From Dave Smith
Excerpted from Cottage Economy by William Cobbett (1821)
Garden Farm Skills

[This is long, but give it a chance. There is great writing here from long ago, and a literality about farm life that too many of us have never experienced.]

In the case of pigs, much must depend upon the situation of the cottage; because all pigs will graze; and therefore on the skirts of forests or commons, a couple or three pigs may be kept, if the family be considerable; and especially if the cottager brew his own beer, which will give grains to assist the wash. Even in lanes, or on the sides of great roads, a pig will find a good part of his food from May to November; and if he be yoked, the occupiers of the neighbourhood must be churlish and brutish indeed, if they give the owner any annoyance…

The cottager’s pig should be bought in the spring or late in winter; and being then four months old, he will be a year old before killing time; for it should always be borne in mind, that this age is required in order to ensure the greatest quantity of meat from a given quantity of food. If a hog be more than a year old, he is the better for it. The flesh is more solid and more nutritious than that of a young hog, much in the same degree that the mutton of a full-mouthed wether is better than that of a younger wether. The pork or bacon of young hogs, even if fatted with corn, is very apt to boil out, as they call it; that is to say, come out of the pot smaller in bulk than it goes in. When you begin to fat, do it by degrees, especially in the case of hogs under a year old. If you feed high all at once, the hog is apt to surfeit and then a great loss of food takes place. Peas, or barley-meal, is the food; the latter rather the best, and does the work quicker. Make him quite fat by all means. The last bushel, even if he sit as he eat, is the most profitable. If he can walk two hundred yards at a time, he is not well fatted.

Lean bacon is the most wasteful thing that any family can use. In short, it is uneatable, except by drunkards, who want something to stimulate their sickly appetite. The man who cannot live on solid fat bacon, well fed and well cured, wants the sweet sauce of labour, or is fit for the hospital. But, then it must be bacon, the effect of barley or peas (not beans), and not of whey, potatoes, or messes of any kind. It is frequently said and I know that even farmers say it, that bacon made from corn costs more than it is worth! Why do they take care to have it then? They know better. They know well that it is the very cheapest they can have; and they who look at both ends and both sides of every cost would as soon think of shooting their hogs as of fatting them on messes; that is to say, for their own use, however willing they might now-and-then be to regale the Londoners with a bit of potato-pork.

About Christmas if the weather be coldish, is a good time to kill. If the weather be very mild, you may wait a little longer, for the hog cannot be too fat. The day before killing he should have no food. To kill a hog nice is so much of a profession that it is better to pay a shilling for having it done, than to stab and hack and tear the carcass about…

There are two ways of going to work to make bacon; in one you take off the hair by scalding. This is the practice in most parts of England, and all over America. But the Hampshire way, and the best way, is to burn the hair off. There is a great deal of difference in the consequences. The first method slackens the skin, opens all the pores of it, makes it loose and flabby by drawing out the roots of the hair. The second tightens the skin in every part, contracts all the sinews and veins in the skin, makes the flitch a solider thing, and the skin a better protection to the meat. The taste of the meat is very different from that of a scalded hog, and to this chiefly it was that Hampshire bacon owed its reputation of excellence. As the hair is to be burnt off it must be dry, and care must be taken that the hog be kept on dry litter of some sort the day previous to killing.

When killed he is laid upon a narrow bed of straw, not wider than his carcass, and only two or three inches thick. He is then covered all over thinly with straw, to which, according as the wind may be, the fire is put at one end. As the straw burns, it burns the hair. It requires two or three coverings and burnings, and care is taken that the skin be not in any part burnt or parched. When the hair is all burnt off close, the hog is scraped clean, but never touched with water. The upper side being finished the hog is turned over, and the other side is treated in like manner. This work should always be done before day-light, for in the day-light you cannot so nicely discover whether the hair be sufficiently burnt off. The light of the fire is weakened by that of the day. Besides, it makes the boys get up very early for once at any rate, and that is something, for boys always like a bonfire.

The inwards are next taken out… and here, in the mere offal, in the mere garbage, there is food, and delicate food, too, for a large family for a week; the hog’s puddings for the children, and some for the neighbours’ children, who come to play with them; for these things are by no means to be overlooked, seeing that they tend to the keeping alive of the affection in children for their parents, which later in life will be found absolutely necessary to give effect to wholesome precept, especially when opposed to the boisterous passions of youth.

The butcher the next day cuts the hog up, and then the house is filled with meat! Souse, griskins, blade-bones, thigh bones, spare-ribs, chines, belly-pieces, cheeks, all coming into use one after the other, and the last of the latter not before the end of about four or five weeks. But about this time it is more than possible that the Methodist parson will pay you a visit. It is remarked in America, that these gentry are attracted by the squeaking of the pigs, as the fox is by the cackling of the hen. This may be called slander, but I will tell you what I did know to happen. A good honest fellow had a spare-rib, on which he intended to sup with his family after a long and hard day’s work at coppice-cutting. Home he came at dark with his two little boys, each with a nitch of wood that they had carried four miles, cheered with the thought of the repast that awaited them. In he went, found his wife, the Methodist parson, and the whole troop of the sister-hood, engaged in prayer, and on the table lay scattered the clean-polished bones of the spare-rib! Can any reasonable creature believe that, to save the soul, God requires us to give up the food necessary to sustain the body? Did Saint Paul preach this? He who, while he spread the gospel abroad, worked himself, in order to have it to give to those who were unable to work? Upon what, then, do these modern saints, these evangelical gentlemen, found their claim to live on the labour of others?

All the other parts taken away, the two sides that remain, and that are called flitches, are to be cured for bacon. They are first rubbed with salt on their insides, or flesh sides, then placed one on the other, the flesh sides uppermost, in a salting trough which has a gutter round its edges to drain away the brine; for to have sweet and fine bacon the flitches must not lie sopping in brine, which gives it that sort of taste which barrel-pork and sea-jonk have, and than which nothing is more villainous. Everyone knows how different is the taste of fresh dry salt from that of salt in a dissolved state. The one is savoury, the other nauseous. Therefore, change the salt often. Once in four or five days. Let it melt and sink in but let it not lie too long. Change the flitches. Put at the bottom that which was first put on the top. Do this a couple of times. This mode will cost you a great deal more in salt or rather in taxes, than the sopping mode; but without it your bacon will not be sweet and fine, and will not keep so well.

As to the time required for making the flitches sufficiently salt, it depends on circumstances; the thickness of the flitch, the state of the weather, the place wherein the salting is going on. It takes a longer time for a thick than for a thin flitch; it takes longer in dry than in damp weather; it takes longer in a dry than in a damp place. But for the flitches of a hog of twelve score, in weather not very dry or very damp, about six weeks may do; and as yours is to be fat, which receives little injury from over-salting, give time enough; for you are to have bacon till Christmas comes again. The place for salting should, like a dairy, always be cool, but always admit of a free circulation of air; confined air, though cool, will taint meat sooner than the mid-day sun accompanied with a breeze. Ice will not melt in the hottest sun so soon as in a close and damp cellar. Put a lump of ice in cold water, and one of the same size before a hot fire, and the former will dissolve in half the time that the latter will…

[S]moking is a great deal better than merely drying…There is scarcely any neighborhood without a chimney left to hang bacon up in. Two precautions are necessary; first, to hang the flitches where no rain comes down upon them; second, not to let them be so near the fire as to melt. These precautions taken, the next is, that the smoke must proceed from wood, not turf, peat or coal…

As to the time that it requires to smoke a flitch, it must depend a good deal upon whether there be a constant fire beneath, and whether the fire be large or small. A month may do, if the fire be pretty constant, and such as a farmhouse fire usually is. But oversmoking, or rather, too long hanging in the air, makes the bacon rust. Great attention should therefore be paid to this matter. The flitch ought not to be dried up to the hardness of a board, and yet it ought to be perfectly dry. Before you hang it up, lay it on the floor, scatter the flesh side pretty thickly over with bran, or with some fine sawdust other than that of deal or fir. Rub it on the flesh, or pat it well down upon it. This keeps the smoke from getting into the little openings, and makes a sort of crust to be dried on; and, in short, keeps the flesh cleaner than it would otherwise be.

To keep the bacon sweet and good and free from nasty things that they call hoppers; that is to say a sort of skipping maggots, engendered by a fly which has a great relish for bacon; to provide against this mischief, and also to keep the bacon from becoming rust, the Americans, whose country is so hot in summer, have two methods. They smoke no part of the hog except the hams, or gammons. They cover these with coarse linen clothes, such as the finest hop-bags are made of, which they sew neatly on. They then white-wash the cloth all over with lime white-wash, such as we put on walls, their lime being excellent stone lime. They give the ham four or five washings, the one succeeding as the former gets dry; and in the sun, all these washings are put on in a few hours. The flies cannot get through this; and thus the meat is preserved from them. The other mode, and that is the mode for you, is to sift fine some clean and dry wood-ashes. Put some at the bottom of a box or chest, which is long enough to hold a flitch of bacon. Lay in one flitch; and then cover this with six or eight inches of the ashes. This will effectually keep away all flies; and will keep the bacon as fresh and good as when it came out of the chimney, which it will not be for any great length of time, if put on a rack, or kept hung up in the open air. Dust, or even sand, very, very dry, would, perhaps, do as well. The object is not only to keep out flies, but the air. The place where the chest, or box, is kept, ought to be dry; and, if the ashes should get damp (as they are apt to do from the salts they contain), they should be put in the fire-place to dry, and then be put back again. Peat-ashes, or turf-ashes, might do very well for this purpose. With these precautions, the bacon will be as good at the end of the year as on the first day; and it will keep two, or even three years, perfectly good, for which, however, there can be no necessity.

Now, then, this hog is altogether a capital thing. The other parts will be meat for about four or five weeks. The lard, nicely put down, will last a long while for all the purposes for which it is wanted. To make it keep well there should be some salt put into it. Country children are badly brought up if they do not like sweet lard spread upon bread, as we spread butter. Many a score hunches of this sort have I eaten, and I never knew what poverty was. I have eaten it for luncheon, at the houses of good substantial farmers in France and Flanders. I am not now frequently so hungry as I used to be; but I should think it no hardship to eat sweet lard instead of butter…

Some other meat you may have, but bacon is the great thing. It is always ready: as good cold as hot; goes to the field or the coppice conveniently; in harvest, and other times, demands the pot to be boiled only on a Sunday; has twice as much strength in it as any other thing of the same weight; and in short, has in it every quality that tends to make a labourer’s family able to work and be well off. One pound of bacon, such as that which I have described, is, in a labourer’s family, worth four or five of ordinary mutton or beef, which are great part bone, and which, in short, are gone in a moment. But always observe, it is fat bacon that I am talking about. There will, in spite of all that can be done, be some lean in the gammons, through comparitively very little, and therefore you ought to begin at that end of the flitches, for old lean bacon is not good…

Irish bacon is ‘cheaper’. Yes, lower-priced. But I will engage that a pound of mine, when it comes out at the pot (to say nothing of the taste) shall weigh as much as a pound and a half of Irish, or any dairy or slop-fed bacon, when that comes out of the pot. No, no; the farmers joke when they say that their bacon costs them more than they could buy bacon for. They know well what it is they are doing; and besides, they always forget, or rather, remember not to say, that the fating of a large hog yields them three or four loads of dung, really worth more than ten or fifteen of common yard dung. In short, without hogs farming could not go on; and it never had gone on in any country in the world. The hogs are the great stay of the whole concern. They are much in small space; they make no show, as flocks and herds do; but without them cultivation of the land would be a poor, a miserably barren concern.

The reader will think, that I shall never cease talking about hogs; but, I have now done only I will add, that in keeping hogs in a growing state, we must never forget lodging! A few boards, flung carelessly over a couple of rails, and no litter beneath, is not the sort of bed for a hog. A place of suitable size, large rather than small, well sheltered on every side, covered with a roof that lets in no wet or snow. No opening, except a door-way big enough for a hog to go in; and the floor constantly well bedded with leaves of trees, dry, or, which is the best thing, and what a hog deserves, plenty of clean straw. When I make up my hogs’ lodging place for winter, I look well at it, and consider, whether, upon a pinch, I could, for once and away, make shift to lodge in it myself. If I shiver at the thought, the place is not good enough for my hogs.

It is not in the nature of a hog to sleep in the cold. Look at them. You will see them, if they have the means, cover themselves over for the night. This is what is done by neither horse, cow, sheep, dog or cat. And this should admonish us to provide hogs with warm and comfortable lodging. Their sagacity in providing against cold in the night, when they have it in their power to make such provision, is quite wonderful. You see them looking about for the warmest spot: then they go to work, raking up the litter so as to break the wind off; and when they have done their best, they lie down.

I had a sow that had some pigs running about with her in April last. There was a place open to her on each side of the barn. One faced the east and the other the west; and, I observed, that she sometimes took to one side and sometimes to the other. One evening her pigs had gone to bed on the east side. She was out eating till it began to grow dusk. I saw her go into her pigs, and was surprised to see her come out again; and therefore, looked a little to see what she was after. There was a high heap of dung in the front of the barn to the south. She walked up to the top of it, raised her nose, turned it very slowly, two or three times, from the north-east to the north-west, and back again, and at last, it settled at about south-east, for a little bit. She then came back, marched away very hastily to her pigs, roused them up in a great bustle, and away she trampled with them at her heels to the place on the west side of the barn. There was so little wind, that I could not tell which way it blew, till I took up some leaves, and tossed them in the air. I then found, that it came from the precise point at which her nose had settled at. And thus was I convinced, that she had come out to ascertain which way the wind came, and finding it likely to make her young ones cold in the night, she had gone and called them up, though it was nearly dark, and taken them off to a more comfortable berth.

Was this an instinctive, or was it a reasoning proceeding? At any rate, let us not treat such animals as if they were stocks and stones.

William Cobbett

~
See also Gene’s Yes, I Care For Animals And Then I Eat Them
and his William Cobbett quotes in Oxen Power for Family Farms;
and Greg’s Oven-Fried Organic Sweet Bacon;
and NY Times’ Communal Butchering a Wild Boar (with narrated slide show);
and Jesse’s My Son, The Pig Farmer.
~~
Dave Smith is author ofTo Be of Use: The Seven Seeds of Meaningful Work and lives in Mendocino Country, Northern California.
Image Credits: Sow Illustration, Bert Kitchen; Community Meat Cutting, Gene Logsdon.
OrganicToBe.org OrganicToGo.com
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