Farm Postcard: The Pork-Scrap Terrine

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In all of its glistening glory

Use it all and make it good: pork loin, seasoned fat from a homemade porchetta, pork liver, figs, almonds, rum, parsley, red pepper flakes, garlic, spices, and reserved pork stock made from hocks. Chop and mix by hand, bake for two hours (in water bath), place weight on top, and cure for a day in the fridge. Serve cold with mustard and pickles, a glass of homemade beer or wine. Enjoy.

A Mid-September Weekend

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We may be feeding hay by the end of the month.

Cresting the hill on my tractor on a Saturday evening of bushhogging, I was followed by a long, dry cloud of chaff and dust. Ahead of me, a few hundred yards of brown fields extended to the woods. It has been a dry year, technically, a moderate drought, that has gripped our valley. A claim that, in this year of extraordinary heavy rains or continual rains in many areas of the country, seems oddly boastful.

Making the final turn at the bottom of the hill, the south end of the field, in the shelter of the oaks, I found my green pasture. Like the last of the snow left in the shade of a tree, here lay a swath of grass, no more than five yards across, still exhibiting the trademark signs of life.

As a kid in Louisiana, I saw my first snow at the age of four — a remarkable day in which the white stuff melted almost as fast as it fell. I ran around our yard, gathering snow from underneath the trees, trying to collect enough to make a snowball. Eventually, I brought a golf ball-size ice ball inside to proudly show off. That is what I felt like doing yesterday upon spying the patch of green. “Look, Cindy,” I’d say, “green grass. Quick, get a vase before it loses its color.”

Friday night we drove to the next valley over to another farm. Turning down a small road, we passed the spot where one enterprising local farmer raises fighting cocks for that lucrative blood sport. Hundreds of wooden huts, each housing a single, tethered rooster, are positioned in neat grids up and down the well-manicured hill.

A bit further down the road we arrived, across a small bridge over a diminished stream, at our friends’ farm, where the next several hours were spent deconstructing four sides of hogs into usable cuts of meat for the two brothers’ freezer. In a slightly chaotic assembly line, I focused on removing the ribs and sides (bacon) and deboning the hams. One of the brothers removed the loins and cut the Boston butt from the picnic shoulder roasts. Cindy and the other brother took on the job of vacuum packing the massive piles of meat. Meanwhile, our hosts’ mother kept busy presenting trays of snacks and penning content descriptions on the sealed bags of cuts. We eventually headed home after capping off the butchering session with a late-night dinner and glass of wine.

Saturday afternoon we headed back up our dry valley to another farm, where we joined a hundred or so guests for a pig-pickin’ party. The 200-pound pig was from our farm, bought by a neighbor just that week, then killed, scalded and slow roasted for 13 hours. The resulting meat was something any Southern boy would have been proud of producing. That it was prepared by a native New Yorker showed that the art of the slow-roast pork is not defined by the geography of one’s birth.

After a few hours of conversation and food we returned home. Up the long, dusty drive we went, past the dying fields and drying ponds, where the cattle and their newborn calves kicked up their heels over some pleasure unseen by us.

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Reading this weekend: Surviving the Future: culture, carnival, and capital in the aftermath of the market economy by David Fleming.

The Great Tear-Down

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Well maintained farm structures

Perhaps it is barn envy. This farm has never had enough barns or sheds for the equipment, animals, forage, and tools to meet our needs, despite our ongoing efforts. Seventeen years of building hay sheds, equipment sheds, chicken coops, and well houses has provided me with a fair sense of the work, skill, material resources, and neighborly assistance needed to construct those larger hay barns that dot our landscape.

So I feel a particular sadness watching old barns fall into disuse or being torn down before their time, the wood destined to deck a second home on the lake or, more often, simply bulldozed and burned.

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This large barn may have been ignored too long

Often this tear-down is done by new owners seeking the “country life.” The country life is a consumer choice, bought and sold. It’s quite distinct from the agrarian life, which is a life of work and provision. In the past five years, we have watched two different neighbors tear down perfectly good barns and burn the lumber. One neighbor bulldozed a two-story hay and tobacco barn and replaced it with a poorly constructed lean-to for lawnmowers and weedeaters and leaf blowers. The other leveled a barn built of chestnut and oak so he could have more room to practice his golf swings.

A recent conversation with an extension agent about fencing revealed a similar pattern. According to his statistics, more than 50 percent of fencing in our county has been torn out in the past 20 years.

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This hay barn was overgrown and falling down three years ago. They replaced the rotting wood and support beams and extended the usefulness for another generation.

The destruction of an infrastructure that is often still perfectly suited for the continued productive use of these East Tennessee valley farms is concrete evidence of the demise of a formerly vibrant community of neighbors and family that worked together. From the tobacco barn and smokehouse to the chicken coop and milking parlor, all helped to explain who went before and what worked on this land.

Although not necessarily wed to our predecessors’ choices, we’d be wise to not wholly ignore them either by tearing down the evidence of their accomplishments. That evidence is a blueprint linking the past to a possible future. Because far deeper than the grain in the wood is the pattern to sustain life and community.

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Reading this weekend: Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hoschschild. An interesting new sociology of the American right that focuses on my home town of Lake Charles and Calcasieu Parish.

A Conversation Postcard: At the Dump

The ­old man from Maine carried on a one-way conversation with Cindy as I unloaded the truck at our local dump. I could overhear snippets as I emptied the garbage cans:

Commenting that every president who does a stint in the White House comes out gray-haired: “I bleach my hair blonde; otherwise, it would all be white.”Feeder pigs 017

On a piglet his family raised as a pet when he was a boy: “Well, then my mom named her Sally, after my dad’s old girlfriend. She’d stand outside and holler, “Fat Sally, Fat Sally,” with a smile on her face, until that fat sow came waddling up from her sty for a meal. That pig would follow us into town. We had this summer kitchen outside with a couch where Sally would rest, waiting for the scraps, when Mom was cooking. Finally, one day we came home and Sally was gone. My parents never told us where she went.”

On Hurricane Carol in 1954: “Hurricane Carol blew the whole crop down — 4,000 Macintosh apple trees. Dad called up his friend at the cider mill, and his friend said, “Jim, I’m firing up the mill right now. Get those apples to me.” We kids picked up apples off the ground all day and all night, I’ll never forget.”

He finally sputtered to a halt, overcome with that memory, as I finished unloading the truck. I climbed back in the cab, then said our goodbyes and headed back to the farm.