Neatly Plastic-Wrapped Meat Not Always Our Way, Either

Long before pigs were household pets and movie stars, before chemicals could make dry turkey meat taste like lean bacon except when you’re actually eating it, the onset of cooler weather brought about a need to go out in the backyard and kill something, usually a fat hog.

Now that Texas is mostly urban and a right-to-carry state, we limit our backyard slaughter to bugs and crab grass, and cities restrict what we can kill on our patios.

This year in Nashville, Tenn., two women were fined for killing sheep behind their house. Recent arrivals from Afghanistan, they sacrificed the sheep in some type of religious ceremony, which offended neighbors, many of whom were preparing to barbecue dead meat because the day just happened to be July 4, a time when we commemorate our freedoms. In the writing business, we call this an ironic circumstance. Multiculturalism is a hard horse to ride when religious liberties conflict with municipal ordinances, even when sheep are involved.

Why can’t those Afghans be Christian-like and, as the Bible relates, just serve up a fatted calf for sacrifice - What else is patio barbecue but a burnt offering? (The Old Testament took no position on cole slaw and pinto beans, but it was bullish on chicken-fried manna from heaven.)

I have, I notice, swerved over into preaching as I headed off to explain cold weather and hog killing. An unorganized mind is easily led into irrelevant but provocative side alleys, although I never really cared for sheep, anyway.

Hog killing was an annual organized social ritual when self-sufficiency was necessary in the countryside. It was a noun, as in, “We’re havin’ a hog-killin’ Saturday. Come on over.” And neighbors arrived to help. Sometimes the hog killing was a multifamily affair, and everyone gathered their hogs at a central site for butchering and preparation of the meat.

Whatever the scope, a hog-killin’ required many hands and much muscle, an entire day, and cold weather to keep the meat from spoiling. Usually, it was a kind of community party with a noontime feast and, occasionally, music and dancing at night.

The children were there to help but mostly they played with the pig bladders, which were similar to large balloons and could be batted around like volleyballs. We used to take them down to the creek and float them in the current, throwing rocks until someone scored a hit - the bladders would burst and sink.

I doubt that a sheep’s bladder is large enough for any fun activities, although I’ve never seen a sheep butchered and have no firsthand knowledge, and I don’t know any Afghans to ask. No sense inquiring around here. Texas raises more sheep than almost any region but the inhabitants eat less lamb and mutton than even, say, Eskimos.

I see that I’ve steered off into another unrelated cul-de-sac, but I believe I can get back to the subject by acknowledging that certain Eskimo tribes do eat the viscera of animals such as seals and whales.

In hog-killing circles, the viscera (frankly, these are intestines and other pig parts, the porcine equal of homeopathic natural junk food) were both utilitarian - sausage could be stuffed into large intestine links - and sort of eerie hors d’oeuvres cooked and fed to workers by the host housewife. Back then, people actually ate pig livers, hearts, brains, knuckles (the ankles), feet and the maw (don’t ask). Ears and snouts were considered delicacies.

If not served up individually, these parts were prepared as souse, which appears today under the alias “headcheese” - a gelatinous mass laced with bits of pig scraps. I’m pleased to say I’ve never eaten headcheese on purpose.

First, the hogs were slaughtered. Usually this was done by a carefully placed .22 rifle shot behind an ear. The throat was slit and the hog hung upside down to drain all its blood. That’s the messy part.

Hog carcasses were dipped into boiling water to loosen hair, which was scraped off. Then the cutting began: hams, chops, bacon, ribs - all the good stuff. Fat was rendered into lard, both for cooking and the making of lye soap. Some meat was run through a muscle-cranked grinder for sausage. The sausage was mixed by hand with spices such as sage and cayenne pepper in galvanized washtubs.

Either intestines - thoroughly cleaned and inverted - were used for storing sausage or the casings were made from flour sacks.

Afterward, all the meat cuts were stored in a smokehouse and literally smoked for weeks. Families needed those meats to carry them through cold winters.

Two other dishes came from the hogs. One was cracklings, which were left over from the lard-rendering process and were tasty and crunchy, often mixed into cornbread batter for flavoring. Cracklin bread, it was called. The second was chitterlings - we’re back to small intestines again. Chopped and soaked in salt water, the fried “chittlins” were considered good eating.

Strange to say, cracklins are a packaged snack food today. One brand explains them as “Fried out pork fat with attached skin, salt added” and notes that cracklins are “Not a Signficant Source of Dietary Fiber,” as though it mattered.

Fried pork skins also are packaged, and an avowed favorite of our last Republican president, George Bush. His Ivy League upbringing allowed no experience with hogs and hog killing, so we are left to guess where he picked up the habit of eating fried pig rinds.

Could be he was after the Eskimo and Afghan voting blocs. If so, someone should have told him that there are no pigs above the Arctic Circle and that Afghans do not eat pork in any form.

As long as we’re off onto a side trail again, you should know I think the sheep got what they deserved, July 4 or not. Baa, baa, bah.

xxxx