Shelby's Lady: The Hog Poems

A freezing cold winter day, a disemboweled 250-pound hog hangs over a vat of hot water in the farmyard. The carcass will be scalded and scraped clean. A few neighbors have come to help and the women are already cleaning the chitterlings that will encase the sausage made from meat scraps.Making sausage was my favorite part of the day. After the meat has been ground, then comes the seasoning: salt, red pepper, and sage from a nearby bush. The women mix it, then fry up a few "try pieces." "Needs more salt," one woman will say. "More pepper," says another. "You need a little more heat in there." The samples are passed around to get everyone's opinion-even a child's if I'm lucky because with so much going on, I've long since run off my lunch.In Shelby's Lady: The Hog Poems, Shelby Stephenson has captured all the hard and often dirty work that goes into prepping and preserving a slaughtered pig before refrigerators were common. I remember salting the hams, drying the links of sausage or rendering the fat for lard. Shelby shows us again a way of life that has almost completely disappeared.-Margaret Maron