Tag Archives: Front Porch Republic

Pig Feed

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Two recent book finds.

The autumn light in the hour before sunset seeps through the thinning branches of the big tulip poplar, landing in bright splotches on the ground by the barn where I stand. The smell of overripe bananas is heady in the air. They are now piled in their bunches in a large tub that once contained a sweet-protein mix for cattle, and already are bubbling slowly, fermenting into a mush. Pigs love bananas, and the riper the better. When I spotted the blackening bunches, my hands were already coated with sticky, gloppy residue from digging through two fifty-gallon barrels of not-yet rotting produce and sorting it into half a dozen buckets.

An hour later, having pulled out the mostly packaged fruits and vegetables from the depths of the barrels and separated the contents into the buckets and tub, I finish this task. The buckets are now filled with berries, mushrooms, lettuce mixes, even cucumbers and tomatoes—all ready to be fed to the hogs in the coming days, along with the mush tub of bananas, courtesy of a local grocery. I bag the plastic wrappings from the haul and put the trash in the back of the pickup. The pile of citrus and onions, neither of which the pigs will eat, I carry to the compost bin and bury under a fresh load of wood chips. Still remaining are the twenty-five gallons of milk, always a bonus with pigs. I trundle them in a wheelbarrow to another building that houses a spare fridge.

Sounds through the wall from the adjacent workshop indicate that Cindy is still working on a drop-leaf tabletop. This is a project she has labored over during the past several months. I stick my head in and say hello before returning the wheelbarrow to the barn, then walk up to the house to wash my hands. As I do, the sun drops behind the ridge and the high scalloped clouds turn gold.

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I spent the past weekend in Madison, Wisconsin, at the annual Front Porch Republic conference. Other than being butt-sore from sitting and listening to speakers for a full day, I found it mostly enjoyable. Paul Kingsnorth was the keynote speaker. Being that it was my first FPR conference, I was not certain what to expect. But this summation of the gathering, by Jeff Bilbro, gives you some idea: One of the particular delights of FPR conferences is the wide range of people who gather: farmers and academics, truckers and housewives, tech workers and artists, socialists and anarchists, Anabaptists and Catholics and agnostics. What unites us? Paul suggested that at the heart of his writing and thinking over the years lies two convictions: a suspicion of power and a desire for roots. That’s a pretty good summary of FPR’s center of gravity.

At East Tennessee Feed and Seed

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The smells that surround me as I wait in the breezeway of the family-owned feed store where we do most of our farm business are a heady mixture of sweet feed, rich soil and mulch, and bales of straw and hay, with a bit of not-so-heady chemical fertilizer thrown in for balance. A whiff of propane drifts into the mix and mingles with the others. It comes from somewhere in the back of the storage area where a worker moves pallets with a forklift, wafting by on the cool wave that always seems to flow through the dust-layered building. An auger softly clanks as it screws a load of corn, soybeans, and cotton meal into bins near the grain mill in a distant shed.

The sights and smells of this local institution strike me the same each time I come here for feed, fence staples, field gates, and sundry other farming needs. It’s a physical presence of the past. Now I’m eight years old and standing on the loading dock of Theriot’s feed store just off Ryan Street in Lake Charles, hypnotized by the chicks, ducklings, and turkey poults huddled under the red heat lamps of the brooder, drawn to them once again by some atavistic longing—until my father hunts me down and says it is time to go. The worker at East Tennessee Feed interrupts my reverie when he emerges from the storage area pushing a hand truck loaded with a couple hundred pounds of hogmeal. I drop the tailgate, and he hoists the feed bags into the well-worn bed of the farm truck and I head toward home.

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Reading this weekend: The Need to Be Whole (W. Berry). Seems like a good time to finish this massive book, before the Front Porch Republic conference next weekend—which, if any of you are there, I hope will offer the opportunity to say hello should our paths cross.

Until I Cross Water; or, Hot Boudin, Cold Coush-Coush

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Note: this is a recent essay of mine that was published in Local Culture: a journal of the Front Porch Republic. LC is an old fashioned print journal. Which means it comes in the mail and you can hold it. You can subscribe at www.frontporchrepublic.com

 

Until I Cross Water; or, Hot Boudin, Cold Coush-Coush *

Crossing waters

The hundred-pound carcass is in the truck bed cooling on ice. Before me, stretching out in the morning sunlight in long looping curves, is 49 miles of Highway 15, a narrow two-lane road perched atop the Mississippi River levee in Central Louisiana. The previous Saturday I had butchered the hog with the help of a friend on my East Tennessee farm. We started the frosty morning with a warming shot of home-distilled muscadine brandy, just because. In the woods, the grunting hogs gathered around us, impatient for their breakfast. The one I was to kill was smaller than the others, an abdominal hernia having stunted her growth. Raising my .30-30, I shot her between the eyes from about three feet. She dropped instantly, motionless, onto the forest floor. Killing animals is an integral part of life on a farm. It’s a gruesome task that, especially in the case of those you have raised, is best done without much premeditation or fanfare—it is always good to just get on with the traitorous deed. I set the rifle down and we rolled her onto her back before starting the bloody business of sticking. Meanwhile, the other pigs continued to eat just a few feet away without any real concern. Porcine compassion, like our own, seems in short supply.

The hard part done, we began with the scalding, scraping, and eviscerating. My friend had recently become an American citizen, and we chatted about upcoming projects on both of our farms and discussed the politics of his native Germany and the U.S. Because here is the thing about a slaughter day: even elbow-deep in the still-warm carcass of a dead hog, life goes on. The dogs stayed close, the flock of sheep grazed on the hill, the geese honked and prepared to fight with any and all who came near their domain, and we took time out to eat sandwiches, holding them with our blood-caked fingers, all while a cluster of chickens, having joined the dogs, searched for scraps at our feet.

A few days later I loaded up my truck with the hog on ice and left home to go home. Over the years I’ve given the act of going and coming much thought. I have decided that it is a bit like having dual citizenship. When I return to Louisiana, home of my birth, the act of going does not really begin until I cross water. It’s not when I pull down the long gravel driveway and leave the farm, nor when I traverse Alabama or Mississippi. It’s when I cross The River. The mighty Mississippi, which is just that, a massive current of water, awe-inspiring yet frightening in its single-minded push toward the Gulf of Mexico.

This particular morning, I made the crossing between Natchez, Mississippi, and Vidalia, Louisiana. From the top of the twin cantilevered bridges, the cotton fields of Concordia Parish spread out far to the west. Below, the ghost of Harlan Hubbard navigated the wild currents in his shantyboat, dodging the heavy barge traffic on the broad river. Now I roll down my windows as Jerry Lee belts out the live version of “What I’d Say”over my truck speakers, and I suck in a lungful of thick Delta air. It tastes of home. Pulling off the bridge onto Highway 15, I give a respectful nod to The Killer a few miles north of here, where he takes his final rest in a Ferriday cemetery, before I turn the wheels south toward the heart of Acadiana.

The real Louisiana is a shrouded place. It’s often hard to glimpse if you are blind to seeing. But if your eyes are open, you will discover that the veil is slightly parted on the present culture, revealing instructive (albeit unfashionable) vignettes to older modes of living. While there is plenty of modern commerce and industry, there are also a people and a lifestyle that remain essentially rooted in a rich past. And while there are still agrarian echoes of the authentic South in scattered pockets, it is only when you cross The River that you find them concentrated in an almost undiluted form in this still slow-to-change world. It is of no small importance that Louisianans have the lowest outward migration in any of the 50 states. And even when they do leave, they still remain, as do I.

I often find it hard to convey to non-natives of the Bayou State what a real food culture is like, one where eating amazing food is as natural as a breath or a heartbeat. It has often been said that the native of Louisiana is not focused on the next meal but already planning what to eat the following weekend—where to catch, trap, or shoot it, and most important, whom to share it with. Because the true heart of Louisiana is found at a table of family, friends, or even perfect strangers eating the bounty of the soil and waters from this most generous land as they sit cheek to jowl under an oak tree next to a gas station or convenience store parking lot.

That is where I find myself around lunchtime, at a no-name crossroads convenience store just east of Simmesport. I pull into a parking lot packed with duck and deer hunters, pickup trucks, and boat trailers. The all-male, camouflage-clothed clientele are keeping the friendly ladies behind the counter busy placing orders for plates of jambalaya, bowls of gumbo, and fried chicken platters. I drift almost without thinking into the line. Even though I have only stopped to take a leak and pick up fresh ice to put on the hog, a bowl of jambalaya finds its way into my hands, and I go back out into the warm day. I squeeze onto a long picnic table with the assorted hunters. Each clutches a noonday longneck in one hand and a fork or spoon in the other. I eat my lunch and listen to their stories of the morning. Some are sharing tips on the best ways to prepare a duck gumbo, others about the best processors for smoked venison sausages. In East Tennessee, men shoot deer and gather at Hardee’s to talk. Yet they seldom express much enthusiasm for eating. No wonder, when what they share are only dreary recipes for venison chili or jerky. (This is a truth that is pointless to dispute.) Which is another thing that sets my birthplace apart: its population of working-class men are obsessed with good food, how to get it, and how to best prepare it … so very French in its values, not just in its appreciation of great eating but in all things.

To my knowledge, there is no other state that has guidebooks and websites devoted to the best “real” food to be found at gas stations. Running a successful gas station in rural Louisiana includes providing good food; the man who ignores the mandate doesn’t stay in business. That is Louisiana. Outsiders may describe it as Cancer Alley, a flood zone, a hurricane either on the way or just arrived, or, God forbid, by the reductionist “Oh, New Orleans, I love it!” But if asked what home means, a native Louisianan is most likely to say it’s a table covered in newspapers upon which is dumped a massive pile of boiled crawfish or crabs, to be served alongside potatoes and corn on the cob. Staying up until midnight shucking 500 pounds of oysters. Duck hunting on the marsh at sunrise Thanksgiving Day, making sure you’re back home in time to be clean and ready for the feast at 2 p.m. Being a Louisianan means it’s 7 a.m. and you’re already five miles off the coast fishing for ling, a true roast beef po-boy with 20 napkins still not enough, a truck stop diner serving chicken sausage gumbo, a cochon de lait out on a levee. A Pentecostal church social that serves up jambalaya prepared in a 50-gallon cast iron pot and that all denominations show up to support. A Baptist picnic under 300-year-old live oaks with endless tables of food, including, and always, massive platters of dirty rice. But most important, it is almost never a restaurant dinner. It is, at its most fundamental, about sharing food with family and neighbors.

A trip to my home state doesn’t need signposts. If you are surrounded by pine forests, you know you are in the northern hill parishes, where my uncle Burl once told my uncle Al, “Nothing grows here but timber and babies.” If the road winds among rivers and endless bayous dotted with small villages, each with a Catholic church at its center, you know you are in Acadiana. Old, ruined plantations tucked among oil refineries that loom next to The River? Then you are between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The Midwestern landscape of flatness, impossibly straight roads, and endless rice fields interspersed by sleepy, sluggish bayous? Now you’ve arrived in my home territory of Southwest Louisiana. You are at the place where Jean Lafitte’s men raided my fourth great-grandfather’s home, on September 27, 1819, up on Bayou Queue de Tortue—an event that precipitated a chase by the USS Lynx to recover stolen slaves and resulted in capturing the pirates in Galveston Bay and hanging them in New Orleans before a public audience.

But wherever you find yourself in this state, you are always near good food and a cold frozen daiquiri stand. Because in Louisiana, the laws on and enforcement of alcohol consumption are somewhat befuddled with a Bacchanalian impulse toward legislation. (This is a state where it used to be legal to drive while drinking, just not drunk, which was an odd but somehow important and civilized distinction for the lawmakers, possibly in an act of self-preservation, to insist on codifying.)

My destination on this particular journey south is Chicot State Park, just outside of Ville Platte. I’m heading to the annual gathering of the men in my family. My path takes me past Lecompte, home to Lea’s Lunchroom, a landmark enshrined in my family lore not for its dozens of pies on display but for the visit circa 1930 when my mother’s older sister danced the Charleston as a little girl, to the amusement of family and the other diners. That this aunt later became the most severe tempered of Baptists made the image of her performing even more one to cherish.

Early afternoon I pull into Ville Platte, not far from where my high school father walked out of the woods with a buddy after a week of fishing, flagged down a truck for a ride back to town, and was informed that the Japanese had just attacked Pearl Harbor. Coming home is like that: the memories are as thick as the fields of sugarcane around me, planted among a landscape of cypress trees along winding bayous, rich rice fields and pecan orchards, all teeming with my ancestors, who walk among and out of mists as densely storied and historied as any in the country.

I load up at Teet’s, a grocery and specialty meat store of long standing (1955), with the essentials for our weekend — mustard greens, boudin, tasso, ponce (stuffed pig stomach), bacon, beer, wine, and coffee. The truck overloaded, I head to a remote cabin sheltered in an old-growth forest alongside Chicot Lake, where I sensibly take a nap to await my kin.

The husband of a niece is the first to arrive. A young ex-marine with a quiet, solemn mien, he helps me get things squared away while we wait on the others. Late afternoon I begin cutting the onions for the big pot before sautéing them in half a stick of butter alongside a quarter pound of smoked bacon. While the onions and bacon cook down, the two of us rinse and chop a grocery bag full of mustard greens, then toss them into the mix. A few chunks of tasso (spicy cured pork), a quart of water, plenty of Tony Chachere’s seasoning, and the lidded pot is left to simmer for the next few hours.

Back when there was still a South, before it began dying a slow and undeserved death with the invention of air conditioning, you could know where a boy was from by the greens he ate. There was a collard belt, a turnip belt, and a mustard greens belt. Louisiana fell mostly in the latter. My father, shortly before he died at 94, was posed the question, “Dad, what are your favorite greens to eat?” ”Mustard greens” was his prompt and correct reply. Some of the newcomers to the region, who in the far-off times of a decade ago would have been called Yankees, propose kale and bok choy as fair greens substitutes. But if a green cannot be improved by long simmering in pork products, then we Southerners don’t want it on our table.

While the greens simmer and everyone else arrives, while beer is drunk, a nephew and his son prepare venison backstraps and loins for the grill. They have shot two bucks the previous morning and have brought the best cuts to share.

We gather around the table as the sun sets. A younger brother gives the blessing, I give the toast, and we dig into bowls of greens, links of boudin, and blood-rare slices of seasoned venison, all washed down by cold beer from a local brewery. Once we’re done cleaning up, we retire outside to sit by a fire. A few of us smoke cigars, and bourbon and scotch make the rounds. We catch up on family gossip, share family history, talk sports, regale one another with hunting stories, make fun of those who couldn’t make the get-together.

After a hearty breakfast the following morning, we put the hog in the smoker. Come afternoon, we gather around the TV to watch LSU get destroyed by Georgia, giving us a chance to exchange classic game-day stories. Such as the one about the time our maternal grandparents took three ferries in the 1920s across the Atchafalaya Basin and the Mississippi just to watch LSU beat Alabama. Or the one about the letter we have all read from my 18-year-old father to his mother when he was on a destroyer anchored off Iwo Jima (a few months after the battle), in which he asks two things: first, could she send him his trigonometry book so he could bone up, and second, could she mail him the newspaper articles that covered the LSU vs. Alabama game?

Meanwhile, outside, slumbering under the coals, with skin crackling, the pork roasts on as the heat works its lovely magic. A pig roast, like a crawfish boil, is a communal event. It is a call to gather the extended family, bring the neighbors, help share in the bounty. Pig meat is accessible and democratic. We can all eat “high on the hog” with pork, because a pig is easily raised by anyone with the tiniest of rural patches. Flora Thompson writes in Lark Rise to Candleford of small children gathering choice thistle and grasses during the day to feed the family pig. Everyone took part in the yearlong domestic project to fatten the animal so that all could enjoy the sausage, flitches of bacon, salted hams, head cheese, chops, loin, and blood puddings. A pig in the paddock says “We can survive, do for ourselves” and “Bring on the worst—you can’t touch us.” Pull up an overturned bucket, hunker down, and watch a cow eat hay and you feel nothing. Watch a pig tuck into a trough of steamed zucchini, corn, and stale bread and you shout “Comrade!” even as you plot his betrayal.

Around halftime we take a grateful break from the shellacking to indulge in the pulled-apart roasted hog (soused in a Carolina vinegar sauce), accompanied by corn on the cob, beans, and more links of boudin. With the lot of us sitting before a table full of porky goodness, my elder brother gives the blessing and we drink more beer and eat to gluttony. Mercifully the game finally ends, and we do that most manly of things on a Saturday afternoon: we all take a nap.

The next morning I am on the road by five o’clock, headed for home in East Tennessee, with 10 hours before me. The remains of the hog have been dispersed to the younger nephews. My cooler is again loaded, this time with pounds of boudin, tasso, ponce, and various other essentials that make an expat’s life bearable through the grief of nostalgia and hunger.

Late in the evening I pull onto the drive of the farm I also call home. Having now spent many more years in East Tennessee than in Southwest Louisiana, I have an adaptable notion of what homecoming means. The farm, which I work and enjoy with Cindy, my beloved, is a homeplace in every sense of the word that matters. Yet it is only mine and her life that I see reflected in its landscape. It is a different sort of homecoming than that to be had from revisiting the land my family has nurtured for 250 years, in life and in death.

* Author’s Note: “Hot boudin, cold coush- coush, / Come on Tigers, push, push push!” Is a very old cheer that most Louisiana sports teams use, substituting their own mascot for “Tigers.” Coush-coush is fried leftover cornbread served with cream and syrup. And, dear God, if someone doesn’t know what boudin is, or has never eaten it—well, that person is only be pitied.

Country Wines and the Top Ten List

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Over the years I have written a variety of annual series on different topics: the farm breviary, the farmer’s alphabet, and a farm toolbox spring most readily to mind. There have also been a few aborted series, possibly to be returned to later. And, in all honesty, most have been done simply to help me with the process of filling out the fifty-two posts each year. Although I do hope they give value.

Fall wines: perry and crabapple.

This coming year and next I’m starting a new series on country wines. There will be twelve posts this year on using ingredients from the farm or field to create a wine (parsnip sherry, anyone?) And then next year there will be a short post each month on tasting the previous year’s creation and answering important questions. Such as, just how did that parsley wine hold up? And what should one serve with their carrot wine?

Of course, there will be the usual weekly posts on whatever else strikes my fancy or has a burr under my saddle. But please, for now, contain your excitement. Because today is my somewhat annual top ten summary of posts from last year.

This little blog, in 2020, garnered a little over 10,000 views, with 341 of those posts written over the years being reread at least once. Which, as I sit at my desk with a rooster crowing outside the window, is encouraging in that annoying Sally Fields type of fashion.

About the South Roane Agrarian and the Farm Breviary remain the top two viewed posts. But since they are separate pages on the site, I’ll discard them from the top ten.

This year’s top ten list contains a few older posts (although, God only knows, why “beef cheek pastrami” keeps showing up). But the rest are from this year.

Top ten posts from 2020

  1. Unsolicited Advice to a Nephew on Starting a Farm (2020)
  2. Neither Past Nor Future (2020)
  3. A Farm Toolbox: the pocketknife (2014)
  4. Using the Odd-bits: beef cheek pastrami (2016)
  5. A Great Divide (2017)
  6. What the Sunrise Will Show (2020)
  7. When It All Falls Away (2020)
  8. Waiting On the Egg Man (2020)
  9. Fatigue (2020)
  10. Hurricane Laura, Eight Weeks Later (2020)

And, an honorable mention, just because I’m delighted this one still shows up on the list.

  1. The Steen’s Syrup Republic (2017)

Next week? I try my hand at making a fig and muscadine raisin wine!

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Reading this weekend: Convivial Dickens: the drinks of Dickens and his times (Hewett and Axton). And, Durable Trades: family-centered economies that have stood the test of time (R. Groves). The latter was published by Front Porch Republic.

Life Lessons From an Old Austrian Socialist

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My last visit with Ken.

Beginning in the late 1980s and throughout the early ‘90s, I would get together regularly with an old Austrian friend of mine. Ken and his wife resided at an independent living facility in a small neighboring town, my friend having retired from Chicago after a career as an accountant. Ken was a small, wiry man with a mischievous sense of humor. He and I would meet periodically for breakfast or lunch and talk over the problems of the world. We’d also get together once a month at his home, where he would attempt to elevate my intellect with prepared readings of European philosophers. (For better or worse, Ken, little of it took.) We continued these discussions until the week before his death, at age 80, in 1994. Ken and I were friends for just over eight years, and even today his friendship remains one of my most valued.

In his will, Ken bestowed on me his library of a couple of thousand books. A conversation with his nephew at the time of Ken’s death gave me a fuller picture of who Ken really was. I discovered, for example, that this unassuming little man had been one of the youth officers in Austria’s Social Democratic Party. The party led an armed fight in the February Uprising of 1934 against the Austrian Fascists. As that fight became increasingly desperate, and with a price on his head, Ken was smuggled out of the country (and eventually changed his name).

In my library hangs a picture of the two of us. The photograph was taken when Cindy and I, returning from a hiking trip in the mountains, had stopped in to say hello. Ken died the next week. Often, I’ll stare at the photograph and remember him with great fondness. He taught me some simple yet key lessons.

  1. Not every question needs to be answered. One day, out of the blue, Ken asked me, “Do you still like your boss?” Nothing unusual, except that the question was presented in the quiet reading room of the genealogy library where I worked, in the very loud voice of the hard-of-hearing, with my boss standing nearby and a roomful of patrons sitting at the oak research tables. I paused, feeling the pressure of the rock against a hard place, then replied simply, “Ken, it is good to see you.”
  2. Curb your optimism. In 1989, when I was preparing to open my own bookstore, Ken advised me on making a business plan. Each time I would present my plan, he would push back and say it was too optimistic. “Plan for no sales and pay your bills with that,” he told me. That is some pretty darned good farming advice right there: when your crop fails or no one buys what you have on offer, you’d better be prepared with a contingency plan.
  3. Find your place and stick. Eventually, as part of a resettlement program, Ken made it to the U.S. in the late 1930s. He was set up with a job in Houston as an auto mechanic. That did not last. To know Ken was to know that there could not have been a job or location for which this bookish Viennese Marxist would have been less suited. A few months later he was resettled again, this time in Chicago, where he trained as an accountant and where he remained until retirement.
  4. Spend time in quiet contemplation. Ken had a poster of a Gustav Klimt painting displayed in a special alcove of his home. He said he liked to just sit and stare at it. He told me over lunch one day that every time he did, he saw something new. I don’t get Klimt, but I do get the concept. Routinely, I’ll sit in my garden and just stare. Eventually, I’ll see it differently, come to a better understanding of what should be done.
  5. Find and praise competence in the small places. Ken always insisted on talking with the manager or owner of a business when a clerk had excelled at his job. To a bemused auto parts manager, he would outline, his heavy Austrian accent at elevated volume, what specifically the employee at the counter had done well. “Call attention to good work habits,” he told me, “and the world becomes a better place.” When the young man helping me build a fence has persevered in hot weather with good cheer, I’ll thank him for a job well done — and also tell his mother for good measure.

The two of us during that last visit.

It’s been more than 25 years since Ken’s passing, and I’m still grateful for my unlikely friendship with such a unique and interesting man. Cheers, Ken, and thanks for that.

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Reading this weekend: Local Culture: journal of the Front Porch Republic, Drawn and Quartered (Chas Adams)