Hog killing time on my grandparents' farm

For my vegetarian and animal loving friends, please be aware that this does include a description of hog killing on my grandparents' farm.

When I was a kid, my brother, sister and I spent many summers and holidays on my paternal grandparents’ farm of about 100 acres in rural east Tennessee. I remember it as not so much a commercial farm, but a family farm that my grandfather had grown up on and inherited from his father. They did sell most of the beef they raised, and, for a while they also raised tobacco to sell. But in my memory, it was mostly about producing food for the family: vegetables, fruit, milk, eggs, beef, pork and chicken.

Summer was all about my grandmother’s big garden; picking strawberries in June, tomatoes in July, beans and field peas and weeding throughout the summer then canning and freezing it all in September and October. For some reason, hay bale hauling was one of my favorite fall chores. It was sweaty, hard, itchy work, but I loved it. It tested my muscles, and, as a young girl of the sixties, I didn’t get to do that a lot. When I was too small to throw bales onto the trailer, I got to drive the tractor. Technically I just kept it moving in a straight line until the end of the row when my Papaw would run to the tractor from where ever he was to make the turn to the next row. Through the years I learned how to drive on a tractor. As I got older, I loved competing with my male cousins (all younger than me, so I had a little edge) to get to the next bale, grab it by the twine and throw it onto the barge-like trailer behind the tractor. It didn’t take but a year or two for them to get big enough to put me to shame. Then, possibly the most fun part, and, as I look back on it, definitely the most dangerous part, was when we all piled on top of the high, rickety pile of hay strapped down on the trailer to ride behind the slow tractor across a divided four lane highway to get it to the barn. When the highway came through in the 1920s, it divided the farm then operated by my great-grandparents, leaving about a quarter of the land on one side of the highway, with the rest on the other side. The hay field was forever on the opposite side of US highway 11E from the barn where it was stored to feed the cattle in winter.

Another of my favorite memories was hog killing time. My memory is foggy around the timing. It had to be at least late fall, possibly around Thanksgiving because most of my aunts and uncles and cousins were there, and it would need to be done in cold weather to keep the meat from spoiling. Papaw used to say it had to be “cold enough to make your nose run and your eyes water but not cold enough to freeze the meat". My brother and I were the oldest grandchildren. We usually participated in this from beginning to end as soon as it was deemed we were old enough. It was a long, grueling day that started with a rifle at close range to the head of a hog that had grown up trusting my grandfather enough not to run. In childhood, I never questioned this action and how easy the hogs made it for Papaw and why that was. But I also trusted him completely, accepting that he was doing the right thing. I still believe he did the most humane thing he knew to do. His animals were all treated well; Angus cows raised and finished on grass, pigs roaming free in a forested area, laying hens in a large coop free-ranging in a field near the house during the day.

I remember a couple of cousins who took off running to the house from the sound of the gun shot. I know enough vegetarians to know that experiences like that would have made many people, children and adults, question their desire or even right to eat meat. But, even as a child, from my perspective meat was another product of the farm, along with the strawberries, tomatoes and beans. As an adult I have killed and cleaned my own meat chickens, chickens who lived comfortable, free range lives until the end. I know now that it isn’t as easy as I thought it was as a child, and I don’t imagine my grandfather considered taking a life to be an easy thing to do. But for him, it was part of farming and feeding his family.

After killing them, the animals had to be immediately bled. I thought this part was pretty gross, watching thick, dark blood flow around the sharp butcher knife, used to cut the neck, and puddle on the ground around its head. I think my brother was more fascinated than disgusted. They were huge animals that were then rolled up heavy boards to get into the truck bed, an activity that involved several adult men. Besides my grandfather, there were my father and uncle, a hired man who lived on the farm with his family and possibly one or two of my grandfather’s friends with whom he would probably exchange the favor at some point. On the truck, the body was hauled about a quarter of a mile up the little dirt road, passing my grandparents’ house and heading toward the upper barn to the scalding and butchering station. There was a large, somewhat rusty metal tub, half of a huge metal drum cut lengthwise, next to a platform about 3 feet by 4 feet that ran the length of the tub at exactly the height of the tub’s edge. A couple of feet away from the platform was a tall upside down U-shaped wood frame, well braced at the base, with two big S hooks hanging from the top crossbeam with two pulleys used to haul the carcass up to hang from the hooks.

There was already a fire burning under the tub full of water when we got to it with the pig. The water was hot enough to make you want to avoid putting your hands in it, but made the pig’s skin nicely warm to the touch on a cold autumn day. We rubbed Vasoline on our hands as a barrier to the cold and also to the heat from the water. The hog was rolled into the tub with ropes that wrapped around it at the inside hip joints of the front and rear legs The ropes were pulled tight and let go slack over and over to bounce the pig around in the water to loosen the tiny hairs on every bit of its skin. While it was in the water we began pulling and scraping the hair on the places we could reach that were above water. When Papaw thought it was hot enough, it was pulled onto the platform beside the tub of water where we finished cleaning up the skin. Timing was tricky, it couldn't stay in the hot water long enough to cook it. The backs of the hind legs were cut lengthwise a few inches just above each hoof to expose tendon under which large hooks were placed, each attached to a rope. The hog was pulled up into the frame and hung there on the hooks by its tendons. I have two memories of this process. One is of two men, each pulling the rope attached to a hind leg over pulleys on the crossbeam until the body was at the right height off the ground. The other memory is of attaching a rope to the back of the tractor to pull the carcass into place. We probably tried both at different times. I'm betting the tractor method won out in the long run.

At this point the slaughtering process takes place and moves quickly. Even in November weather in east Tennessee, the meat has to get to the house as quickly as possible after being cut into pieces. Papaw kept a sharp butcher knife for just this purpose and cutting down the meat into sections was his role. The head is removed (and saved, nothing wasted - I distinctly remember eating hog brains scrambled with eggs for at least one breakfast.) and he made one long cut lengthwise down the middle from anus to neck, being very careful not to nick the anus or intestines and contaminate the meat. Now the piecing begins.

Being a tomboy and forever curious, but also a girl fascinated by my grandmother’s cooking magic, I determinedly participated in both ends of this process. My brother and I carried batches meat cuts to my grandmother’s spotless kitchen where she was ready to begin preserving the meat. Larger sections, like the hams, were loaded in the back on the truck whatever was the cleanest cardboard lying around. I made the transition from field to kitchen and helped Mamaw sort and preserve the meat. I loved her food and always enjoyed learning about how she worked her magic. From canned tomatoes, jams and jellies, pies and biscuits to sausage and tenderloin, I wanted to know how to do it. Some parts of the pig were cut into meal-size roasts, wrapped in paper, or in later years, in plastic or foil, and put in the freezer. Some parts were cooked and cut into chunks to can in wide mouth pint jars with about an inch of fat on top as a seal and finished in the pressure cooker. The pork in jars was my favorite, served with pinto beans, cornbread and a spring onion. It was always tender and flavorful.

The hams were my grandfather’s domain, seasoned and hung in a room of the “little house,” the four room building where my grandparents “began housekeeping,” as my grandmother would say. They lived in this tiny house until their third child was born, when Papaw and his two sons built the two story, three bedroom house I first knew them in. Their fourth child, second daughter, was born here. By the time I came along, the little house was all storage. The back room to the left used to be the kitchen and was now furnished with saw horses under plywood for curing hams. Papaw piled salt, sugar and spices (I wish I had thought to ask more about this recipe because I loved his ham more than any I’ve had since) on the plywood and rolled the ham around in the pile, rubbing handfulls into the meat until it was entirely, thickly coated. Each ham was carefully hung with a rope tied around the ankle bone from a hook in the ceiling and left to cure.

At the end of our holiday, when each family said their goodbyes and drove down the gravel road toward the highway, our coolers were loaded with cuts of meat on ice and boxes or grocery bags filled with jars of meat, beans and jellies Mamaw had put aside for us. All of it was the best food I’ve ever had. As we drove away my grandparents stood in the driveway and waved to as long as they could see us. Not confined by seat belts, my brother, sister and I were on our knees facing backward waving back.

My mother didn’t have much talent with food, so I learned the old ways of cooking from my grandmother, and I will be forever grateful for that. I remember the very first time I saw her open a grocery store tin can of beans for supper. I chided her good-naturedly, but truly I was confused and disappointed. When she could produce the incredible food she had always served, why would she buy the same kind of factory produced green beans from a store that my mother artlessly served? At the time, she was delighted to have the convenience of not having to do all the work it took to grow and preserve those beans. I sadly remember a time when her large garden was reduced to a small spaces for just a few items.

From my grandfather, I learned that animals raised with care on pasture make the best meat and the best kind of farm life. But I also remember where there once were chickens and then an empty coop, eventually torn down; the hog pen thick with trees, empty of pigs, the fence taken down and a swing set put up near a chestnut tree. With only the two of them living on the farm, it all became a physically, and probably financially, unsustainable way of living. I believe there were cows until Papaw died. By that time my parents were also living at the farm, and my father had reopened a small section of the garden, more as a hobby than farming.

I’ve been told by a cousin that my grandparents would be proud of my attempt at small scale farming. My first thought was that they’d probably think I was nuts for setting myself up with all this work when there’s a grocery store up the street. But maybe they would be pleased by my efforts. I wonder if they would be baffled by the words organic and sustainable that describe a way of life that they took for granted. I like to think that they would be appalled by the poisons that go into our food, the disgusting ways meat animals are raised, the horrible lives of warehoused laying hens. I feel very lucky for the experiences they gave me that taught me how food can be produced with respect and care for the land, the soil and the animals. I appreciate the fact that, through their example, I know I can produce and preserve much of my own food and how to do it.

My brother with a pig head.