Feb 2, 2013

Wed, Feb 3, 1943: some fat hogs

"...Monday Daddy took some fat hogs to Wichita and he called at the hospital while in Wichita and saw both Virginia and LaVerne....
"We had Oscar Hein butcher a pig for us.  Had sausage for supper and it tasted fine...."
--Letter from my grandmother, Bloomington, Kans., to my father, Winfield, Kans., Wednesday, February 3, 1943.
In his memoir, the father wrote the following about hogs on the family farm: “Our hogs were kept in some low, ramshackle buildings open on the south near the house, and wallowed in the mud just beyond when the rains came.  Leonard was an expert at hog calling, and his ‘Whooee,’ when he took the kitchen slop out brought them running from all across the alfalfa field.  They fed at a trough, filled with leftovers from the family table and added grain, to fatten them for the market, or for butchering.
“We slaughtered some of the best hogs on the coldest day of winter, when the great outdoors approximated a deep freeze locker, and natural refrigeration preserved the meat while it was being processed.  We set up equipment south of the old storage house, and had six or eight people around to do the job.  Frank Cousins and Walter Bowyer, old timers, had mastered the art of hog-butchering, and appeared with their knives to carve up the fattened hog, assisted by Leonard, and Pus Cousins, Max King, Jay Causey, and the author who ran errands as a ten-year-old.  The animal was suspended by its feet from a temporary frame, its throat cut, blood drained, and then dropped into a huge black kettle of boiling water, heated by a wood fire underneath.  The hot water made scraping the black hair from its body easier.  When the carcass was free of hair, it was suspended again from the special frame, head downward, and the butcher deftly cut it apart into pork loins, hams, bacon, and all the parts which humans consume.  The intestines were discarded, but the extensive fat portion was chopped into squares and dumped into the fresh boiling water of the great kettle, taken out, and rendered into lard.
“Cracklings--what was left after the lard was removed--were the treat of the day for little boys,.  Pork rinds they would be called today.  After the crew had left, we made soap from the lard, a mixture of lye, saltpeter, and who knows what else.  The ghastly mixture was boiled in the same huge kettle, and, after it had cooled and solidified, cut into blocks of soap which Jessie used on Monday, the universal wash day.  Tide had not been invented, or was too expensive, and our self-sufficient farm kept going with its huge white cakes of homemade soap.
“Bacon was the best part of the hog; the bacon sides were treated with salt and other things, and easily preserved.  The rest of it was preserved by some mixture of salt and spices, cloves among them, and stored in the cellar beneath the house until needed.  At one time, I believe the meat was smoked and dried in the smokehouse to take care of preservation through the winter, and I dimly remember as a small boy watching smoke come out of that building just south of the house.  When I was older the “smokehouse” was used for the washing machine, the cream separator, the butter churn and the large wooden ice box, but never for smoking meat.”  (Source: Brown, Kansas Farmboy, 114-15)

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