BEEF, PORK, AND LOVE; but the greatest of these is love.
Essay on my family's annual butchering event, written for a food issue of a literary magazine Francis is putting together.
*****
BEEF, PORK, AND LOVE; but the greatest of these is love.
*
My sister, a vegetarian of thirteen years, walked into the garage and stopped. She held a knife; we were able-bodied adults and were needed. The pig was on its back on an upside-down trough, its legs tucked up high, pink and rounded. We butcher in the winter to preserve the meat, but that means the animals, dead all of five minutes, steam copiously into the December air. "My dog lays like that sometimes," she muttered to me, readjusting her grip on the knife. Deep breath.
Christmas is important, but Butchering, that four-day event directly after, is sacred. This is not an unusual thing back homeward, although it seems families scale back more and more over the years. We have definitely scaled back: we no longer make lard; we don't save and scrape out the intestines for sausage, buying premade casings instead; we don't boil down the bones to make scrapple, that delightfully Dutchy meat by-product of suspicious origins. We raised chickens when I was young, but they just weren't worth the bother. Family tradition is important, but it only goes so far when dealing with us practical Pennsylvania Germans. We buy our chicken at the store now, like most Americans.
But the cow and the three pigs, whichever make it out of the stall first, these are the constant, even more essential than the overabundance of dessert and the annual scuffle over how much coriander to put in the sausage. Four days straight of constant family members coming and going from my grandparents’ crooked log-cabin farmhouse, of endless piles of dishes to be washed, of grabbing handfuls of cookies with hands only perfunctorily wiped on fat-smeared hand-stitched aprons. It is a special holiday disguised as everyday life; it is the perfect venue to spend time living alongside cousins, aunts, and uncles seen too rarely. That we get a yearful of meat out of the process is the point, even as it is beside the point.
I have not yet made it out to the barnyard early on Killing Day: I've tried twice now, and each time get out there around 8 in the morning, meet my uncle and a cousin-in-law or two. They pick up their guns and say, "Well, let's do this," and I say, "Uhhm... maybe I'll just meet you in the garage for the skinning." Maybe next year.
I haven't quite teased out the reason I feel it's so important for me to participate in this part of the process too, rather than contenting myself with the meat-wrapping like many of my other girl cousins. Partially it’s because my uncle, the sole remaining farmer in the family, is getting older with none of my own generation looking to step up to the plate; partially it's because I feel this is a rare opportunity to really see where my food comes from, from start to finish.
I also want to be out in that barnyard because of the individualism that's been bred into me, a stubborn PA-Dutch self-reliance as ingrained as my polite-yet-distant approach to strangers, my unstated Protestantism. There is a rural allure in being able to say with clear certainty, Yes, in the case of Apocalypse, I can feed myself.
It's more than that, too. I take joy in pulling a crude white package of family-farm meat out of the freezer, the same way I take joy in the scarf my sister knit me, the journal I hand-bound. It's about creating something I can use, with my own hands, and finding meaning in the process. In this way, Butchering is another form of Craftsmanship, just... bloody.
Back in the garage, we start at the hooves, slicing a shallow ring around the first knuckle and then drawing a line down the back of the leg towards the rump. The first time I skinned a cow, slicing and peeling, I overcame my kneejerk revulsion to delight in thinking, so this is why leather feels the way it does. Ideally there are four of us skinning, one on each limb, with my uncle tending to the head. We haul the animal up by its back legs with a winch, finish skinning, and then stand around and munch freshly baked cookies while my uncle eviscerates it. Family bonding in farm country.
***
I went through a period where I was embarrassed to mention that my family butchers its own meat, knowing it marked me as the country girl I am, thinking any civilized society would be shocked at an educated girl being part of so base a process. Except in the past few years, after moving out of the area and realizing what I’d left behind, I’ve discovered how to take pride in slotting myself into this root of my own food origins. The people who are shocked don’t have any business picking up those saran-wrapped Styrofoam trays of beef at the grocery store, I decided. This is the reality of eating meat: the animal must be killed and butchered. If we can do it ourselves, have control over the process, all the better - especially if we can make some traditions along the way.
The traditions pile up alongside the freezer packs. As steak-cutting and hamburger-grinding happens in the basement, there is an equal contingent of wrappers directly upstairs in the kitchen. We divvy up the pans of pork chops and hamburger into 3 or 4 person servings, and pass them around to be swaddled in white freezer paper. The younger kids rip masking tape, and the youngest draw and learn to write on the blank slates that are the finished packages. We mark the year, the destination family, and what’s inside. Far too often someone forgets what they’ve been wrapping, so it’s not unusual to later find an indiscriminately lumpy package in the freezer that says, “BEEF SURPRISE.”
The first of my generation to get married, my cousin Amanda, got a special treat her first Butchering into wedlock. My aunts, creatively inspired just like us kids, wrote recipes in Sharpie on the blank packs. On a package of round steak came a list of vegetables for Beef Stew; on a hunk of hamburger, the recipe for Stroganoff. We write notes to each other, to be found months from now (“Hi Aunt Linda!” or “LARGE T-bone, for when Susan and Ben are visiting!”). Another reason to avoid the Styrofoam trays: I pull out a pack of sausage and recognize my aunt Debbie’s handwriting, and it’s a reminder of this network we are for each other.
***
"Well... what do you think?" Uncle Dennis asked, rotating a large hunk of cow and squinting in concentration.
"Um," I said.
This past year, Dennis, my Godfather, lent me his copy of Basic Butchering of Livestock and Game, in reaction to the active interest I took the previous year. I called myself his apprentice, helped him haul sides of pork and decide where to cut the T-bones. I had no idea what I was doing, and Dennis, for all that he had done this multiple times, was not an expert. Once a year is not often enough to learn as esoteric a trade as butchering, and he has his crops and his livestock always on his mind. My aunt Debbie, Dennis’ wife, confided that the night before Killing Day Dennis stayed up late at the kitchen table, poring over the diagrams, trying to memorize where to slip the knife, reminding himself how to avoid nicking the intestines.
We wound up with odd-looking hunks and tried to come up with purposes for them. My mother, checking in on us, laughed, "Cows don’t actually have those dotted lines, do they?" When in doubt, we passed bits onward to the small army of aunts, uncles, and cousins boning out, meaning cutting these parts into small mostly-defatted chunks for grinding into sausage and hamburger. What we could we ran through a bandsaw, flecks of pink tallow spitting out in the steak-cutting. It is all very unglamorous, and perplexing, and makes me love my uncle even more than I already do. He steps up to do this vague thing because he is needed to.
The book made even gutting seem dull, full of phrases like, “Carefully tie off the bung.” More interesting to me were the notes my uncle scrawled, trying to refresh his knowledge from 360 days ago; and the varying sausage-recipe cards that fell out as I flipped through. This year we tried maple sausage in addition to the standard batch; one year we tried filling the rusty metal smokehouse with hickory wood. We fry up a few test patties when we think we have the sausage mixed properly, pass around bites and uncles chew thoughtfully before commenting, “Could use more black pepper.” That first bite of sausage, hardly three days out of the animal, is my favorite bite of meat the whole year through, astoundingly fresh and flavorful, relatively lean and thickly formed, familiar spices tasting like Sunday morning brunches of my childhood. I am not much of a meat connoisseur, but that bit of fresh sausage alone is a very strong argument to avoid vegetarianism.
I carefully replaced the recipe cards and returned the book, completely overwhelmed at how much knowledge goes into a hamburger. Knowing I will ask to borrow the book again in another eleven months, just as Dennis will pull it back out.
***
I don’t know who will take over Butchering in my own generation. That it might die off is unthinkable, so much that I would myself step up. Without an active farmer, though, we would have to buy the animals from someone else, and small family-owned farms are growing increasingly rare.
I have toyed with the idea of apprenticing on the farm with my uncle for a while, because while I know intellectually how difficult survival from the land is, I know I don’t truly understand it. But to be the one to actually take on that sort of life choice - I don’t think I can do that. My family and the farm are precious to me, even as I live 1200 miles away from them, and Butchering the most productive of family reunions. But there are so many things I want to do in my life, and even if learning how to butcher is one of them, I don’t think I am prepared to give up the rest. I am juggling what I have made for myself, my work and my education, with my birthright. I am caught between the progression of time and the static halt to it tradition brings, and I can’t see my way out.
I want to learn how to cut up an animal, but I would not want to do it more than this once a year, would not want to do it outside this rooted context. I want to do it because it has been done this way; I am rarely on the family farm, growing in the larger world outside our valley, but when I am home, I am ruled by tradition. I submit joyfully. I want to grow older with my cousins always gathering the way we have, with their children learning to write on the stacks of white-wrapped meat, with cows always in the barn and snow on the sledding hill, with always more dessert than we can possibly eat. I go away for the rest of the year, but I want to always come back this one week, for this one sacred act, to replenish our freezers and bond over the dishwashing. I am learning to find life in the act of sacrifice. And I want always to come across a happy note from a cousin jotted on a steak in the back of my freezer, and laugh delightedly in the heat of July, reminded of the tether that holds me to that valley, oddly thankful it takes the form of meat.
********
additional farm photos on my flickr.
*****
BEEF, PORK, AND LOVE; but the greatest of these is love.
*
My sister, a vegetarian of thirteen years, walked into the garage and stopped. She held a knife; we were able-bodied adults and were needed. The pig was on its back on an upside-down trough, its legs tucked up high, pink and rounded. We butcher in the winter to preserve the meat, but that means the animals, dead all of five minutes, steam copiously into the December air. "My dog lays like that sometimes," she muttered to me, readjusting her grip on the knife. Deep breath.
Christmas is important, but Butchering, that four-day event directly after, is sacred. This is not an unusual thing back homeward, although it seems families scale back more and more over the years. We have definitely scaled back: we no longer make lard; we don't save and scrape out the intestines for sausage, buying premade casings instead; we don't boil down the bones to make scrapple, that delightfully Dutchy meat by-product of suspicious origins. We raised chickens when I was young, but they just weren't worth the bother. Family tradition is important, but it only goes so far when dealing with us practical Pennsylvania Germans. We buy our chicken at the store now, like most Americans.
But the cow and the three pigs, whichever make it out of the stall first, these are the constant, even more essential than the overabundance of dessert and the annual scuffle over how much coriander to put in the sausage. Four days straight of constant family members coming and going from my grandparents’ crooked log-cabin farmhouse, of endless piles of dishes to be washed, of grabbing handfuls of cookies with hands only perfunctorily wiped on fat-smeared hand-stitched aprons. It is a special holiday disguised as everyday life; it is the perfect venue to spend time living alongside cousins, aunts, and uncles seen too rarely. That we get a yearful of meat out of the process is the point, even as it is beside the point.
I have not yet made it out to the barnyard early on Killing Day: I've tried twice now, and each time get out there around 8 in the morning, meet my uncle and a cousin-in-law or two. They pick up their guns and say, "Well, let's do this," and I say, "Uhhm... maybe I'll just meet you in the garage for the skinning." Maybe next year.
I haven't quite teased out the reason I feel it's so important for me to participate in this part of the process too, rather than contenting myself with the meat-wrapping like many of my other girl cousins. Partially it’s because my uncle, the sole remaining farmer in the family, is getting older with none of my own generation looking to step up to the plate; partially it's because I feel this is a rare opportunity to really see where my food comes from, from start to finish.
I also want to be out in that barnyard because of the individualism that's been bred into me, a stubborn PA-Dutch self-reliance as ingrained as my polite-yet-distant approach to strangers, my unstated Protestantism. There is a rural allure in being able to say with clear certainty, Yes, in the case of Apocalypse, I can feed myself.
It's more than that, too. I take joy in pulling a crude white package of family-farm meat out of the freezer, the same way I take joy in the scarf my sister knit me, the journal I hand-bound. It's about creating something I can use, with my own hands, and finding meaning in the process. In this way, Butchering is another form of Craftsmanship, just... bloody.
Back in the garage, we start at the hooves, slicing a shallow ring around the first knuckle and then drawing a line down the back of the leg towards the rump. The first time I skinned a cow, slicing and peeling, I overcame my kneejerk revulsion to delight in thinking, so this is why leather feels the way it does. Ideally there are four of us skinning, one on each limb, with my uncle tending to the head. We haul the animal up by its back legs with a winch, finish skinning, and then stand around and munch freshly baked cookies while my uncle eviscerates it. Family bonding in farm country.
***
I went through a period where I was embarrassed to mention that my family butchers its own meat, knowing it marked me as the country girl I am, thinking any civilized society would be shocked at an educated girl being part of so base a process. Except in the past few years, after moving out of the area and realizing what I’d left behind, I’ve discovered how to take pride in slotting myself into this root of my own food origins. The people who are shocked don’t have any business picking up those saran-wrapped Styrofoam trays of beef at the grocery store, I decided. This is the reality of eating meat: the animal must be killed and butchered. If we can do it ourselves, have control over the process, all the better - especially if we can make some traditions along the way.
The traditions pile up alongside the freezer packs. As steak-cutting and hamburger-grinding happens in the basement, there is an equal contingent of wrappers directly upstairs in the kitchen. We divvy up the pans of pork chops and hamburger into 3 or 4 person servings, and pass them around to be swaddled in white freezer paper. The younger kids rip masking tape, and the youngest draw and learn to write on the blank slates that are the finished packages. We mark the year, the destination family, and what’s inside. Far too often someone forgets what they’ve been wrapping, so it’s not unusual to later find an indiscriminately lumpy package in the freezer that says, “BEEF SURPRISE.”
The first of my generation to get married, my cousin Amanda, got a special treat her first Butchering into wedlock. My aunts, creatively inspired just like us kids, wrote recipes in Sharpie on the blank packs. On a package of round steak came a list of vegetables for Beef Stew; on a hunk of hamburger, the recipe for Stroganoff. We write notes to each other, to be found months from now (“Hi Aunt Linda!” or “LARGE T-bone, for when Susan and Ben are visiting!”). Another reason to avoid the Styrofoam trays: I pull out a pack of sausage and recognize my aunt Debbie’s handwriting, and it’s a reminder of this network we are for each other.
***
"Well... what do you think?" Uncle Dennis asked, rotating a large hunk of cow and squinting in concentration.
"Um," I said.
This past year, Dennis, my Godfather, lent me his copy of Basic Butchering of Livestock and Game, in reaction to the active interest I took the previous year. I called myself his apprentice, helped him haul sides of pork and decide where to cut the T-bones. I had no idea what I was doing, and Dennis, for all that he had done this multiple times, was not an expert. Once a year is not often enough to learn as esoteric a trade as butchering, and he has his crops and his livestock always on his mind. My aunt Debbie, Dennis’ wife, confided that the night before Killing Day Dennis stayed up late at the kitchen table, poring over the diagrams, trying to memorize where to slip the knife, reminding himself how to avoid nicking the intestines.
We wound up with odd-looking hunks and tried to come up with purposes for them. My mother, checking in on us, laughed, "Cows don’t actually have those dotted lines, do they?" When in doubt, we passed bits onward to the small army of aunts, uncles, and cousins boning out, meaning cutting these parts into small mostly-defatted chunks for grinding into sausage and hamburger. What we could we ran through a bandsaw, flecks of pink tallow spitting out in the steak-cutting. It is all very unglamorous, and perplexing, and makes me love my uncle even more than I already do. He steps up to do this vague thing because he is needed to.
The book made even gutting seem dull, full of phrases like, “Carefully tie off the bung.” More interesting to me were the notes my uncle scrawled, trying to refresh his knowledge from 360 days ago; and the varying sausage-recipe cards that fell out as I flipped through. This year we tried maple sausage in addition to the standard batch; one year we tried filling the rusty metal smokehouse with hickory wood. We fry up a few test patties when we think we have the sausage mixed properly, pass around bites and uncles chew thoughtfully before commenting, “Could use more black pepper.” That first bite of sausage, hardly three days out of the animal, is my favorite bite of meat the whole year through, astoundingly fresh and flavorful, relatively lean and thickly formed, familiar spices tasting like Sunday morning brunches of my childhood. I am not much of a meat connoisseur, but that bit of fresh sausage alone is a very strong argument to avoid vegetarianism.
I carefully replaced the recipe cards and returned the book, completely overwhelmed at how much knowledge goes into a hamburger. Knowing I will ask to borrow the book again in another eleven months, just as Dennis will pull it back out.
***
I don’t know who will take over Butchering in my own generation. That it might die off is unthinkable, so much that I would myself step up. Without an active farmer, though, we would have to buy the animals from someone else, and small family-owned farms are growing increasingly rare.
I have toyed with the idea of apprenticing on the farm with my uncle for a while, because while I know intellectually how difficult survival from the land is, I know I don’t truly understand it. But to be the one to actually take on that sort of life choice - I don’t think I can do that. My family and the farm are precious to me, even as I live 1200 miles away from them, and Butchering the most productive of family reunions. But there are so many things I want to do in my life, and even if learning how to butcher is one of them, I don’t think I am prepared to give up the rest. I am juggling what I have made for myself, my work and my education, with my birthright. I am caught between the progression of time and the static halt to it tradition brings, and I can’t see my way out.
I want to learn how to cut up an animal, but I would not want to do it more than this once a year, would not want to do it outside this rooted context. I want to do it because it has been done this way; I am rarely on the family farm, growing in the larger world outside our valley, but when I am home, I am ruled by tradition. I submit joyfully. I want to grow older with my cousins always gathering the way we have, with their children learning to write on the stacks of white-wrapped meat, with cows always in the barn and snow on the sledding hill, with always more dessert than we can possibly eat. I go away for the rest of the year, but I want to always come back this one week, for this one sacred act, to replenish our freezers and bond over the dishwashing. I am learning to find life in the act of sacrifice. And I want always to come across a happy note from a cousin jotted on a steak in the back of my freezer, and laugh delightedly in the heat of July, reminded of the tether that holds me to that valley, oddly thankful it takes the form of meat.
********
additional farm photos on my flickr.