PEA RIDGE — Last week I was scalding and peeling tomatoes for a dinner and that was what sent me down memory lane about the corn. I’ve run those days past my mind all week.
I never minded the assembly line for peaches and tomatoes because the scalding was already done for me, and I would work up a big dishpan of warm tomatoes in cold water. They had already started to slip their skins. I always ate too many peaches and remember the rolling stomach, but I’d do it every time! The corn was always a one-time thing, but some things were worked up several times.
Next to corn, my least favorite was dressing chickens. Mom would go behind the cove and wring the necks of four of them and leave them to flop while she carried her buckets of boiling water. She could pluck two of them in the same water. Then they were turned over the line.
There were usually a couple of neighbor women and everybody’s was done in oneday. This was a once-a-yearthing like the corn.
Mom could pluck them as fast as we could work them up if we could keep getting boiling water to her. Legs and wings were thrown in one tub of cold water. Liver, heart and gizzards in another. Mom always wanted the breast bones broken in half so my sister and I never got to play the game of pulling and wishing and breaking a wish bone. I wasn’t strong enough to break them, so someone else had to do mine.
I was always thankful, when I would get home from country school and realize it was “cut up meat day,” that I didn’t have to help. That involved a lot of newspapers, old worn out sheets, sharp knives being constantly resharpened, a couple of hatchets and hand saws. The bigjobs were done on the table and work bench in the wash house and the rest of it on the kitchen table. The actual butchering would have been done several days or weeks ahead of time, depending on how cold it stayed. Dad would sit in the barn door and wait for a clean shot, then jump down and cut them for a clean bleed. There were always two, so four halves hung from the rafters in the aisle of the corn crib while they chilled out. Different cuts of frozen meat would be taken off as needed for meals until someone would decide it was time to work it up.
Mom and Dad would work together grinding the sausage and cooking the fat to run it through the lard press.
Again, I would eat and make myself sick on the cracklings. The sausage would be fried down in a big iron skillet on the wood stove in the wash house, then Mom would stack them in gallon jars and pour the boiling lard over them. When they cooled, they had to be pried out ofthe cold lard to use, but they kept forever as long as the lard stayed solid.
Dad would have already prepared two barrels of salt brine to put hams and some of the bacon down. I don’t know what the brine was. It was bought in gallon bags of powder. He had to keep stirring it as we carried buckets of water to him and it was prepared and stirred several days ahead. I know the meat had to be kept covered, but I don’t remember how long.
Our hams and bacons were never smoked like Bill Fergeson’s. Dad said it was because we didn’t have a smoke house and he didn’t have time and wouldn’t cut a perfectly good hickory tree for it.
I was raised on pork chops, fresh side meat and “sow belly” was my favorite sandwich to take to school.
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Editors note: Edith Lammey has been a resident of the area for nearly 40 years. She can be contacted through The Times at 451-1196 or [email protected].
Opinion, Pages 4 on 08/15/2012