When I was just a little boy, it was kind of an old-fashioned kind of farm.  We had all kind of livestock -- hogs and cattle and a few sheep and a chicken house full of chickens and so on.  We were pretty self sufficient.

In the fall when it would start to get cold, we would run a hog out there and shoot him or butcher him, you know.  In the old days your bacon used to be left on the pigskin.  They would scald that hog just like they would scald a chicken.  They would pull the chicken pin feathers out.  Well, with the hog you would scald him and drag him up on a table.

And they had a tool -- one part of it would be about this big around (indicating), about 5 inches and another one about 3 or 4.  And they would scrape the hair off that hog.  Then they would take him in and start cutting him up.  And all the fat that was on that hide went in a big kettle.  We had a fireplace in that building and a big iron kettle.  When that stuff got to boiling, why we would put it in a lard press.  We had a tool about this big around and about that high (indicating).  We would use that to squeeze the lard out of it. 

What came out was oil, and it hardened up into lard.  That was quite a deal. 

It was the same way with the cattle.  We would shoot 'em right between the eyes.  (cattle groans)  When you kill an animal, you want to cut their throats right away because the heart's still beating, and it gets the blood out.  If you don't, you've got a lot of blood in the meat and so forth and so on.

You know out in the country it can run out on the ground someplace.  We were two miles from the closest farm.  

That stuff sounds kind of gory, but I was raised there.  Now, I never killed any of that stuff, but Granddaddy had been doing it his whole life.  And, boy, he could grab that .22 and, bang, just like that and put them out of their misery!  

It took a day to get the meat cut up.  We had a grinder on a little bench there, and all the meat they decided they wanted for sausage, they would run it through the grinder.

And in the meantime my mother and my grandmother would clean the gut.  The intestines is what they were.  Part of the intestines were thrown away.  What you would really see on your sausage in the old days was just a thin membrane.  They would get it all cleaned and washed out.  I don't know how many times they would wash it, just wash it and wash it.

That same lard press was used to stuff the sausage casings.  It would have a little stem about right like that (indicating).  They would run that -- what do I want to call it -- anyway, it was what they stuffed the sausage in.  And it would feed right out as nice as anything.

Eventually it was hung over a stick in the smokehouse.  Sometimes they smoked it, and sometimes they took it in and cut it up in pieces and poked it down in quart jars and poured lard in around it and put them in a conservo. 

I don't think you have seen my conservo, did you?  Well, it's a metal cabinet yea square and about that high, and you could put several quart jars in there.  And they bring them up to a heat, and it's preserved.  We would set them in the basement.

The smoked sausage, that was all it took, just the smoking.  A lot of times they smoked the bacon and hams and that kind of stuff.  The hams were kind of large.  They embalmed them, you might say, with salt water or some kind of salt solution. 

It was quite a chore.  I remember part of it, you know. 

Bernie:  Did you ever make any soap out of the lye?

Alan:  My mother made soap all the time.  We had a big L-shaped house.  And inside this L was a big porch.  Mom had her lard and her bacon fat drippings.  And anything like that, she always saved it.  Then she'd go out there on that porch and fire things up together and make soap.  We used that for laundry soap all the time.  My overalls always got washed in lye soap.