I’ve given my wife, Michele, so many ways to mock me that I’ve lost count.
The latest came this month on my 62nd birthday.
I regularly get up at 4 a.m., and it would have made luxurious sense to sleep in and then start the day with some hot cakes and scrapple washed down with our usual Costco coffee. Maybe even a shot of Jameson’s Irish Whiskey.
But no. I went to a hog butchering instead. An hour away in Boyce, Va. At 6 a.m. on a freezing, 7-degree morning. And no whiskey.
My longtime deer hunting mentor and buddy, Paul, has been hosting butcherings on his gravel driveway for years, and it wasn’t his fault that the best day to tackle his hogs was my birthday. And I wasn’t going to wimp out just because of a silly birthday.
Hog butcherings are a staple of the Shenandoah Valley. If you take a drive on Route 340 on any Saturday in January or February, you’re bound to see butcherings at fire halls and gun clubs. You can tell because the pickups are parked randomly on lawns, it’s smoky from the fires burning under the scrapple and lard kettles, and there are a lot of people just milling around with knives in their hands.
They can be a lot of work, and Paul made sure of it this year with his promise of seven pigs.
In past years, we drove over to an Amish butcher near Hagerstown, Md., to buy pigs already slaughtered. But lately Paul has been raising his own and killing them the day before the sausage-making begins.
That’s not my cup of tea, so I showed up Saturday, parking my pickup next to the hogs hanging from a pole tied between two pine trees.
Cold weather is key when butchering. It keeps the fat firm so the grinder doesn’t get jammed.
But this year the sub-freezing temperature messed with everything. The smaller pigs froze. The hoses used to put water in the kettles were stiff with ice. And nobody could feel the ends of their fingers.
As we waited for the sun to warm things up, we had more time for the other fun part of butcherings, jawboning with old and new friends.
This year we had a bunch of folks join, including two Loudoun County career emergency responders — a really great thing since somebody typically cuts a finger, usually after I’ve sharpened their knives.
I worked with J.R. and Ronnie on the hog heads. Ronnie showed me how to get all the meat off the skulls, like the cheeks that are so popular in the fancy downtown Washington restaurants.
When they heard I was a political reporter, the conversation quickly shifted to President Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and the scandals plaguing our state capital of Richmond.
It started getting heated at one point, until somebody mentioned that it was my birthday. That broke things up and led to a fresh round of mockery.
That was a good point for everyone to take a break and have a fresh sausage and egg biscuit cooked up by Paul’s son, Kenny.
About five hours into the nine-hour day it was time to finish the scrapple, pouring in so much corn meal that it made stirring tough. When it looked done, everybody dipped a finger in for a taste of the chunky hot “puddin” right out of the bubbling pot.
“It is the best we ever made,” Paul said.
He figured that we made 400 pounds of sausage — some with Italian seasoning, others with salt and pepper and sage — 140 pounds of scrapple and 180 pounds of chops, roasts, and ribs.
Who knows how many rolls of Food Saver plastic his daughter Michelle and her crew went through to bag it up with three, constantly humming vacuum packers.
In the end, and after a little more ribbing on how I spent my big day, Paul loaded me up with sausage and scrapple as a wonderful birthday present that I was sure would quiet any more mocking when I got home.
It didn’t.
Paul Bedard is a senior columnist and author of Washington Secrets.
