

November 29, 2008 12:36 am

UMMM. I can still smell the fresh sausage and hear the patties sizzle in the grease as they fried in a black skillet on the old wood cookstove.

When I was a child, someone in the neighborhood would have been killing hogs this weekend.

The weather would have been perfect--not so warm that the meat would spoil and not so cold that it would freeze and not take salt.

Hog-killing time was a big event for country people. Vegetables and fruit were raised and canned in the summer, but it was early winter when the year's meat supply was put away.

And pork--we always just called it "hog meat"--was a staple in country cooking.

Yes, we had chicken on Sunday (I never had a steak until I was 19), but pork was on the table every day. We'd cook sausage in the morning, flavor the string beans with fatback at dinner and eat country ham on special occasions.

Every skillet was greased with lard, which was also the shortening used in hot biscuits.

Hog killing was an all-day affair. It began before daylight when the fires under the scalding box were lit and the water heated near the boiling point.

Neighbors would gather, and each person had his own special job. There was always one man who had the strength and stomach to kill the hogs, which sometimes tilted the scales at 450 pounds each.

Some were shot and then bled, while others were just "stuck." Bleeding was necessary to make the meat better.

After they were killed, the hogs were rolled into the scalding box so that the hot water would loosen the hair, which would then be scraped off.

As soon as the carcasses had cooled, the cutting began. This took great skill, and the job was not left to just anyone. This person had to know his business.

Hams and shoulders were neatly worked, with the trimmings tossed into a pan and saved to be ground into sausage.

Hog killing was hard work that mostly had to be done outside in the cold. By the end of the day hands felt as if they were about frozen. Still, the job had to be done.

We never made pork chops. We canned the tenderloin and put the trimmings into sausage, which we also canned. This was women's work and one of the few jobs that was done inside the house.

After the meat was in the jars and cooked, the jars were turned upside down so that the grease could congeal at the lid for an airtight seal. Canned sausage and tenderloin always had to be kept in a cool place where the grease wouldn't melt.

Above another hot fire, usually outside, the fat was boiled into lard, with the cracklings skimmed off and saved for making cracklin' bread.

Nothing was wasted. The liver was made into liver pudding, and various parts of the head were rendered into souse.

The feet were either boiled and eaten that day or pickled and saved for later. And there was always someone in the neighborhood who wanted the intestines for a chitterling dinner.

I remember one old guy exclaiming, "Man, those chittlins are so good I could eat one as long as from here to Richmond!"

Few people in my neighborhood thought as highly of intestines as this gentleman did, and usually he was granted his delicacy without an argument.

As for me, well, I always claimed the pigtail. I'm not sure why a little kid would develop a taste for this end of the hog, but I did.

And I loved liver pudding, eating it like candy.

By nightfall the hams, shoulders and fatback were all salted down in the meat house, the sausage and tenderloin was in jars, the lard had been poured into tins where it would cool and turn snow-white within days and the souse and liver pudding had been cooked and divided up among the workers.

Everyone who had helped went home with a few days' worth of fresh sausage and a portion of his or her favorite cut of meat.

Some readers in this modern world probably look upon hog killing as a barbaric event. To middle-class country people 50 years ago, however, people who didn't have money to shop at what few supermarkets there were, butchering was a necessity.

It was an important event, both social and economic. Neighbors who otherwise might not visit each other all year came together in a common cause that saved money for all.

If hogs had not been raised and butchered, there would have been very little meat on country tables years ago.

Donnie Johnston is a staff writer with The Free Lance-Star. E-mail him at djohnston@freelancestar .com.