From an email to a relative

From an email to a relative

I recently got back from the local grocery store, and they have the boneless pork loins to grind and will grind it for me with some wild game meat, so even I can make sausage if I have to. And at the Hemlocks I can do it (grind mixed meat) manually, too, if I have to. The local grocery store has an expensive electric powered grinder.

Now in the meantime, it is more convenient to just buy sausage already made from the same store. Now I recall you would take off the casings (the wrap around the sausage meat), and some of the casings are made from cellulose, like a wood bark product.  But during my youth time, even the most expensive condoms were made from lamb’s intestines, and I always liked using them for pleasure reasons.

Now it is more rural here, as you now know. Well one rather young meat cutter and local fellow knows how to nail rat traps to trees and bait them so as to catch squirrels.

Now imagine trying to make sausage from squirrel meat and pork. The gag factor would probably be high. At least Chester dog will probably eat it. Add in some of Mark Walker’s local honey and your own biscuits, and you could have a wild game meal, so to speak. I once attended a party that was just such a thing while in Georgia.  I helped make the invite for the doctor host, and the menu included wild fish and wild mammals he had harvested from around the world, mostly in the USA. I don’t recall him sharing New Zealand stag, for example.

Even my own mother would make chitlins from scratch from local farm pig guts, and I would usually leave the house because the smell was so crappy from when she would strip the pig intestines (reverse them to clean out the crap that stunk so bad) Then she would boil them to make sure all the germs were dead, and then the smell really got out, like to permeate the whole house or apartment. Even in the name of racial harmony, we would have soul food day once a week (back in the 1970’s) at the mess hall, but most black Marines were from the cities and hated chitlins just as much as most people. Later “soul food day” at the mess halls was dropped as a bad idea.

Last, both my brother and I would usually make up some excuse not to eat the chitlins my mother made, or even sometimes we would lie outright to her. (Same goes for when my grandmother would wring a chicken’s neck as part of the preparation process.)  I’ve never forgotten that stripping chitlin smell, either.  But zillions of people have eaten them, so I know they are OK to eat, and if hungry enough I am sure even I would eat them if the other choice is not to eat at all.

And having been overseas a lot, I have eaten some foods that were strange to me, all without throwing up the food. So I figure if they can do, so can I. And I did, often preceded by liberal amounts of the local brew, too. Now that did help my courage.