Picked them up Friday morning from the locker who killed and scalded them that Monday. Six hogs live weight 325-330. Hanging weight 260-265.



Started cutting heads and hocks off and getting them spread out to stay cool.



Also cutting jowls off to be cured.

What do you do with the heads? I saw a hog head in the grocery store a few months ago, which is weird because they've never carried them before.

I remember I was about 4 years old, my neighbor up the road had 3 pigs. He had a son my age and we'd play regularly. The pigs were big old bastards but to us they were basically pets.

Never understood they were there to be butchered. One day we're playing in the road next to the pen and his dad come out with a rile , doesn't say boo to either one of us, shoots all 3 pigs in the head. He then picks them up by their feet with a boom and slits their throats.

That was my introduction to how the sausage was made.

between that and being chased by a headless chicken around the yard after my grandmother just lopped it off for Sunday dinner, 4 years old was crash course to living in the country.

Head, hock, tongue and hearts into the kettle to be cooked off the bone.



Once cooking was completed picked clean off the bone and then added a lobe of liver, oatmeal and spices. Then ran through the grinder and into cloth sacks. Then back into the kettle for 15 minutes to cook the liver through.

The daughter was shocked when we killed a calf this morning.
Everything on the farm is her personal pet, till it's not...

Lard, scrapple, puddin'?




Sad on my post,
So that's basically scrapple in bags?
Cultural difference here.

looks good

make any scrapple or head cheese?

Saturday morning had my Brother in law and my two boys and son in law starting to break them down. Sorry no pics. Basically break them down for chops, bacon front shoulder for pork steaks and hams. Everything else is trimming for sausage.

After all the hogs were broken down, they go to the ladies to do their magic.





Curing hams

Heads make good tamales!

this

Nice set up!

Blue ribbon thread, really enjoy this kind of thing.


Cabeza taco's , freakin' rock.

Sunday morning, last thing is to render the lard.

In 1956 my grandfather in Bristol VA had two plow horses and no tractor, no electricity, and no running water.
He paid to have someone else slaughter his hogs.

In 1996 the wife and I in Snohomish WA were engineers.
We paid to have someone else slaughter our hogs.

Hocks and feet’s are good in the crock pot

Cracklins!
MMMMMMMMmmmmmm!

We are about a month away from killing our 4 Duroc’s . One a piece for our house and each of the three kids. I just bought enough AC Legg sausage seasoning for 200 pounds of meat.
Crappie , what is your cure for the hams .? I plan on salt curing some and some bacon too.

BP, I’ll post it up later tonight.

On the sausage.

I don't mix seasoning with ground until we are ready to eat sausage. I think it tastes a little better and honestly think it will keep a little longer in the fridge after thawing. Just weigh out a few ounces once my ground is thawed, mix in and either cook right then or the next morning.

Also leaves the option open to use ground meat for whatever. We rarely eat ground beef, substitute pork instead.

You will never have a better meatloaf than a 50/50 pork and venison.

Getting ready to grind 150# of pork today. The local grocery had Boston Butts on sale for $.99 a pound, no limit. Pretty cheap eating.

I may go buy another 25-50# for smoking if there are any left this evening.

I'd be making some lardo too!

Twenty years ago, between Dad’s family and his cousins family, we’d do 12 or 14 every year over Thanksgiving Weekend.
We’d pop them in the noggin with a .22 Magnum, slit their throat and winch them on to the bed of Dad’s rollback.
It was always a big family thing, with over 2 dozen sons, daughters, spouses and kids working together to get them scalded, scraped and butchered, hopefully by early Saturday so we’d have time that weekend to shoot our rifles in for Monday’s first day of buck season.
Lotta work, but a lot of great memories too.
Wish we still did stuff like this, but over the years, the patriarchs died out, and the families got more spread out, and the tradition sorta fell through the floorboards.
As I said before, I’ve always felt that I was very lucky to be part of this, but the times are a changing.
( I sometimes wonder if I could remember enough to do the butchering now, and the kids, Ben and my nephews and nieces would remember enough to help, or would they be in the road Mosta the time?
I sometimes think that maybe an EMP or some catastrophe wouldn’t be such a bad thing, as it might teach us again to rely on ourselves and our families more.
Christ, I sound like an old man!
7mm

I bet not many people know what actual cracklins from rendering lard tastes like.

This is the crackling bucket so far. These get frozen in bags for Scooby snacks for the labs. Mucho better than the China crap you see in the stores.

find bp gas station near me

Don’t you have a lard press?

I do have an old enterprise lard press but don’t go through the hassle. I don’t need all the lard I’m getting, give quite a bit away.

Yield looks to be about 9 gallon off of the chunk and another 3 gallon of leaf lard.

Lard press/stuffer

Chittlings and paunch is fine delicacy cleaned and cooked right

Damn good.


Next day, all that fat can make holding a turd tough!😉


Hmmmm?
Bet some of our "members" struggle with that regularly.😁😁😁😁

In the rural east, killing hogs was an annual November deal with neighbors pitching in until the community had things wrapped up.

Cracklings! Worked a small cut plant just out of high school. Cracklings were bagged and tossed atop the bins in the freezer rooms amounting to tonnage over the year. Around Thanksgiving their availability would be announced, and they'd be gone by lunch time. Really go good in cornbread.

Nobody has hogs anymore around where I live. Used to be everywhere. My Mother in Law used to make souse every year from the heads. Never liked the stuff myself. My Grandparents made it too.

thought this thread was going to be about burns.

Now that's funny !!!!

According to burns, every thread is about him.

Crappie Killer
Cool thread. Thanks for posting it

Grew up helping my Dad butchering both Hogs and Beef on the Farm. Seems like a lifetime ago but learned a ton of butchering ability. He also cut up Deer locally to make extra bucks. My job was to skin all that were brought in, then to help with the butchering. Got to be hard to find someone who smoked Hams and Bacon, so he built his own Smoker.

Wifeys grand dad used brown sugar salt mix and poured red pepper on top to ward off the rats on jowls and side meat.

Lost art and tradition

The gathering of a family part is great too

There’s 4 generations of women in that room. You just don’t walk in there and start barking orders

Always loved to hear the old timers talk about butchering hogs.
I talked to a lot of them about it.
Hogs fed this country from the beginning up through the 50’s at least.

An old feller I knew came from a family of eight. Six kids plus parents.
He said they had two Jersey milk cows. Knowing they couldn’t drink it all, I asked what they did with all that milk.
He said what they didn’t use they fed to the hogs. He said they loved it; made em’ so fat they could hardly walk.
Totally different living today.

Hell no!


Them old hens are so busy barking you don't have a chance!

dassa, Wrong you are thinking about deflave, he is a ex-spert on every thing, just ask him when he's sober which is not to often.Rio7

So did we on the smoker. We made a shanty about 4’ x 6’, mounted on a skid so we could move it.
It looked so much like a schithouse, that The Old Man cut a fake half moon in the door!
But you could hang hams and bacon in there, and put the bottom of a 55 gal drum with smoldering hickory and apple wood on the floor.
Shut the door and forget it for a couple days.
We’d soak cuts of deer in a saltwater brine, and then hang them in there too.
After it’d smoked a while, we’d use a store bought slicer to carve it up.
Beats the heck outta store bought jerky.
7mm

I feel sorry for those people. I'll butcher a hog after Christmas along with a couple of late season Iowa whitetails

Good to see you post Selmer.

I remember growing up, my dad loved pork brains and scrambled eggs for breakfast. I never tried it. Also, we had to saw the pork head in two so Grandma could get the brains out and then make "head cheese" from the rest of the meat on the skull.

G23

Head cheese is killer.

My grandparents did a hog and sausage every year. I remember when I was about 9 my uncles couldn’t figure out which ammo to use to shoot it (I know now it was a 22). My grandfather had spent hours sharpening his jackknife and said “We don’t need a gun.” He straddled that hog, grabbed it under the jaw and slit it from ear to ear. Gawd, that hog made a racket!!!

I was still dating my first wife when we did our last hog. She saw them cutting up the meat, walked into the dining room and saw a large pan with a tee towel over it. She lifted the towel and had the hog’s head staring back at her. I still remember the yelp she made.

When I was young the people in the small town I grew up in Said: When Caroline butchered a hog all she threw away was the squeal. That lady was my grandmother. We butcher all our own game and I'm pretty much the same way. We haven't bought any beef in many years and we eat lots of red meat.
Had our end of big game season elk chili feed tonight, the 2 young guys I took hunting this year and their ladies and kids, all had a great time. Unfortunately my son who killed 3 deer this year with me was back home in WA.

There's pretty much a use for everything a hog has to offer......except the oink.......

"So.....just exactly what all goes into your BBQ hash Maurice?"

"Everything except the oink!"

We have a chitlin festival down here......not saying I've ever had one.

A good friend and his dad would go to butcher shops to buy hog heads. It had to be scalded and scraped. They’d roast it whole in the oven until done and have a feast off it. The tongue is lean meat, the jaw is like bacon they say. My friend loves the ears for some reason I can’t fathom. Dad was eating a mouthful of brain and found a 38 slug once. The only part not really eaten is the roof of the mouth, eye lids and maybe the eye balls but they might be on the menu. I’ll pass on most of that, thank you very much.

I've never tried chitlins either. 30 yrs or so ago, my FIL drove 3 hrs to Sally for the Chitlin Festival. Stood in line for 2 hours to get a plate. Took one bite and threw it in the trashcan. Drove home. He's 90 now and we still kid him about it.

The pigs got a 22 to the head when my mother was a girl in the 1930s.
The pigs got a 22 to the head when my daughter was a girl in the 1990s.

For a long time, an old town, these days just a wide spot in the road, named Gastonburg, AL, hosted a mountain oyster and chitlin festival. It was known as the Nuts and Guts Festival. Somewhere around here I still have the tee shirt.

This is a picture of love, and it's what modern so-called life has killed.

Our hunt club put on a pig picking on new years back in the day.....normally we would reserve a split spine hog from a local processor, but one year we forgot. We had to buy a medium live hog and dress it ourselves.

A local 85 year gentleman and his wife with much experience in the matter agreed to host the process. Tub of scalding water was prepared to prep the pig for removing hair. The process for putting the pig down was for me to restrain the animal by grabbing the hind legs while a 22LR was centered thru the forehead. The elderly gentleman then slammed a ball-peen hammer to the same location, then follow that with a deep slashing of the throat with a 12" knife. We let the pig bleed out for 20-30 minutes.....about 2 beers.

The pig eventually died from drowning once we tossed it into the tub where it decided to come to life, about a 4 minute struggle to survive under water.

It's about the most cruel thing I ever imagined being done to animal.

And as if that wasn't bad enough, the processed pig had to be kept in a chest freezer that wasn't comfortably big enough until we were to begin prepping for the bbq. So it was contorted in order to fit, in which case, when we took it out to that it resembled the very mangled nightmare we put it through.......just an awful sight.

Good chance it was shot between the eyes?

That doesn't work well.


As a youngster I saw a hog "stuck" once.

Some Polish dude, a friend of a cousin, wanted the blood for
blood pudding. They got a loop around the hogs back leg, over a beam,
And hoisted it up. The "Pro" then cut it's throat. Catching blood in a pitcher
while the hog squealed, blew blood, sucked blood and swung around.

It wasn't pretty, it wasn't quick.

I will never watch that again.

Crappie Killer, good thread and great pics.

Brings back memories of my childhood.

I remember my grandparents, parents, uncles and neighbors going at it. I'm sure I was in the way all day!

Those peaple didn't waste anything back then.

When I was a kid I watched a friend's father put more than a couple of 22 rounds in a hogs head before it went down. I was like damn man kill the damn hog already.

Peter Burns?