BUTCHERING

Butchering is not for the faint of heart. As long as we humans include meat in our diets, animals will die. As a farm kid, butchering a hog each fall was as natural an event as digging potatoes or cutting cabbage heads from the garden. We needed the meat if we were going to survive the long winter. And to the best of my knowledge, nobody in our neighborhood said one word about the fact that enjoying a pork chop, a thick slice of ham, or some crispy bacon meant that a pig had died.

During the war years, my dad raised sixty or so hogs—Berkshires and Chester Whites—each year. Berkshires are mostly black, with a turned-up nose; Chester Whites are completely white, with long noses. The term mortgage lifter was commonly used in those days when raising hogs was mentioned—and it certainly was true in the case of my father, who sent as many as fifty of his hogs to market each fall. The price paid for hogs had risen considerably since the Depression years, and Pa was able to make enough money to pay off the mortgage on the farm before the war ended. He kept the remaining ten or so sows for the next year’s hog production, plus a couple of choice barrows (castrated males) for butchering.

Early November was the time for butchering. Pa chose a Saturday, when my brothers and I were home from school, so I could help. Like so many jobs on the farm, butchering involved neighbors working together, and every fall our closest neighbor, Bill Miller, and Pa helped each other with the task.

Hog butchering involved several steps, each important and each requiring a certain amount of skill. While there was little variation in the ritual from year to year, I recall one butchering day in particular. Early that morning Pa started a fire under the big cast-iron kettle in one corner of the pump house and filled the kettle with water. By midmorning, when Bill arrived to help, the water was steaming hot. In the nearby shed, Pa set up the scalding table, which consisted of some planks laid across a pair of sawhorses.

Pa had segregated this year’s pig—a Chester White barrow—in a corner of the hog pen away from the others. Pigs could be unpredictable, and keeping the others away from the killing made sure they wouldn’t get in the way.

Killing the pig was the easiest part of the process. Pa aimed his .22 rifle between the pig’s eyes. One shot, and the pig was down and dead—no suffering. Immediately Bill cut the pig’s throat, allowing it to quickly bleed out onto the ground. Some folks, including the Millers, would catch the pig blood in a pan and use it for making blood sausage, but my folks didn’t do that.

Next we rolled the carcass onto the stone boat. Pa harnessed Frank and Charlie, our dependable team of Percheron draft horses, to the stone boat so they could pull the carcass to the shed. Luckily, the smell of blood didn’t faze the Percherons. One year Pa had hitched Dick, the Western mustang he had bought from a horse dealer, to the stone boat to haul the butchered pig. When Dick smelled the hog’s blood, he took off at a gallop, dragging the stone boat with the dead pig behind him. Dick jumped over Pa’s new wooden barnyard gate, but the stone boat with the pig did not. The new gate exploded, slivers of wood flying everywhere. The pig rolled off the stone boat and lay in the barnyard while Pa caught Dick and took him back to the barn.

A fifty-five-gallon steel barrel, its top removed, sat in front of the scalding table. Pa, Bill, and I hoisted the dead pig onto the table. Then Pa and Bill began carrying pails of boiling water from the pump house, filling the barrel a bit more than half full. Their next task was to each grasp one of the pig’s hind legs and then slide the carcass up and down in the boiling water, back end first, then front end first. This loosened the animal’s hair, which Pa and Bill removed with a scraper, a slightly concave circular metal device about six inches in diameter with a short wooden handle. The sharp smell of wet pig hair filled the air. After the hair was removed, the men shoved a gambrel stick through a slit in each of the now naked pig’s back legs. About two feet long, the gambrel stick had an eyebolt through it, and here Pa fastened the block and tackle, a series of ropes and pulleys attached to the shed’s slanted ceiling. We removed the planks and sawhorses, and Pa pulled the pig upright so that its head hung above the ground. With a sharp butcher knife, Pa made a slit from between the pig’s hind legs all the way to its head, exposing the internal organs: heart, intestines, liver, and lungs. As the organs began to sag out of the body cavity, Bill held them in his arms while Pa continued cutting them loose. Pa removed the liver and the heart and placed them in a dish pan that Ma had provided. We did not save the intestines, but some people did clean them and use them for sausage making.

The smell of pig entrails is strong and pungent and different from most every other smell around the farm. It doesn’t burn your eyes like chicken manure, or work its way into your wool clothing like cow and hog manure. But it’s a smell I’ve never forgotten.

Bill carried the armful of entrails out to the field past the machine shed and dumped them in a pile. Within a few days the pile would disappear as crows and foxes feasted. With this part of the butchering process complete, we filed into the house for coffee and cookies and a round of storytelling. Bill Miller was known as the best storyteller in the neighborhood; he was also known to make up stories out of whole cloth, so when you listened to him you never knew what was true and what was not. My mother was a stickler for the truth and had no patience for embellished stories. In fact, she referred to Bill Miller (not to his face, of course) as the biggest liar that had ever come down a country road. I didn’t much care about what was fact and what was fiction: a good story was a good story. So I always enjoyed Bill’s visits. After an hour or so of story swapping (Pa was no slouch at telling a good story, either), Bill grabbed his cap, put on his denim coat, and walked off down the road toward home and his own farmwork.

Pa grabbed the meat saw and the butcher knives, and we headed out to the shed and the naked white pig hanging with its nose just off the frozen ground. “Hold on to its head,” Pa instructed. He worked the meat saw back and forth against the pig’s neck, severing the head from the rest of the carcass. Soon I was holding an armful of pig head, its eyes still open and blankly staring. I carried it to the house, where Ma was prepared to remove the skin and carve off the meat to make something called headcheese.

Next Pa began sawing between the hind legs and sawed through to the front end of the carcass, creating two halves. We each carried a half pig into the kitchen and laid it on the kitchen table, which was covered with its usual oilcloth. Pa cut off the four feet with the meat saw, and then Ma and Pa, each wielding butcher knives, cut out the bacon bellies, cut off the pork shoulder, and removed the hams. Next they cut the loin, the part of the hog next to the backbone, into pork chops. They wasted no part of the pig, saving even the tail. On Monday Pa would take the bacon bellies and hams to the meat market in Wautoma to be smoked; then they could hang alongside the cellar steps all winter without spoiling.

All the while, Ma cut off any fat she came across, cut it into little squares, and tossed it into a big pan. She put the pan of hog fat on the woodstove to melt, a process she called rendering the lard. After it had melted down a bit, she placed the lard in a lard press (the press could also be used as a cider press, but we never used it for that purpose). As she turned the handle on the top of the press, liquid lard poured out of its spout into big gallon jars. Ma allowed the jars to cool, screwed on covers, and placed the jars on the cellar shelves along with the other canned goods. She would use the lard throughout the year for baking and for frying such things as potatoes and eggs.

That night we enjoyed pork chops for supper, and what a treat they were. I could think of no meat that tasted better than a fresh, thick-cut pork chop—unless it was a thick slice of smoked ham. We’d have to wait a few weeks for the smoked ham. The pork chops we could enjoy right away.