Connecting with History: Pork

I used to wish that I had been born 200 years earlier.

I would have made a fantastic pioneer.

With age comes wisdom. I have learned to appreciate that there are many blessings that come from living in this age of information technology and relative human rights awareness that I would not have had access to if I had been born long ago.

But I still like to do things the old way. Time has taught me that the more you work for something, the more you appreciate it.

The soapstone will radiate heat from the morning fire the rest of the day.

I don't care how much work it is heating my house by burning fire in my masonry heater. There is no cozier feeling than sitting in front of a cheerful fire on a cold winter morning after coming in from milking the cows.

I insist on growing a garden. It would be a lot easier to buy veggies from the store or farmers' market, but there is a deep sense of pride and independence that comes from plunging my hand into the earth and pulling out a potato, that I cherish. I wouldn't trade that.

We haven't used a bar of soap in 15 years that was not made by me.

I love to eat a meal that is completely home grown. The centerpiece of most of our meals is pork. Pork has a long history of being the staple meat of farming families. Pigs are easy to raise on table scraps and extra milk and hay from the cows. One pig is just the right size to feed a family for a year. They are adaptable animals. And they taste SO GOOD.

I saw a picture of my great grandfather on the farm in Utah with a 400 pound pig hanging that they had just slaughtered. I know what happened next.

The men folk got busy with the heavy work of scalding and scraping the hide and breaking the carcass down into halves. The next day, neighbors came to cut up the chilled carcass into smaller, manageable pieces of meat that could be salted and preserved for the winter. Each man would take home a cut such as a rack of ribs as his portion for having lent a hand.

The women busied themselves collecting fat and rendering it into lard. The leaf lard would be saved for making pastries. The back fat would be used for soap, general cooking, and sealing jars of cooked meat for the cellar.

Over the next couple of days much of the meat was dry salted or brined, and after it had cured, bacon and hams were put to smoke so that they would keep all winter.

I butcher a pig or two every year. Some things I do the same that they did back then. I time the slaughter so that it's cold enough at night to chill the carcass but not so cold that it freezes. I have favorite cuts that I preserve by salting. I don't do that out of necessity, but because when you marry pork with salt and give the union time, magic happens. Cured meat is melt in your mouth tender and the taste is like nothing else.

Salty, sweet, and crispy. Home made bacon is usually thicker cut and more robust than the stuff you buy in the store.

Home made maple bacon... well... if you haven't tried it, you just don't know what you are missing.

Some things I do different than they did. I'm grateful to have power saws because hand sawing through all those bones is exhausting! Some of the cuts I keep in the freezer so I can pull them out later and make them into favorites like pulled pork or a juicy cider brined roast.

One of my favorite parts of butchering is teaching other people to butcher. I learned how to cut up deer in our garage with my dad when I was little. Being able to harvest your own meat is not hard, but it's a task that most people are intimidated by because they don't know where to start. People leave my class with new knowledge and confidence and less reliance on the system.

Teaching someone how to break down a carcass into cuts for the freezer.

Some of the people who purchase whole or half hogs from me buy pork by the side not only because they want meat that was raised clean and on pasture, but because they want to have the freedom to make things from the cuts that you just can't do if you are stuck buying standard packages at the grocery store.

Some of my customers are just as crazy as I am; they come to slaughter the pig and do the butchery themselves.

Others opt for sending it to a butcher. Sure, if they want the butcher to take care of making bacon, they can choose that. But if they want to do it themselves, they can. Or if they want to make guanciale out of the jowls, or cappicola out of the coppa, they can. It connects them with their food in a way that buying mass produced, factory raised meat can't.

We are lucky to live in a time and place that allows us to enjoy the best of both worlds. If you want the convenience of electricity, go for it! You can choose the profession you want--which is increasingly true even for women and people of all ethnicities. I am grateful for vehicles that take me where I want to go (although I still have to be home in time for evening milk chores...).

There are so many good traditions that we can keep as we enjoy modern conveniences. So much of the old ways are timeless and frankly, better than their modern counterparts.

Every time I rub salt onto a piece of pork I feel connected to the past. I feel like I am carrying on old traditions that still have value in our modern lives. Convenience needs to take a back seat, sometimes, to timeless skills.

Click here to reserve your half hog.

A coppa on its way to transforming into mouth watering cappicola.

What aspect of old fashioned living do you think we should keep alive?