No. VI. Keeping Pigs

Cottage Economy, To Which Is Added The Poor Man's Friend, by William Cobbett is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. No. VI. KEEPING PIGS—(continued.)

143. As in the case of cows so in that of pigs, much must depend upon the situation of the cottage; because all pigs will graze; and therefore, on the skirts of forests or commons, a couple or three pigs may be kept, if the family be considerable; and especially if the cottager brew his own beer, which will give him grains to assist the wash. Even in lanes, or on the sides of great roads, a pig will find a good part of his food from May to November; and if he be yoked, the occupiers of the neighborhood must be churlish and brutish indeed, if they give the owner any annoyance.

144. Let me break off here for a moment to point out to my readers the truly excellent conduct of Lord Winchilsea and Lord Stanhope, who, as I read, have taken great pains to make the laborer's on their estates comfortable, by allotting to each a piece of ground sufficient for the keeping of a cow. I once, when I lived at Botley, proposed to the copyholders and other farmers in my neighborhood, that we should petition the Bishop of Winchester, who was lord of the manors thereabouts, to grant titles to all the numerous persons called trespassers on the wastes; and also to give titles to others of the poor parishioners, who were willing to make, on the skirts of the wastes, enclosures not exceeding an acre each. This I am convinced, would have done a great deal towards relieving the parishes, then greatly burdened by men out of work. This would have been better than digging holes one day to fill them up the next. Not a single man would agree to my proposal! One, a bullfrog farmer (now, I hear, pretty well sweated down,) said it would only make them saucy! And one, a true disciple of Malthus, said, that to facilitate their rearing of children was a harm! This man had, at the time, in his own occupation, land that had formerly been six farms, and he had, too, ten or a dozen children. I will not mention names; but this farmer will now, perhaps, have occasion to call to mind what I told him on that day, when his opposition, and particularly the ground of it, gave me the more pain, as he was a very industrious, civil, and honest man. Never was there a greater mistake than to suppose that men are made saucy and idle by just and kind treatment. Slaves are always lazy and saucy; nothing but the lash will extort from them either labour or respectful deportment. I never met with a saucy Yankee (New Englander) in my life. Never servile; always civil. This must necessarily be the character of freemen living in a state of competence. They have nobody to envy; nobody to complain of; they are in good humour with mankind. It must, however, be confessed, that very little, comparatively speaking, is to be accomplished by the individual efforts even of benevolent men like the two noblemen before mentioned. They have a strife to maintain against the general tendency of the national state of things. It is by general and indirect means, and not by partial and direct and positive regulations, that so great a good as that which they generously aim at can be accomplished. When we are to see such means adopted, God only knows; but, if much longer delayed, I am of opinion, that they will come too late to prevent something very much resembling a dissolution of society.

145. The cottager’s pig should be bought in the spring, or late in winter; and being then four months old, he will be a year old before killing time; for it should always be borne in mind, that this age is required in order to insure the greatest quantity of meat from a given quantity of food. If a hog be more than a year old, he is the better for it. The flesh is more solid and more nutritious than that of a young hog, much in the same degree that the mutton of a full-mouthed wether is better than that of a younger wether. The pork or bacon of young hogs, even if fatted on corn, is very apt to boil out, as they call it; that is to say, come out of the pot smaller in bulk than it goes in. When you begin to fat, do it by degrees, especially in the case of hogs under a year old. If you feed high all at once, the hog is apt to surfeit, and then a great loss of food takes place. Peas, or barley-meal is the food; the latter rather the best, and does the work quicker. Make him quite fat by all means. The last bushel, even if he sit as he eat, is the most profitable. If he can walk two hundred yards at a time, he is not well fatted. Lean bacon is the most wasteful thing that any family can use. In short, it is uneatable, except by drunkards, who want something to stimulate their sickly appetite. The man who cannot live on solid fat bacon, well-fed and well-cured, wants the sweet sauce of labor, or is fit for the hospital. But, then, it must be bacon, the effect of barley or peas, (not beans,) and not of whey, potatoes, or messes of any kind. It is frequently said, and I know that even farmers say it, that bacon, made from corn, costs more than it is worth! Why do they take care to have it then? They know better. They know well, that it is the very cheapest they can have; and they, who look at both ends and both sides of every cost, would as soon think of shooting their hogs as of fatting them on messes; that is to say, for their own use, however willing they might now-and-then be to regale the Londoners with a bit of potato-pork.

146. About Christmas, if the weather be coldish, is a good time to kill. If the weather be very mild, you may wait a little longer; for the hog cannot be too fat. The day before killing he should have no food. To kill a hog nicely is so much of a profession, that it is better to pay a shilling for having it done, than to stab and hack and tear the carcass about. I shall not speak of pork; for I would by no means recommend it. There are two ways of going to work to make bacon; in the one you take off the hair by scalding. This is the practice in most parts of England, and all over America. But the Hampshire way, and the best way, is to burn the hair off. There is a great deal of difference in the consequences. The first method slackens the skin, opens all the pores of it, makes it loose and flabby by drawing out the roots of the hair. The second tightens the skin in every part, contracts all the sinews and veins in the skin, makes the flitch a solider thing, and the skin a better protection to the meat. The taste of the meat is very different from that of a scalded hog; and to this chiefly it was that Hampshire bacon owed its reputation for excellence. As the hair is to be burnt off it must be dry, and care must be taken, that the hog be kept on dry litter of some sort the day previous to killing. When killed he is laid upon a narrow bed of straw, not wider than his carcass, and only two or three inches thick. He is then covered all over thinly with straw, to which, according as the wind may be, the fire is put at one end. As the straw burns, it burns the hair. It requires two or three coverings and burnings, and care is taken, that the skin be not in any part burnt, or parched. When the hair is all burnt off close, the hog is scraped clean, but never touched with water. The upper side being finished, the hog is turned over, and the other side is treated in like manner. This work should always be done before day-light; for in the day-light you cannot so nicely discover whether the hair be sufficiently burnt off. The light of the fire is weakened by that of the day. Besides, it makes the boys get up very early for once at any rate, and that is something; for boys always like a bonfire.

147. The inwards are next taken out, and if the wife be not a slattern, here, in the mere offal, in the mere garbage, there is food, and delicate food too, for a large family for a week; and hog’s puddings for the children, and some for neighbor's children, who come to play with them; for these things are by no means to be overlooked, seeing that they tend to the keeping alive of that affection in children for their parents, which, later in life, will be found absolutely necessary to give effect to wholesome precept, especially when opposed to the boisterous passions of youth.

148. The butcher, the next day, cuts the hog up; and then the house is filled with meat! Souse, griskins, blade-bones, thigh-bones, spare-ribs, chines, belly-pieces, cheeks, all coming into use one after the other, and the last of the latter not before the end of about four or five weeks. But about this time, it is more than possible that the Methodist parson will pay you a visit. It is remarked in America, that these gentry are attracted by the squeaking of the pigs, as the fox is by the cackling of the hen. This may be called slander; but I will tell you what I did know to happen. A good honest careful fellow had a spare-rib, on which he intended to sup with his family after a long and hard day’s work at coppice-cutting. Home he came at dark with his two little boys, each with a nitch of wood that they had carried four miles, cheered with the thought of the repast that awaited them. In he went, found his wife, the Methodist parson, and a whole troop of the sisterhood, engaged in prayer, and on the table lay scattered the clean-polished bones of the spare-rib! Can any reasonable creature believe, that, to save the soul, God requires us to give up the food necessary to sustain the body? Did Saint Paul preach this? He, who, while he spread the gospel abroad, worked himself, in order to have it to give to those who were unable to work? Upon what, then, do these modern saints; these evangelical gentlemen, found their claim to live on the labour of others.

149. All the other parts taken away, the two sides that remain, and that are called flitches, are to be cured for bacon. They are first rubbed with salt on their insides, or flesh sides, then placed, one on the other, the flesh sides uppermost, in a salting trough which has a gutter round its edges to drain away the brine; for, to have sweet and fine bacon, the flitches must not lie sopping in brine; which gives it that sort of taste which barrel-pork and sea-jonk have, and than which nothing is more villainous. Every one knows how different is the taste of fresh, dry salt, from that of salt in a dissolved state. The one is savory, the other nauseous. Therefore, change the salt often. Once in four or five days. Let it melt, and sink in; but let it not lie too long. Change the flitches. Put that at bottom which was first put on the top. Do this a couple of times. This mode will cost you a great deal more in salt, or rather in taxes, than the sopping mode; but without it, your bacon will not be sweet and fine, and will not keep so well. As to the time required for making the flitches sufficiently salt, it depends on circumstances; the thickness of the flitch, the state of the weather, the place wherein the salting is going on. It takes a longer time for a thick than for a thin flitch; it takes longer in dry, than in damp weather; it takes longer in a dry than in a damp place. But for the flitches of a hog of twelve score, in weather not very dry or very damp, about six weeks may do; and as yours is to be fat, which receives little injury from over-salting, give time enough; for you are to have bacon till Christmas comes again. The place for salting should, like a dairy, always be cool, but always admit of a free circulation of air: confined air, though cool, will taint meat sooner than the mid-day sun accompanied with a breeze. Ice will not melt in the hottest sun so soon as in a close and damp cellar. Put a lump of ice in cold water, and one of the same size before a hot fire, and the former will dissolve in half the time that the latter will. Let me take this occasion of observing, that an ice-house should never be under ground, or under the shade of trees. That the bed of it ought to be three feet above the level of the ground; that this bed ought to consist of something that will admit the drippings to go instantly off; and that the house should stand in a place open to the sun and air. This is the way they have the ice-houses under the burning sun of Virginia; and here they keep their fish and meat as fresh and sweet as in winter, when at the same time neither will keep for twelve hours, though let down to the depth of a hundred feet in a well. A Virginian, with some poles and straw, will stick up an ice-house for ten dollars, worth a dozen of those ice-houses, each of which costs our men of taste as many scores of pounds. It is very hard to imagine, indeed, what any one should want ice for, in a country like this, except for clodpole boys to slide upon, and to drown cockneys in skaiting-time; but if people must have ice in summer, they may as well go a right way as a wrong way to get it.

150. However, the patient that I have at this time under my hands wants nothing to cool his blood, but something to warm it, and, therefore, I will get back to the flitches of bacon, which are now to be smoked; for smoking is a great deal better than merely drying, as is the fashion in the dairy countries in the West of England. When there were plenty of farm-houses there were plenty of places to smoke bacon in; since farmers have lived in gentleman’s houses, and the main part of the farm-houses have been knocked down, these places are not so plenty. However, there is scarcely any neighborhood without a chimney left to hang bacon up in. Two precautions are necessary: first, to hang the flitches where no rain comes down upon them: second, not to let them be so near the fire as to melt. These precautions taken, the next is, that the smoke must proceed from wood, not turf, peat, or coal. Stubble or litter might do; but the trouble would be great. Fir, or deal, smoke is not fit for the purpose. I take it, that the absence of wood, as fuel, in the dairy countries, and in the North, has led to the making of pork and dried bacon. As to the time that it requires to smoke a flitch, it must depend a good deal upon whether there be a constant fire beneath, and whether the fire be large or small. A month may do, if the fire be pretty constant, and such as a farm-house fire usually is. But over smoking, or, rather, too long hanging in the air, makes the bacon rust. Great attention should, therefore, be paid to this matter. The flitch ought not be dried up to the hardness of a board, and yet it ought to be perfectly dry. Before you hang it up, lay it on the floor, scatter the flesh-side pretty thickly over with bran, or with some fine saw-dust other than that of deal or fir. Rub it on the flesh, or pat it well down upon it. This keeps the smoke from getting into the little openings, and makes a sort of crust to be dried on; and, in short, keeps the flesh cleaner than it would otherwise be.

151. To keep the bacon sweet and good, and free from nasty things that they call hoppers; that is to say, a sort of skipping maggots, engendered by a fly which has a great relish for bacon: to provide against this mischief, and also to keep the bacon from becoming rusty, the Americans, whose country is so hot in summer, have two methods. They smoke no part of the hog except the hams, or gammons. They cover these with coarse linen cloth such as the finest hop-bags are made of, which they sew neatly on. They then white-wash the cloth all over with lime white-wash, such as we put on walls, their lime being excellent stone-lime. They give the ham four or five washings, the one succeeding as the former gets dry; and in the sun, all these washings are put on in a few hours. The flies cannot get through this; and thus the meat is preserved from them. The other mode, and that is the mode for you, is, to sift fine some clean and dry wood-ashes. Put some at the bottom of a box, or chest, which is long enough to hold a flitch of bacon. Lay in one flitch; then put in more ashes; then the other flitch; and then cover this with six or eight inches of the ashes. This will effectually keep away all flies; and will keep the bacon as fresh and good as when it came out of the chimney, which it will not be for any great length of time, if put on a rack, or kept hung up in the open air. Dust, or even sand, very, very dry, would, perhaps, do as well. The object is not only to keep out the flies, but the air. The place where the chest, or box, is kept, ought to be dry; and, if the ashes should get damp (as they are apt to do from the salts they contain,) they should be put in the fire-place to dry, and then be put back again. Peat-ashes, or turf-ashes, might do very well for this purpose. With these precautions, the bacon will be as good at the end of the year as on the first day; and it will keep two, and even three years, perfectly good, for which, however, there can be no necessity.

152. Now, then, this hog is altogether a capital thing. The other parts will be meat for about four or five weeks. The lard, nicely put down, will last a long while for all the purposes for which it is wanted. To make it keep well there should be some salt put into it. Country children are badly brought up if they do not like sweet lard spread upon bread, as we spread butter. Many a score hunches of this sort have I eaten, and I never knew what poverty was. I have eaten it for luncheon at the houses of good substantial farmers in France and Flanders. I am not now frequently so hungry as I ought to be; but I should think it no hardship to eat sweet lard instead of butter. But, now-a-days, the laborers, and especially the female part of them, have fallen into the taste of niceness in food and finery in dress; a quarter of a bellyful and rags are the consequence. The food of their choice is high-priced, so that, for the greater part of their time, they are half-starved. The dress of their choice is showy and flimsy, so that, to-day, they are ladies, and to-morrow ragged as sheep with the scab. But has not Nature made the country girls as pretty as ladies? Oh, yes! (bless their rosy cheeks and white teeth!) and a great deal prettier too! But are they less pretty, when their dress is plain and substantial, and when the natural presumption is, that they have smocks as well as gowns, than they are when drawn off in the frail fabric of Sir Robert Peel, “where tawdry colours strive with dirty white,” exciting violent suspicions that all is not as it ought to be nearer the skin, and calling up a train of ideas extremely hostile to that sort of feeling which every lass innocently and commendably wishes to awaken in her male beholders? Are they prettiest when they come through the wet and dirt safe and neat; or when their draggled dress is plastered to their backs by a shower of rain? However, the fault has not been theirs, nor that of their parents. It is the system of managing the affairs of the nation. This system has made all flashy and false, and has put all things out of their place. Pomposity, bombast, hyperbole, redundancy, and obscurity, both in speaking and in writing; mock-delicacy in manners; mock-liberality, mock-humanity, and mock-religion. Pitt’s false money, Peel’s flimsy dresses, Wilberforce’s potato diet, Castlereagh’s and Mackintosh’s oratory, Walter Scott’s poems, Walter’s and Stoddart’s paragraphs, with all the bad taste and baseness and hypocrisy which they spread over this country; all have arisen, grown, branched out, bloomed, and borne together; and we are now beginning to taste of their fruit. But, as the fat of the adder is, as is said, the antidote to its sting; so in the Son of the great worker of Spinning-Jennies, we have, thanks to the Proctors and Doctors of Oxford, the author of that Bill, before which this false, this flashy, this flimsy, this rotten system will dissolve as one of his father’s pasted calicoes does at the sight of the washing-tub.

153. “What,” says the cottager, “has all this to do with hogs and bacon?” Not directly with hogs and bacon, indeed; but it has a great deal to do, my good fellow with your affairs, as I shall, probably, hereafter more fully show, though I shall now leave you to the enjoyment of your flitches of bacon, which, as I before observed, will do ten thousand times more than any Methodist parson, or any other parson (except, of course, those of our church) to make you happy, not only in this world, but in the world to come. Meat in the house is a great source of harmony, a great preventer of the temptation to commit those things, which, from small beginnings, lead, finally, to the most fatal and atrocious results; and I hold that doctrine to be truly damnable, which teaches that God has made any selection, any condition relative to belief, which is to save from punishment those who violate the principles of natural justice.

154. Some other meat you may have; but, bacon is the great thing. It is always ready; as good cold as hot; goes to the field or the coppice conveniently; in harvest, and other busy times, demands the pot to be boiled only on a Sunday; has twice as much strength in it as any other thing of the same weight; and in short, has in it every quality that tends to make a labourer’s family able to work and well off. One pound of bacon, such as that which I have described, is, in a labourer’s family, worth four or five of ordinary mutton or beef, which are great part bone, and which, in short, are gone in a moment. But always observe, it is fat bacon that I am talking about. There will, in spite of all that can be done, be some lean in the gammons, though comparatively very little; and therefore you ought to begin at that end of the flitches; for, old lean bacon is not good.

155. Now, as to the cost. A pig (a spayed sow is best) bought in March four months old, can be had now for fifteen shillings. The cost till fatting time is next to nothing to a Cottager; and then the cost, at the present price of corn, would, for a hog of twelve score, not exceed three pounds; in the whole four pounds five; a pot of poison a week bought at the public-house comes to twenty-six shillings of the money; and more than three times the remainder is generally flung away upon the miserable tea, as I have clearly shown in the First Number, at Paragraph 24. I have, indeed, there shown, that if the tea were laid aside, the labourer might supply his family well with beer all the year round, and have a fat hog of even fifteen score for the cost of the tea, which does him and can do him no good at all.

156. The feet, the cheeks, and other bone, being considered, the bacon and lard, taken together, would not exceed sixpence a pound. Irish bacon is “cheaper.” Yes, lower-priced. But, I will engage that a pound of mine, when it comes out of the pot (to say nothing of the taste,) shall weigh as much as a pound and a half of Irish, or any dairy or slop-fed bacon, when that comes out of the pot. No, no: the farmers joke when they say, that their bacon costs them more than they could buy bacon for. They know well what it is they are doing; and besides, they always forget, or, rather, remember not to say, that the fatting of a large hog yields them three or four load of dung, really worth more than ten or fifteen of common yard dung. In short, without hogs, farming could not go on; and it never has gone on in any country in the world. The hogs are the great stay of the whole concern. They are much in small space; they make no show, as flocks and herds do; but with out them, the cultivation of the land would be a poor, a miserably barren concern.

157. VERY FAT Mutton may be salted to great advantage, and also smoked, and may be kept thus a long while. Not the shoulders and legs, but the back of the sheep. I have never made any flitch of sheep-bacon; but I will; for there is nothing like having a store of meat in a house. The running to the butchers daily is a ridiculous thing. The very idea of being fed, of a family being fed, by daily supplies, has something in it perfectly tormenting. One half of the time of a mistress of a house, the affairs of which are carried on in this way, is taken up in talking about what is to be got for dinner, and in negotiations with the butcher. One single moment spent at table beyond what is absolutely necessary, is a moment very shamefully spent; but, to suffer a system of domestic economy, which unnecessarily wastes daily an hour or two of the mistress’s time in hunting for the provision for the repast, is a shame indeed; and when we consider how much time is generally spent in this and in equally absurd ways, it is no wonder that we see so little performed by numerous individuals as they do perform during the course of their lives.

158. Very fat parts of Beef may be salted and smoked in a like manner. Not the lean; for that is a great waste, and is, in short, good for nothing. Poor fellows on board of ships are compelled to eat it, but it is a very bad thing.