Butchering at Kjettestorp

Kjettestorp Norrgård 1930. Left to right are Margaretha, Sara, Henrik, Thor, Elin sitting with
Lennart on her lap, Ragnar, Midi sitting, Johan August, Hildegard, Brita and Gunborg :)

"I don’t think I really talked much about the butchering. When I was a kid, of course, this was done at home, like everything else. It was a big job and people would usually come and help. Both men and women worked on these kinds of days. They butchered several times a year; I don’t remember really how often. I know there was always one done in October when it started to get cold. Then they’d butcher a pig and a calf for Christmas. Us kids always liked when they butchered a pig because that meant there would be bacon and sausage and palt. When they butchered, they saved the blood from the pig and then they took the dead pig to the washhouse. There they boiled lots of hot water and they scrubbed the whole pig to get all the bristles off.

With the pig blood, they made something called palt. They mixed the blood with dark rye flour and made a stiff dough. They’d use it to make a round loaf and in the middle of the loaf they’d put some of the pig fat. They’d cook it and slice it and then fry the slices and serve it with lingonberries.  I loved it. It

was delicious. If it was put in a pan, they called it paltbröd. When they served that, they’d make a white gravy, and they’d cook bacon to eat with it.

I know it’s been said often, but when a pig was slaughtered everything was used. Nothing was thrown away except the bristles. When they got out the intestines, they put in something like a water hose to wash them out. They washed them and scraped them and washed them again. Then they were cut into lengths and turned inside out and washed and scraped again. That’s what they used to stuff the sausages in.  There were all the kinds of sausages that we made. We had potato sausage, fläskkorv, medvurst and barley sausage.  Quite a few years ago now, a butcher here in town asked me if I had a recipe for potatiskorv and I gave him my mother’s recipe. By now that recipe has been passed around to several different places here. Right now, I think it’s fun that my Swedish mother’s potatiskorv is being made by a Mexican butcher in a store owned by a Chinese man. She would have enjoyed that.

Well, then there was the calf. They made different things out of the calf. They used the calf liver to make liver sausage and liver pate.

Some things like the hams and the bacon were smoked to preserve them. We had our own little smokehouse that Dad had made himself. We used to use juniper branches and oak wood for the smokehouse. There was a long channel from where you had the fire and into the smokehouse. The fire was situated so the smoke went up through this channel. On the bottom of the smokehouse, there were rocks, but there were little openings toward the roof, where the smoke would come out a little bit eventually. Often us kids were sat out there to watch the smoke fire once they had gotten it started. We’d have a bunch of branches and wood and put them in there as needed. When the smoking was done, the meat was stored in that storage house that I’ve already talked about."