Pandemic, Tendon, Renovation – Part 34

9 October 2020

As men of the South often say “It’s time to get down to the nut cuttin’.” Allow me to explain to you non-Southerners. You often castrated animals in the fall of the year. October in most of the south is the time of first frost. Usually, that’s the last or next to last week in October, at least in Mississippi. That means it is cold enough to kill hogs (or castrate them). You needed cold weather to kill hogs so that the meat didn’t spoil before you could get it properly cut and stowed away in the smokehouse. It’s also when you killed the calf, for the same reason.

I know this is hard to believe, but I’ve actually spectated a hog killing. It happened when my maternal grandmother’s next door neighbors, the Pinter family, raised and killed a hog. The one with the most experience at it was my Dad who probably killed a lot of hogs with his Dad down on the farm in Pulaski, Mississippi.

Mr. Pinter called in my Dad to help. First, you had to kill the hog. This was done with a 22 rifle to to the head of the hog. The carcass was then dragged to a very large tripod in the gravel drive between my grandmother’s house and the Pinter house and hoisted rear feet first. A cut was made between the Achille’s tendon of each hind leg and rope passed through. It was then pulled up to the top of the tripod by manpower with the head of the hog just off the ground.

The hog’s throat was then cut to bleed the hog. Believe it or not, the blood was saved. I think Mrs. Pinter made blood sausage with it. Then, starting at the genitals, the hog was sliced lengthwise to open the body cavity and the organs removed. If they still had their testes, they would be removed and fried and eaten.

They were very, very careful not to damage the gall bladder. Everyone seemed to know if that was pierced, it would taint the meat of the hog.

The hog was then lowered into a boiling water bath (actually a 55 gallon drum filled with water and heated over a wood fire) to facilitate the removal of the hair on the hog. You didn’t “skin” the hog because the skin was too valuable. It was used to make cracklings and pork rinds. Skin and the layers just underneath (dermis and epidermis and some connective tissue) were later removed and baked in the oven for a long time. That’s cracklings. They were often eaten as a snack (a very greasy one) or baked into cornbread to form crackling bread (delish!). Sometimes just a thin slice of the skin was dropped into a pot of hot oil. Those pieces puffed up and formed pork rinds – I still consider them a delicacy but a sure way to a heart attack.

The intestines were cleaned by washing the intestines out with a hose. You then grabbed one end of the intestine and closed your fingers tightly around it tube and dragged it the length of the intestine to remove any left over feces. Then wash again, and squeeze again.

Just to throw a bit of science into this, that motion of a series of contractions down the intestine is known as peristalsis. It pushes fecal matter downward and towards the anus. It also is how you swallow.

A series of peristaltic contractions pushes the food before it into the stomach. I used this analogy for years when teaching in Mississippi but quit when I moved to Broward College because all students in Broward thought pork came from Publix.

The kids in our group (me included) were given the task of slinging chitterlings (chitlins). That’s a process where you beat the intestines against, preferably a tree stump – hence the term stump whipped- to tenderize the chitterlings.

The intestines were then cut up into short lengths. Some of the intestine was saved to make casing for sausage. Most, however, was used to make chitlins. Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing smells worse than boiling chitlins. My Aunt Minrose and Uncle Ray boiled chitlins once at their house in Morton and I swear I can still smell that horrible odor.

You can eat chitlins one of two ways: boiled or fried. I’ve tried both. I couldn’t get past the smell of the boiled but the fried are actually pretty tasty.

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Anyway, after the hair is removed, the hog is quartered (hence the terms “hung” – via tripod, “drawn” – man powered up the tripod , and “quartered” – with axes and saws).

A particularly popular part of the hog is the head. From that can be retrieved a great deal of very tasty meat, for example, hog jowl. You can also make hog’s head cheese – not actually a cheese but a meaty aspic made from all parts. Some people even use the eyes.

In the South, hog’s head cheese is most commonly called souse. Aunt Mabel used to sell it at the Shell Service Station in Morton. People would make sandwiches with it but trust me when I tell you it is an acquired taste. You make it by boiling down parts of the head to soften the cartilage in the ears, snout, and other parts of the head and making a gelatinous mass that is then mixed with some of the muscle on the head and compressed like a terrine. Even though a lot of fancy French dishes are served à la terrine, I stay away from them because of my memories of souse.

Literally, nothing is thrown away from the hog. Just as you can eat calf liver, you can eat hog liver. The brain is edible but not as tasty as calf brain. For some reason, we called the brain “lights.”

I’ve already alluded to the intestines. One great comfort food for my Dad was pickled pig’s feet. Just about every honky tonk in the south sold those along with illegal beer in Mississippi. He loved them. I have tried them several times in my life thinking I must be missing something but sanity finally arrived and I no longer even think of picking one up and eating.

Any fat from the hog was removed, even from pieces of the hog that had a lot of meat on it and the fat was melted down, poured through cheese cloth to remove bits of bone, cartilage, and dirt from the killing (hog guts are very heavy and you had to drag them out and into a pan and hope they didn’t lap over the sides into the dirt) and then allowed to re-solidify. That’s lard and it was worth its weight in gold.

You could butcher the hog yourself, but a lot of people would eventually take sections of the carcass to a “processor.” I use the term loosely. There was one in Kalem, a bump in the road between Forest and Morton. I do remember they made the best pork sausage anywhere. People would the guy scraps from their hog and he would make it into the most flavorful sausage you could eat.

My paternal grandparents smoked their own meat. They had a small log smokehouse at their place in Pulaski. Dad told me his mother would go out every morning before light and cut off a piece of smoked pork belly and fry it up for breakfast. For those of you who don’t know, that’s called bacon.

OK, why all this about hog killing? It’s October , we’re due for a break in the weather and time is running out. The election is 25 days away and soon, we’ll either know the winner or we’ll be waiting for the supreme court to make the decision, or we’ll be fighting in the streets.

What does it have to do with renovation? Two days ago, I received the missing glass cabinet door. Today, 20 drawer stops were delivered (I only need 10). Still to come is the spice rack pull out. Maybe, just maybe, the renovation will be finished by election day (but remember, I said December).

What does it have to do with a tendon? No, I’ve not be dunked in the River Styx but Mississippi kids knew the idea of tendons because of hog killing. Oh, and I also snapped my biceps tendon sometime in March. It still reminds me but as time passes, it is less of a presence in my life.

My song recommendation is Jimmie Rodgers’ “Peach Pickin’ Time Down in Georgia.” Let’s just say it’s timely. You can’t beat the singing brakeman and he shares my birthplace – Meridian, Mississippi.

Stay tuned and stay safe!