When I was growing up on the farm there was a season for everything. Some examples would be garden planting time, corn and tobacco planting time, blackberry picking time, time to cut firewood for next year and of course hog killing time.
Seems on a farm the work never gets caught up. In my mind it wasn’t all work though. I enjoyed doing a lot of those things, especially hog killing time.
You see we’d buy three or four feeder pigs in the spring time for about $10 apiece. We would then place them in a toe sack to get them home and then release them into our hog pen.
Way back, people would let their stock have free range and fence in their crops. The animals would feed on all kinds of nuts and anything else nature provided. As more land was cleared and the people population grew, domestic animals were fenced in. Their feed had to be grown or bought.
We bought very little feed for our pigs because we raised our own corn and threw in some older garden produce, pears, apples and hogweeds to help fatten them up. Also there was a five gal. slop bucket left on the porch to put leftover food in to feed the hogs.
Back then you wanted your hogs to weigh 300 or 400 pounds before you butchered them. People would say if’n you couldn’t get two five gallon stands of lard out of a hog you didn’t have much of a hog.
Hog killing time was reserved to the last of November when the weather was getting colder. You see back in the day won’t much way of keeping your meat from spoiling unless you canned it or salted it down.
A lot of people today would look down and turn up their noses at killing hogs. But with over ten million hogs being grown in N.C. today the big slaughter houses work round the clock keeping the grocery stores stocked. This was the only meat we would have back then except for wild meat or fish.
Hog killing day was a day I looked forward to. We’d get up before daylight; fill three or four cast iron wash pots with well water and build a fire under each one. A fifty gallon steel drum would be partially buried in the ground close to the wash pots. When the water was a certain temperature it was poured into the barrel to scald the hog and remove their hair. Sometimes fire ashes were added to the water to better remove the stubborn hair.
Next a scaffold was built to hang up the hog while it was being dressed. A tractor pulled on one end or some type of weigh was required to hold the scaffold down.
When dressing a hog, care had to be taken not to puncture the intestine. I remember one time someone accidentally hit my dad’s arm while he was cutting them out. This was a very messy sight I want you to know. Won’t nothing to do but rinse, rinse and rinse again.
After the hog was dressed the hams, shoulders and middling meat (fat-back) were placed in a salt box and salted down. We hoped the weather wouldn’t turn off warm because then the meat would spoil. Also what meat won’t all fat was ground up in sausage except for the ribs and tenderloin.
All the fat left over from trimming the meat was poured into the wash pots. It was then cooked until there wasn’t anything left but liquid grease and cracklings (pigskins). Then the liquid was strained through cheese cloth into five gallon lard stands. A tight lid was placed on the stands and was placed in a cool place to turn into a white solid called lard. This was used to make biscuits and to fry with. The cracklings were drained and would be used to make crackling cornbread. Yum, Yum.
No sir-ree, won’t much of that hog we didn’t use. Why the head and feet were used to make souse meat, the liver into liver pudding and Granddad would eat the brains scrambled up with hen eggs. Can’t say as I ever tried that.
On most hog killing days friends and family would pitch in and help. At the end of the day each would go home with a mess of fresh meat.
I remember my great aunt always coming to help. She didn’t much like helping kill the hog so she stayed in the kitchen and cooked for the crowd. Won’t nothing better than her homemade biscuits filled with a piece of sausage or a piece of fresh tenderloin.
Also my aunt could cook the best egg custard pies you ever ate. Yeah, she was known far and wide for them pies of hers but I remember one time they didn’t turn out so good. It seemed the day before the hog killing my grandma had bought two brown bottles about the same size from Mr. Green, the local Watkins Products salesman. One had vanilla flavoring in it and the other had rubbing liniment in it. Both were left on the kitchen countertop.
The next day when my aunt arrived she had forgotten her reading glasses. She started cracking the eggs and mixing the other stuff to make her pies. Somehow when she reached for the vanilla flavoring and got the wrong bottle. You guessed it, in goes the rubbing liniment in the pie mixture.
You can imagine how hungry people get after a long day of butchering hogs. Everyone came in for supper and be dog gone if’n they didn’t eat every last one of my Aunt’s biscuits and started in on them pies.
Why I ain’t never seen such funny faces on people in my life as when they tasted them pies. Not a word was said. However, for two or three weeks I never heard anybody complaining about their rheumatism bothering them, no not a’tall.
J.A. Bolton is a member of the N.C. Storytelling Guild, Anson County Writer’s Club, Richmond County Historical Society and the Story Spinners in Laurinburg.