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Summer Sausage

Summer sausage season is rapidly approaching. Grandpa always butchered hogs in late October or early November when the weather was cool but before the constant rains had made the yard muddy. The first sausage came out of the smoke house when Christmas visiting started around my uncle’s birthday, December 18th.

My grandparents made three kinds of sausage: summer sausage, liver sausage, and blood sausage. The least controversial and most popular of the three was summer sausage, which is actually broad category of sausage that keeps without refrigeration, not a specific recipe.

The sausage stuffer
The sausage stuffer

Some form of summer sausage appears in most culinary traditions. It can be made in any season of the year, although its name comes from its resistance to spoilage  during the warm summer months. It is usually preserved by a combination of fermentation, nitrates, and drying, often accomplished by smoking. All of these preservation methods add to the flavor and texture of the sausage, although modern summer sausage makers often take short cuts by adding lactic and citric acid in place of fermentation, smoke flavoring instead of smoking, and keeping the product refrigerated so a hard cure is not necessary.

Sausage scientists often point out that modern methods are safer and more reliable than the old techniques, and their statistics and bacterial studies are no doubt correct, but visitors came from all over at Christmas time to sample and praise my grandparent’s summer sausage. Poking around in odd corners of the north county, I still occasionally run into old folks who claim to remember their summer sausage.

I  have only the slimmest and most tenuous memory of the old sausage. I mentioned in my last post that Grandpa slit his last pig’s throat in about 1956. The last batch of summer sausage was made by the old rule when I was only seven.

And I hated it. I remember sitting at my grandparent’s kitchen table. Grandma sliced her homemade bread in the German style, without a cutting board,  holding the bread against her apron covered chest and rolling the loaf as she sawed away with her bread knife. But she put the summer sausage on a cutting board and sliced it on the table in thin even slices, a mere sixteenth of an inch thick. Summer sausage was consumed open-faced on bread spread with butter. There was absolutely no thought given to cholesterol in that kitchen. My grandmother was still swinging an ax and splitting her own stove wood when she turned 90. She might not have ever died if she had paid attention to her triglycerides and low density lipids.

With all the praise heaped on summer sausage, I always expected it to be good. But every time I tried to like it, I would bite into one of the whole peppercorns that laced every slice, setting my mouth on fire and forcing me to drink glass after glass of water.

There was no recipe for the old summer sausage. My grandmother had few recipes and my grandfather never wrote anything down. Grandma had a collection of cook books that she was proud of, but did not use. At the same time, my grandmother was an inspired cook. Her methods were all simple and called for a little of this and a pinch of that and most of her cooking was done on a combination wood electric range where temperatures varied according to the seasoning and species of the fire wood as much as the setting of a dial. Fortunately, my mother had a more analytic approach to cooking. She was not inspired like Grandma, but she had recipes and kept note of the changes she made. My mother recorded the recipes for liver and blood sausage. But not the recipe for summer sausage.

The old sausage was made with pork meat only, unlike many summer sausage recipes that call for beef or venison, even bear. There was lots of pepper. They used Morton’s meat curing salt, so it probably found its way into the summer sausage. I have a notion that they used thyme from the garden, but I can’t gage the reliability of a seven-year-olds vague memory.The sausage was stuffed into about inch and a quarter casings tied into rings. The rings were strung on poles and suspended over a low and smoky vine maple fire in the smoke house for about a month.

I am absolutely certain I would love my grandparent’s summer sausage if I had it today.

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The Cauldron Beneath the Kitchen

The old house has a thirty inch cast iron cauldron in the basement under the kitchen. The iron cauldron sits in a concrete wood burning stove that feeds into the old kitchen chimney.

The cauldorn beneath the kitchen
The cauldorn beneath the kitchen

It looks like one of the big pots cartoon cannibals used to cook pith helmeted explorers. One section of the basement was a butcher shop where my grandparents made summer sausage, hams, and bacon for the smokehouse. My grandmother used the cauldron to render pork fat into lard. My grandfather was the family butcher. He died when I was eight. By the time I was seven, my tobacco chewing Grandpa was too sick with colon cancer to butcher pigs and the cauldron was never used again.

Hog butchering was an event that required heavy labor and community involvement. There were always relatives and neighbors around for butchering and they all went home with their share of pig liver, brains, and sweetbreads. Grandpa slaughtered the pigs outside the pig barn, under the pear tree planted for him by his father, Gottlieb. The killing itself was done with a single fatal stroke of a sledge hammer. Grandpa was a calm quick workman who brooked no drama. The pig died before anyone realized what was happening. Then the men used a block and tackle to hoist the pig by its hind legs into the pear tree and Grandpa would slit the pig’s throat to drain the blood. He kept a special knife that was pointed and sharp on two edges like a dagger. Grandma caught the blood in a dishpan and saved it for making blood sausage.

Long before killing the pig, Grandpa would start a fire under the scalding tank, which was like a watering trough with a firebox underneath and a short brick chimney at one end. When the water was hot, the men lowered the pig into the trough and scraped off the bristles loosened by the hot water.  The scrapers, last used in 1956, are still nestled in the fork of Gottlieb’s pear tree.

The next step was removing the offal and trimmings. Then the carcass, suspended above passing scavengers, would hang high in the pear tree overnight to cool.

The next day, a low fire was started early in the morning beneath the cauldron in the basement and Grandpa would begin cutting up the pig with a meat saw, butcher knife and cleaver. The fat was cut in thumb size pieces that went into the rendering cauldron and permeated the house with the odor of mellow bacon. When the fat was rendered into lard, Grandma would ladle it out into crocks which she stored in her pantry. At the bottom of the cauldron were the cracklings, the last crisp bits of meat. Most of the cracklings went into sausage, although for a few days after butchering Grandma would fry them up with scrambled eggs and serve them with molasses or maple syrup and slices of toasted home made bread for breakfast before the men went out to clean barns and tend the cattle after milking. In those days, calories and fats were something you tried to get enough of, sometimes successfully, not avoid.

Grandpa and Grandma did not freeze the pork they butchered themselves. The meat was made into sausage or salted. The sausage, hams, and slabs of bacon were suspended on poles in the top of the smoke house. Grandpa kept a small smoky fire burning in the smoke house for weeks until he declared everything cured and let the fire go out, sometime after Christmas. The sausages, hams, and bacon stayed in the smokehouse until they were eaten.