|
Butchering In the fall, my Dad and John “Junior” Dunlap had a hog or calf butchered and each took half. Williamsport had a freezer locker in the same building as the “beer joint”. The meat would be cut up, wrapped and stored there. We always got the cracklins’ and kept them on our cold back porch. We munched on them all winter long. My sister Betty’s favorite part of them was the pig’s tail and all of us teased her about it. We also got the lard rendering in 25 or 50 pound lard cans. My mother fried the sliced jowl (hog jaws), and put it into the lard for using later. It was a good alternative for the lack of refrigeration. My mother would dip a large cooking spoon into the lard and fried meat and put it in an iron skillet to make gravy using flour, a little corn meal, salt and pepper, milk or water. It made the best gravy on earth. One year we ground our own sausage in our kitchen. We also had big pork chops and another time, my Dad took a ham and had it baked at Lindsey’s Bakery in Circleville. It was returned crusty and delicious. I believe, that on occasion, my Dad was asked to help with the butchering for the Red and White Grocery Store. My Dad was a big man physically and was often asked to help with big jobs. He was “a man for all seasons”. ©Marilyn Francis Ferguson 2020 Photography/graphics by Michele Ferguson Schuck
3 Comments
 How to Kill and Clean a Chicken Most young people today think that a chicken comes from the store or even a fast food restaurant. In the forties, a local farmer would stop by the house asking if we wanted to buy one. If no one came, my mother would ask my Dad to go to a farm south of town and buy a big fat hen. The farmer or my Dad would come carrying the doomed chicken by its feet. My Dad usually killed the chicken but every now and then it fell to my mother to do the execution. She didn’t like to do it but was, more or less, up to the job. She carried the chicken by its feet between the garden and the coal house. As far as I can remember, she laid the chicken on the ground with her foot on the chicken’s feet and chopped its head off with a hatchet. It was awkward sometimes and required more than one try. Then she let the chicken go and it flopped all over that area until its nerves stopped working. She had already boiled a galvanized bucket of water on the stove. She brought the bucket out and holding the chicken by its feet, dunked it into the boiling water. That caused her to be able to pull the feathers out easily. She then carried the chicken in the house to hold over the flame on the gas stove to singe off the remaining hairs (it was an awful smell). She then put the chicken in a white enameled dishpan to clean it out and cut it up. My mother liked the chicken’s tail, so she had to cut out the oil sack on it. Betty and I were always standing in the kitchen doorway watching this chicken operation. I’m not sure but I think she removed the neck first so she could get the craw out. It was full of small rocks, corn, etc. She removed the entrails from the bottom of the bird. I remember seeing them float around in the dishpan. There is a blue gall bladder that has to be cut out because it would make the chicken bitter if it were cut into. Sometimes the fat hen had a sack full of immature eggs. My mother usually cooked the hen along with the eggs. They were better than eggs that have already been laid. I think chickens tasted better in those days than they do today. I lived at home my first year of college and babysat Ricky, Jackie and Pattie after school for Shorty and Janet Hooks. Janet worked on the second shift at GE and Shorty worked for Dunlap’s. One day she asked me to cut-up a chicken for her to fry the next day. It was my first one. That poor chicken had so many pieces when I got done, Janet must have wondered what happened. Soooo, what’s for dinner tonight? Chicken anyone? KFC, Canes, Chic-Filet? Maybe not. ©Marilyn Francis Ferguson 2020 Photography/graphics by Michele Ferguson Schuck  Ironing Day Our kitchen was very small. On the right of the entrance to the kitchen from the living room door was the table where my mother washed dishes in a dishpan and put them to be rinsed in another. It is also where she did all of her cooking preparation. There was a window between the table and the kitchen cabinet. The kitchen door was on the back wall leading into the back porch. A washstand with a white enameled wash pan on top stood on the other side of the door. There was a medicine cabinet with a mirrored front on the wall over the washstand. The gas kitchen stove stood on the left side of the living room entrance with enough space to put an ironing board just before the dining room entrance. It was a good place to put the ironing board because it was close to the stove where the irons were heated. They were not electric and had to be set on the stove flame to heat them up. For some reason, my sisters Jean and Kat ironed on Saturday. Maybe because of school or work. In my opinion, their ironing would have been uneventful other than what they did while they ironed. For one thing, they heated up the curling irons on the same stove at the same time. They ironed their clothes and curled their hair. And secondly, Jean always had the radio on listening to music. Later, she was the first to get a record player. Country music was her preference but she also listened to other music. One of her favorite songs at that time was, “Tennessee Waltz”. I know the words to most of the songs of that era, thanks to Jean. Before she passed away in 2017, we went to visit her. We asked what her favorite song was. I was surprised when she said, “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia”. I shouldn’t have been surprised because that was the kind of music she had always liked. It was nice to see that her taste hadn’t really changed. I guess ironing can be about more than ironing. ©Marilyn Francis Ferguson 2020 Photography/graphics by Michele Ferguson Schuck  Wash Day I don’t know what day my mother did laundry but I suppose it was Monday. It was an all-day event. On laundry day, we had bean soup for supper because there was no time or place on the stove to cook anything else. Mama filled a large round tub with water and set it on our kitchen stove to heat. Remember that the water had to be carried inside from the cistern which was outside. Daddy may have helped get it in the house before he went to work. When he came home for lunch, they poured the heated water into the washer. The washer was situated in the dining room. First, the washer agitated the dish towels, then everything else and lastly, my Dad’s work clothes. It was a wringer washer, so my mother had to run everything through the wringer. She used a cut off broomstick to pick the hot clothes up to put through the wringer. After being washed, the clothes fell from the wringer down into another tub or bucket on the floor which was filled with cold water. The laundry was then rinsed and put through the wringer again. We had an outdoor wire clothesline behind the house. In the winter, my Dad’s clothes looked surreal blowing in the wind while frozen stiff. We had a clothes rack behind the Warm Morning Stove in the living room where everything ended up if they couldn’t be dried elsewhere. We also had a clothesline that stretched the entire diagonal length of the dining room. When it rained, my mother hung the clothes there. Even today it depresses me to think of that because the clothes dripped on us while we ate. Sometimes it rains in our lives….even in the house. ©Marilyn Francis Ferguson 2020 Photography/graphics by Michele Ferguson Schuck |
Marilyn Francis FergusonGrowing up in Williamsport, Ohio is a blog by Marilyn Francis Ferguson which describes small town life in the 1940s and 1950s. Blog Categories
All
Archives
December 2025
|