In my grandfather's time, fall butchering was vital to survival. And, as an important event, it became a big event.
Several neighboring families would bring their butcher animals to one family's farm where task became festivity. Butchering meat is a complex job - skinning, dipping, gutting, and cutting are the initial tasks, tasks that call for an all-hands-on approach.
But to turn these meats into delicious cuts that would last the winter and into the spring, secondary, specialized tasks like salting hams, rendering lard, smoking bacon, and making sausages were needed. Individuals were often known for one skill or another, and their cured meats or summer sausage were known throughout the county.
As the years went by and times changed, these fall butchering events slowly faded, losing their meaning as grocery stores and butcher shops became mainstream. It was a thing nearly lost to history until the farm crisis. Starting when I was about ten in the late 1970s, money got tight and November became memorable for one thing besides Thanksgiving. Every year--if we could afford it--we would butcher a pig and a steer of our own for the freezer.
It may be that those days had something to do with my later becoming a butcher. But what I mainly remember is cold hands and it seeming like no one knew what they were doing. My job was to wrap the various cuts and label the said packages; on more than one occasion I was handed meat chunks to label simply as "mystery roast."
No one in my family may have been very good at butchering--the skills skipped a generation and we were doing the best we could. Yet in my work as first a chef and later a butcher, I relearned much of the knowledge that had been lost, artisanal techniques common in my grandparents' day but absent from my parent's generation.
Today, fall is still the season of bounty. Farmers hurry to clear fields of crops and get the grain into storage before the weather ruins the harvest. Local meat lockers take over the burden of slaughtering, butchering, identifying, and wrapping any whole animals a farm produces.
But few understand the ways to further process cuts, like drying meats or making sausage. To me sausage making stuffs together the arts of cooking and butchery, packing them into a tasty little mastery I enjoy sharing.
With our new building finally ready, I'm bringing back tradition and inviting our dear supporters to join in. I will be staging my first Whippoorwill Creek Farm sausage making class on November 18th. If you'd like to join, click here for more information.
I've done quite a few of these classes in San Francisco and even one at the Iowa State Fair last summer. But this will be my first in our new building, and I'm pretty excited about it. I hope you can join us for some of the tastiest hijinks and hilarity you will ever have the pleasure of participating in.