Hog: Part 1

Here's the hog hanging in the garage. The slaughterer left the halves attached at the bottom and at the top so it wouldn't flop apart when my parents sawed it into sixths.

My dad is cutting the chine bone out with a twenty-dollar reticulating saw so that it'll be easier to separate the ribs into chops. My mom almost lost her arm at least twice. My folks don't always wear matching red shirts:

In the foreground are the ribs, which have been separated from the bacon and the part of the ribs you use for chops. My mom is trimming fat, I think. That's a big pile of it next to the lard pot:

Chops ready for the freezer:


Sausage being made. The gray stuff off to the left is the liver, which Mom and Dad froze for later use in liverwurst. The white stuff is fat, of course, some of which went into the sausage and some of which was rendered for lard. The KitchenAid meat grinder/sausage stuffer attachment worked really well. It started to heat up at about pound twelve, but how often does a person want to make more than twelve pounds of sausage anyway?


This is andouille (salt, cracked pepper, garlic, cayenne, thyme), which Dad smoked the next day:

Breakfast of pann haas, fried in bacon fat. We made about ten loaves of it:

The hams were all that was left to take care of as it was getting light outside (we were all up with the bug at 3:30 that morning and just went ahead and started the job, so it was pretty much done by noon). After the bulk of the butchering was over, Dad put a fresh piece of cardboard underneath the hook just in case he got a deer that evening. In fact, he had one in his sights later, but decided to let it live. As he said, that deer was lucky we'd just butchered a whole hog.