Darkness and Vernacular Salami

The shortest days approach. Organize your resources.

Woke up to the first snow this morning, with two hogs hung on gambrels out in a breezy tin-sided shed, the rest of our pigs very much alive and snoring in a hay-lined hut down on the blanketed prairie. The cows came in as well, clopping through the wet cover to paw at the snow, accessing the still-verdant grass in favor of hay, and while the thick stuff clings to the arched branches of hedge and burdened bows of easter red cedar, it drips away to become icy slush or cold mud, sure to refreeze slickly this evening as the north wind kicks in and drops the thermometer another twenty or so degrees for the cold night ahead. Tomorrow morning I will be sawing carcasses in the icy dawn, but in this moment I will take full advantage of the dry firewood and reasonably ample electric light available in our small and untidy dwelling of straw and earth.

Our home isn’t the warmest home I know of, and I suppose it could be kept warmer if we chose to continuously burn fuel… many do… but it has books and snacks and blankets and distractions from the ever-frigid world outside, making it preferable to laying in the steaming warm pile of pigs in the drafty shelter downslope, if only for the snacks. The ability for humans to bear physical discomfort through distraction and entertainment is certainly one of the advantages of our species, though who knows what the fluffed cardinals of the brambles or curled up ‘possums sheltered in hollow stumps think about in times of cold and discomfort. Could be a total zen-like state of blankness, or constant reiteration of “Damnit I’m cold, damnit I’m cold…” Probably somewhere between the two, because often times that’s my own internal monologue when I’m crouching in the swine-flavored slush, rolling up icy reels of electric fencing while drops of ice cold snowmelt slide right between my collar and the back of my neck beneath the dripping oak boughs. 

It was a day that never grew much lighter than it was at 6:30 AM, and seems to be growing dimmer now. Up in our hemisphere it is time to embrace the dark, or at least sleep through it, with the knowledge that there will never be a longer day than today for nearly two months. It’s easy, with our modern technologies of information, entertainment, and electric light in all places and at every time, to fight darkness rather than embrace it.  I raise livestock for a lot of reasons, but one of them, to be honest, is to keep my mind from going weird, weak and soft in the long darkness of winter, not to mention my body.

Embracing the dark necessitates occasional festivities: the sharing of precious resources like warmth and light, and the consumption of winter fare which cannot easily be preserved for extended time. The tendency of attaching religion, or its modern counterpart of capitalist consumerism, to winter celebration has little to do with the functional purpose of these festivities, at least if you follow my logic here. The function of winter feasting is to share and organize resources, make amends, and maintain relationships in our communities before the ensuing days of darkness and isolation ahead. 

I mean a few things by sharing and organizing resources. In terms of food, this means eating what needs to be eaten first. In grocery store culture, it is hard to grasp the seasonality and linear progression of food availability. In our home we are eating the sweetbreads of two slain hogs tonight… they will not keep much longer than that, whereas the salt-cured hams can wait ‘til Easter. We have been selecting winter squash for its keeping quality for some years, and so weekly we must look through our cache and pick out the squash that seem most likely to go. Many years we keep green tomatoes in the root cellar, each wrapped in its own veil of newspaper, but I was so sick to death of tomato preservation this year that we won’t have any. They’d be gradually turning red throughout December, with a flavor consistent with what you’d find in a grocery store, so not great, but certainly food. Chestnuts cannot keep forever, so they too become a seasonal specialty, whereas hickories, pecans, and walnuts can emerge later in the year if stored properly. And so for us, a typical late fall / early winter meal might incorporate poultry or organ meats, the last of the collards and chard, chestnuts, squash, lard, and smaller or damaged sweet potatoes. Later on down the line we will delve deeper into canned, cured and fermented goods, hopefully not exhausting these items completely until chickweed, nettles, and eggs all return in abundance some months from now. 

Festivity arrives when a glut of some resource, like fresh meat unsuitable for long-term storage, must be shared among neighbors and loved ones. There, near the flicker of wood heat, arrangements for winter woodcutting or hay trading might occur. Community rivalries might have been quashed at the table as well, before entering this season of deeper reliance and potential starvation. And so while I’m not personally festive in many ways, I have some appreciation for this role of celebration and festivity, provided we continue to work these old rituals in as part of a larger embrace of this darkening time and keep them away from the ever expanding wholesale of meaningful human experience. 

Our efficient wood-fired cookstove of modern manufacture. I’m not being paid to advertise, but we’ve been quite happy with the stoves offered by Sopka, Inc.

Now and then, we send the kids to gather kindling from the draws and bring it back in battered banana boxes. We do not tend to purchase firewood, nor specifically harvest it, but rather obtain it as a byproduct of our continuous construction and land management work. By the time this work subsides, the black locust we’ve planted for coppice management will yield plenty for our purposes, but this piecemeal approach has always been enough. We also find ways to justify our heating. Our heart of our home is a small wood cook stove of modern construction, produced in Serbia. It meets our needs well enough, and by using it three times daily to prepare food, and sometimes all day to render lard we are able to keep the house adequately warm. On the spectrum of depletion and abundance, we find winter time to be an opportunity to evaluate ‘enoughness’, that level of resource use that adequately serves our needs without negatively impacting the long term needs of others. Our food, fuel, and water all require enough work that we naturally settle for less. Running on solar power in the dark times creates its own limits on the free flow of electrons. By correlating resource use with labor, seasonal availability, and ecological conditions, we can temper our affluent, Western attitudes toward resource use with the reality of their provision.

And currently, I am in the process of provisioning fat and flesh. The work of this month is the culmination of long seasons spent herding swine and tending to their needs. We raise kunekune pigs, a lard breed originating in New Zealand noted for their slow growth and ability to convert grass and vegetation into meat with little supplementation. It takes eighteen months of moving fences, grazing, and general care to get a kunekune hog up to butcher weight, unlike the six or so it takes for conventional industrial breeds. A kunekune provides rich, red flesh due to its unique diet, but not in the form of big chops and chunky roasts, but instead more morsely bits of deep crimson flesh flecked and striated with the fat of the land. In other words, they are sausage hogs.

On the evening after a hog killing I will return to our warm home with cold, greasy hands and a bowlful of purged intestines. It takes a bit over an hour for me to stand at a cleared table over a bin and a wooden board to further scrape the mucal lining out from the many feet of casings before giving them a good rinse and a deep soaking in salt-water, a task that must be repeated daily as we work through the abundance of meat until these skins are ready to stuff. There is something unusually satisfying about disassembling an animal and reassembling it back inside itself that this process entitles me too. The cured and herbed and ground flesh is stuffed back into the casings a few days later, with the addition of some whey from cheese making and fermented overnight in a warm nook somewhere to bring the sausages to a more acidic PH level, as a way to discourage botulism and other pathogens, and then lightly smoked for an anti-bacterial coating and hung to dry. We call this product the Northeast Missouri Vernacular Salami.

Of course, there are many provincial laws throughout Europe about what meats and cheeses can be claimed to be called. It is sometimes a matter of regional pride, but more often a form economic protectionism. Gastronationalism, if you will. Processed animal products, particularly those derived from a certain manner of feeding or fermentation can arguably be described as rare or unique to certain regions, and I can understand, to a degree, the pride that might come with producing a renowned product under conditions that are impossible to replicate. But my appreciation grows thin when socio-economic elitism shows up to the dinner table, and it always does. On our farmstead, we often do things ‘the hard way’, largely as a result of our desire to live simply or consume less. But there is a contingent of foodies out there who seem to actively demand their food is produced through toil, for the purposes of authenticity. Slow and simple solutions to our food system ought not be exhausting to the producers for the benefit for those with the “knowledge, discernment, and sense of taste” And while “slow food”, as offered as a solution to consumptive and destructive industrial systems of nutrition holds promise, and I do believe in preserving traditional foodways, and I don’t want Oscar-Meyer or Cargill to be able to market a Salami de Arles, I am ultimately skeptical of any movement so deeply focused on regionalism and nationalism, particularly when it is centered on European regionalism and nationalism, which has a known proclivity for going fascist on the drop of a dime (usually soon after migrant influxes). And I’m not sold on a movement so focused on encouraging only what is rare, for the benefit of a prosperous few. So we produce a ‘vernacular’ salami. It is unsanctioned and unprotected, but worth cherishing nonetheless. “Slow food”, heritage breeds, heirloom seed and traditional manners of production and preservation all have a place in revitalizing local food systems, but I shudder to think of the un-pragmatic approach to nutrition that a foodie-dominated global system might create. We have questions to ask as we gather ‘round the winter table in celebration of darkness, one of them being who else has a seat there.

Now, on the Western horizon, the day’s first, and last, sliver of sunlight peaks out at the base of our frigid little clay-stricken hillside. The chickens roost in their winter barn, the pigs nest in their hut, and even the stoic cows clop back into their loafing shed to ruminate and rest, filling the dark air with frosted exhalations. Half-melted snow stiffens on the marcescent leaves of oak along the silent draws. Tomorrow will be darker than today, and with more work. But for tonight, I will be at home, like most humans in winter, endlessly shuffling the resources of our survival and preparing quick food, mostly noodles, for the waiting bellies of my kin and community. Not every tool has been retrieved from along the snowy fencelines, and before me there stands to be many more weeks of slaughter and processing. But that work will fade from me in the approaching dark tonight in this bright enough, warm enough, untidy hovel of earth and straw at the hilltop.

Slowly, and in the dark,

BB

As a little addendum to this entry in the Almanac, I have compiled my two part introduction to scythe mowing document here for your convenience. I hope that this manual will serve it’s purpose in gently introducing folks to the use of this tool, so please share the link with anyone who may be interested!