This text was obtained via automated optical character recognition.
It has not been edited and may therefore contain several errors.

---

taste like a hog smells. One time Willie was going to work and Leah and Willard were in their teens, so he asked them did they think they could kill and dress a sholt (young hog) and Willard said Yes, sir; so they did and we had to throw the whole thing away on account of not scrapping it good enough. They had a big long table in the yard where they cut them up. They'd bring one at a time and one of the men would do the cutting and sawing, another would take the hams, shoulders, sides and so forth and go into the store room and salt it all down and continue that until all was salted. Then there'd be three or four of us women in the kitchen, some grinding the sausage, some cutting up fat for cracklins and when we'd get all the fat cut up we'd take it into the yard and put two dish pans full at a time into the big wash pot and Mr. Hover would have a low fire burning so he'd stand there and keep the fire going and he'd have a clean paddle that he used every year to stir the cracklins with and when all of the grease was cooked out of them he'd bring them in and sprinkle salt on them and pour into a 50 lb. lard can. "Bov were the lean ones good with a hot cathead as some of the boys used to call biscuits. That was my daddy-in-law's part of the work. God Bless his soul, he was one good old man. I loved him as much as I did my own father. I never heard him speak a cross word or any ugly word in the six years I knew him. Well to go on with my hog killing. The next thing to be done was to clean the entrails (chitlins). That was Mrs. Hovers job. She'd take them out to the cow lot which was quite a ways from the house and there was a pump out there where they kept water for the animals and I'd always go with her and pump the water and she'd empty the contents out of the entrails then put them into a big tub of water and take a smooth stick and turn them wrong side out then after they were sloshed around in two tubs of water with her stick, she'd put a few at a time in a large bucket and put salt, then another layer of entrails, then more salt until they were all salted down. Then the next day we'd wash the salt off and we had a long wide board that we would each take one entrails at a time and scrape it until there was nothing left except a thin casing like onion paper, so then we'd stuff the casing with the ground meat. And when we finished Mr. Hover would take the yard long and some times two yards and hang it over clean poles in the store room. Some called it that, some called it a meat house and others called it smoke house. He'd build a small fire under it with nothing but green hickory wood and smoke it. I believe it was nine days and from then on he'd only build a smoke under it when it would come a rainey spell.
30