Chapter VII Continued
Butchering day was a special day for me, it meant our neighbors would come early in the morning and stay all day.
We would have dinner together and have great fun joshing and joking with each other. It was the only day I asked and was permitted to stay home from school.
The extensive preparations for butchering had been done the day before. The large iron kettles were brought out and set up near the woodhouse for heating water to be used in the butchering routine. The old mud boat sled was backed to the woodhouse to make a platform needed in the preparation of the carcasses. A derrick was improvised to suspend the hog for gutting and cooling in the crisp early winter air. It usually took the fore noon for the actual butchering and the afternoon was spent in dismembering the carcasses, trimming the hams, shoulders, etc., with the lean trimmings cut in small pieces for sausage and the fat being rendered for lard.
My Dad always rendered the lard because he possessed a special expertise required and also because he had an unusual tolerance for smoke. He could stand all afternoon stirring the lard with a big wooden paddle and suffer no ill effects from his constant exposure to smoke.
Contrary to my family's practice of not discarding anything usable, the majority of the so called offal's were not used. Kidneys, sweetbreads and spleens were fed to the dogs. Much of the liver was made into liver pudding and the pigs feet pickled and preserved. The meat from the head was made into head cheese and mince meat. After the butchering was completed, the hams, shoulders, bacon and seasoning parts were packed in a barrel and covered with salt. After they were given time to cure, they were hung on racks in the little smoke house where they were
smoked with smoke from a fire of corncobs, sassafras and hickory wood.
After the smoke had thoroughly penetrated the meat, each joint was placed in separate muslin bags and hung on the ceiling joists of the smoke house.
We were usually very hungry for fresh meat because all summer our meat diet had been cured meats or chicken and our appetites were keenly whetted for a taste of fresh meat. We could not wait for supper to get a taste of fresh meat, but prepared some in advance by suspending a tenderloin strip on the end of a string and dropping it in a kettle of rendering lard to be cooked to a delicious bit, and which in turn made us more anxious for a full meal of fresh pork.
After the lard was rendered, the solids were transferred to a press which pressed out all the remaining lard, and the solids were convened to a mass of residue we called cracklings, which had a good flavor and always presented a temptation to over eat, usually resulting in gastrointestinal upsets.
No history of the Caleb Dooley family would be complete without a tribute to our faithful old horse Dock He was a beautiful light bay horse of about 1200 pounds and from a breed known as Copper Bottom, which is now extinct.
My father bought him after my parents were married and started farming. Our family really grew up with old Dock, and we all loved him giving him a human quality. He trotted gracefully when hitched to a buggy, and when hitched to a corn cultivator he would turn at the end of a row without trampling the delicate young corn plants. I am sure if there is a horse heaven, old Dock is serenely grazing in the lush celestial pastures under the watchful eye of the arch angel.
To be continued
