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From: Bill Utterback <>
Subject: Dr. Gordon Wilson - "Passing Institutions" - 'The Smokehouse'
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 19:04:51 -0500


My friends -

I am again checking in with the List, as my wife and I continue the process
of moving to another residence. Time has allowed me to prepare another
essay from those of the late Dr. Gordon Wilson, the great storyteller who
was born and grew to manhood in New Concord in Calloway County.

This selection is entitled, 'The Smokehouse', and is from Dr. Wilson's
little book, "Passing Institutions". In reading this piece, one can almost
smell and taste the exquisite scents and meats which emanated from the old
smokehouse.

My posts will continue to be irregular until our move is completed, which
we hope will be no later than 1 November.

-B
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THE SMOKEHOUSE
-Dr.
Gordon Wilson
"Passing
Institutions"

Armour, Swift, and others may have a knack at saving all the pig, including
the squeal, but they have almost destroyed a great institution, the
smokehouse. The old smokehouse has left a fragrant memory, literally. In
some modern homes there is a special lumber room; we old-timers made the
smokehouse bear the burden, along with the loft, or attic, the loft over
the buggy-shed, and the large space under the corn-crib. Meat, of course,
was the chief thing to be found in a smokehouse; that was its reason for
being. But meat was not all. Soap grease in many a container, a barrel or
two of lye soap, canned and preserved fruit, jars or cans of lard, sausage
in sacks, sauerkraut in barrels or jars, and so on and on--these were the
distinctive contents of the smokehouse. No hold of a sea-going vessel ever
held a more motley or useful array of things to eat and use. And everything
had its odor: the rank, acid odor of soap grease; the alkaline smell of lye
soap; the thick, rich odor of sauerkraut; and the indescribably fine smell
of ham and bacon and smoked sausage. And, from the wood smoke that had been
used to cure the meat, everything had in addition that true, smoky,
smokehousy odor that every farm boy knows.

How often the smokehouse figured in the life of the people! It was
carefully locked up every night to keep its treasures from being stolen. It
was a sort of sign that the day's work was over when Mother began to wash
the supper dishes and called the youngest boy to see whether the smokehouse
were locked. When bitter weather came on, nobody feared starvation, for the
old smokehouse was at hand, stocked as for a famine. Even if coffee and
sugar did run low when the roads were too bad for freight to be hauled, the
old standby was always to be relied on.

Hog-killing was the great event in the life of the building. It then
assumed a position really worthy of a great institution. Long before day we
were up heating water and irons for the great day. We planted the scalding
barrel and made a platform on which to scrape the hogs after they had been
scalded, not even forgetting the grass sack over the mouth of the barrel to
keep in the heat of the water and that added by the red-hot irons. When
everything was ready, the butchering began. You pale-faced and anemic ones
must not feel that there was anything brutal about this event; it was just
a necessary thing, time-honored and romantic. By the time the hogs were
killed, some of the older men took out some irons from the fire and dashed
them into the barrel. Such sizzling and popping; and how the steam rose
into the cold winter air! Then came the scalding and scraping, followed by
hanging up the heavy bodies. After these were thoroughly dressed, it was
usually time for dinner. While we ate, the meat assumed a firmer condition,
so that cutting out the pieces--a great art in those days --was greatly
facilitated. During the afternoon the pieces of meat lay in the smokehouse,
getting cold through and through, while the family busied itself with lard
and sausage. The neighbors who had helped departed, carrying spare ribs,
backbones, livers, and hearts. I wish I were a poet, so that I could tell
about the process of making sausage. The old sausage mill was a fearful
thing, as many a man with whittled fingers can tell. These new-fangled
food-choppers were then unknown. And how good the smell of sage and red
pepper when they were ready to add to the tubful of sausage! And how
opulent looked the house with its great sacks of sausage ready to be hung
up in the smokehouse! And the strange mystery of cooking lard, and how much
art it required to keep it from boiling over and scorching! And, my, again,
how good cracklings and salt are, and crackling bread! But rhapsodies must
stop, for the meat must be salted down.

Lantern in hand, the small boy accompanied his father to the smokehouse
after supper and acted as helper by handing salt and joints of meat, while
the father busied himself in burying each joint of meat in a great white
bed of salt. Of course, the boy rained volleys of questions as he watched
the dancing shadows from the old lantern. Anything took on greater poetry
when lighted with a lantern, whether it was salting down the meat, or
shucking corn after supper, or carrying slop to the pigs. This salting was
another art, for it was regarded as almost shiftless when anyone lost his
meat after it had gone through all the interesting and standardized process
attendant upon hogkilling.

Six weeks or more the meat lay wrapped up in salt. Then the old smokehouse
took on some more importance: now the meat must be taken up from the salt,
scalded to remove excess salt, and dusted with borax. Sometimes we did a
fancy kind of curing by coating the hams with sorghum molasses and black
pepper and then enclosing them in cloth sacks. Smoking the meat was now the
thing for days. Chips again played a part. This chip fire in the smokehouse
was a sort of sacred thing: it betokened that the family was again
provisioned for the winter, that starvation could not make any headway on
this farm.

Meat now occupied its proportionate share of the building; by degrees the
smoked sausage disappeared, and the less valuable pieces of meat. The hams,
prized possessions then and now wherever the country ham is known, stayed
on longest, cut into only for real company. Early in the spring the
building had other uses. The soap grease was taken out, to return the next
day as lye soap. In late summer the sauerkraut was made and brought in and
stored in barrels or earthenware jars. And all through the summer we added
jars of canned fruit and glasses of jelly and preserves. Every season was
the season for the old smokehouse.

But where is the smokehouse? Gone with the ash-hopper and soft soap, gone
with wood ashes and the open fireplace, gone with horse-and-buggy days,
gone with preaching all day and dinner on the ground, gone with the front
room and the family album. Milton imagined a place called the Limbo, where
chimerical things went when they vanished from the earth. Why not a Limbo
of Passing Institutions, where we shall see and know the things we have
outlived, the things that are fragrant with memories of days long since
vanished?

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