The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 79, July 1975 - April, 1976 Page: 184
528 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
the "leaf lard." The "leaf lard" was fat that wasn't too definitely attached
to any part of the anatomy, but sort of floated around inside the hog. It
could be readily separated from whatever it was next to.
Some of our neighbors scrubbed out hog intestines and used them later
as casings for the sausage; but our family did not do this. After the "in-
nards" had meticulously culled over, Mama would tell us to carry them off.
Accordingly, the kids would carry the "tub of guts" down into the field
as far away from the house as possible, and in a day or so the buzzards
would have had their feast.
As the innards were gone over, the hog bladder was carefully saved. The
kids would blow it up, tie off the hole, and now we had a six- or eight-inch
ball that would last us several days if we did not kick it too hard.
Even the most carefully inflated and tied off hog bladder would deflate
to some extent after a day or two. One cold winter night, for some reason
or other, I put the semi-deflated bladder near a hot stove and to my happy
amazement it became tightly inflated. I called Papa's attention to the ap-
parent miracle and he seemed equally surprised. I envisioned a revived and
well-inflated hog bladder to play with, but my spirits deflated with the
bladder as it cooled and went back limp. As a boy of some ten years, I had
observed a variation of Boyles's law, demonstrated by a hog bladder and hot
stove. However, it was seven or eight years later before I was formally in-
troduced to Boyles's law in college physics.
Now back to the hog killing. The carcass would now be slit in half and
laid out flat, typically on the sideboards from a wagon. Papa and his neigh-
bors would then carve out spare ribs, bacon slabs, hams, and backbones.
Nothing was wasted.
The leaner trimmings we cooked up into "sauss"-not "sauce." Some of
the other leaner trimmings, including part of the head, were cooked up into
"hogs head cheese." The meat itself would be hung up to be chilled over
night.
As the day wore on, the excitement would die down. Mama would pro-
duce carefully washed flower sacks and Papa would offer the assisting
neighbors spare ribs, backbones, or perhaps a shoulder. Of course, the
neighbors and their wives would protest that they neither wanted nor
expected any portion of the pork, but always their protests died down and
they would go back home with generous supplies of fresh pork.
That night we would have large helpings of fresh spare ribs and corn-
bread washed down with sweetmilk, buttermilk, or clabber. After all these
forty or fifty years, I still have no trouble recalling that even a wildly active
farm boy could get sick on fresh pork. However, such overindulgence wasI84
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 79, July 1975 - April, 1976, periodical, 1975/1976; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101203/m1/216/: accessed May 3, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.