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Sign from Yatesville, Georgia. Pork related recipes and stories below
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Halifax, Virginia circa 1939 courtesy of the Library of Congress
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Yesterday I did part one of a two-part series on hot killing talking
about hot killing in tropical regions such as the Caribbean and South America.
Today let's talk about hot killing in places like North Carolina and Virginia
were both sides my family respectively comes from. Dating back to the colonial
period rule folk in the South slaughtered hogs around Christmas time using the cold
winter weather as a natural refrigerator. Slaughtering hogs can best be
described as a highly skilled labor-intensive process. As a result in most
rural societies hog killing became a community event in which neighbors
killed and butchered six or many more hogs at one time. Responsibilities were
divvied up with some making crackling, sausage, chops, preparing choice cuts
for curing and smoking hams, all the way down to cleaning the intestines for a
chitlin strut or hoedown like similar one advertised above. Hog killing continued as a
collective community event, and often an integrated one until affordable
refrigeration technology became widespread and available. Still the tradition
continued even after World War II in some places. For example my father told
how his grandfather “Wash” (short for Washington) Opie would, as part of his
hog killing day, butcher and prep hogs for his farm in Virginia as well as box
and ship a whole butchered and salted hog to my father’s home in Sleepy Hollow,
New York.
My pork related stories with recipes:
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