As soon as the young chickens were ready for the frying pan they became number one on the meat menu for Sunday dinner. The old saying "Chicken Every Sunday" certainly held true in our home.
The second butchering in August provided fresh meat to feed threshing, silo filling and cornhusking crews. The supply was stretched to carry through to the end of the year with the addition of poultry.

One or two smoked hams were reserved to be baked and served with the traditional Thanksgiving turkey and Christmas goose.
There was a great deal of work to be done the week before butchering. Mamma invited relatives and neighbor ladies to assist in the mammoth undertaking. Grandma was the star of the show. With her years of experience she took charge of operations in the kitchen area. She was of German descent; an expert in the field of seasoning and tasting, and only in later years did she reluctantly pass her secret formulas on to other family members.

Grandma arrived early in the week carrying her little brown, imitation alligator leather bag. Naomi and I urged her to open it immediately. Neatly wrapped inside the folded calico apron were small packets of fragrant spices and seasonings grown in her herb garden. Thyme, sage, marjoram, parsley, and basil had been harvested the previous year, cut, tied up in bunches and hung over the fireplace to dry. She loved to keep us in suspense. "Now did I forget some-
thing?" she would ask while searching down in the bottom of her satchel. At last, with a pretended look of surprise flooding her pleasant face, she came up with the treasure we were expecting - several strands of sweet, sparkling rock candy. We began to nibble it from the end of the with a stack string. Its sweet taste and smell remain one of the most pleasant of memories of those semi- annual visits of our maternal grandmother. In gratitude for the special treat we would run errands, try to bridle our curiosity, and "keep out of the way."

Papa and the hired hands carefully laid plans for butchering day. The large black iron kettle was hung on a trivit, ready to be fired with a stack of wood piled nearby. Wooden barrels were filled with water pumped and carried from the well. It took a lot of hot water to scald and cleanse the hogs. Sawhorses were set up to hold the barrels at a proper slant for scalding. Strong oak stakes, called single-trees, were ready to spread the legs of the carcass before hoisting it up on bars placed across branches of a tree in the back yard.
Our parents, knowing we had followed the growth of the piglets from shoats to present maturity, sheltered us from the horror of the slaughter. We never witnesses the roping, stabbing, scalding and scraping of the hog carcass, or the beef butchering. Papa would ask, "Will you girls please run up to Uncle Adolph' s and bring back two extra wooden pails?" He kindly made excuses to remove us from the horrible performance.
In later years we learned that a cup of lye was thrown into the kettle of boiling water, the barrels filled and the hog immersed into the tilted barrel, head first and then the other end. This scalding process loosened the hair and made the work easier for the men who used round metal scrapers with wooden handles to shave the skin. Then the joints of the hog's rear legs were slit, a single-tree inserted, and the hog hoisted on the wooden bars.
Only an experienced man could tackle the next maneuver. First the carcass was carefully cut open, entrails removed, liver and heart separated and placed in pails of cold water. Entrails were emptied, scrubbed, scraped, turned inside out, scraped again, washed and soaked in salt water. Later these casings would be stuffed with a variety of fillings for sausage.
After a carcass was properly "cooled out," a man with a trained and steady hand would proceed with the trimming. The snow white leaf lard was carved out of the kidney niche and laid in large dripping pans. Most of the fat was trimmed and would be rendered for lard.

The expert then carved out hams, shoulders, slabs for bacon, side pork, loins and spareribs. Neck bones, liver, the heart and all excess trimmings would be cut up and cooked for sausage fillings. The head meat and tongue were used for a special favorite head cheese, and the feet for another specialty - pickled pigs feet. Leaner cuts of trimmings would be combined with parts of beef to make several kinds of summer sausage.
Butchering beef was a much simpler task. The best 800 to 1,000 pound steer or heifer would be selected for the family food supply and fed a diet to produce prime or choice meat. The beef carcass was hung on the overhead beams of the corncrib after being dressed out. The hide was then stripped off, salted, rolled up and tied, ready to be sold for a few dollars to the local junk man who collected them and sold them to a tannery.
Special strips of beef were trimmed out of the carcass to make dried beef, and all the tallow was tossed into a scrap barrel to be used later for making soap. The beef was quartered and hung most of the winter in the cold. Nearby, on a sturdy sawbuck table, lay a sharp butcherknife and the meat saw used to slice off beefsteak or roasts as required for family consumption.

Meanwhile, in the kitchen all hands were assigned a special duty. Some women diced up leaf lard and rendered it in large dripping pans in a controlled oven. It was the only lard Mamma ever used to make her delicious pie crust. Other lard was kettle rendered on the stove top; a dangerous and greasy job. It was then strained and the balance placed in the lard press to extract every last drop, leaving only a crust of cracklings on the bottom of the press. Nothing was ever discarded - even the cracklings were made into cookies or fried with eggs for breakfast. The lard was stored in stone crocks ranging in size from 2 to 20 gallons and kept on the cellar floor.

Another group of women, including Grandma, ground and mixed the fillings for a variety of sausage. It was put in a huge washtub, seasoned, mixed, tasted and then placed in the stuffing machine which fed it into casings.

The ends were tied up and it was either cooked or, as in the case of summer sausage, carried out and hung in the smokehouse. Some of the fresh meat was made into patties, fried and placed in stone crocks, preserved only by a covering of hot melted lard.
More work followed for the women. Hams, bacon sides and dried beef were cured in a special brine for a specific time, then wrapped in cheese cloth and hung up in the smokehouse. After several days the greater part of the work was completed. Utensils and floors were cleaned and scrubbed, and both men and women settled back to a normal routine.