Rusyn Charcuterie and the Winter Pig

Specialised

The household slaughter — a community event with its own division of labour and its own meal — producing salted and smoked bacon and fatback, hams hung in the chimney, fresh and smoked sausages, liver and blood sausages, rendered lard as the year’s cooking fat, and cracklings. ⚠ HISTORICAL PRACTICE IS NOT A MODERN SAFETY PROCEDURE: ambient-temperature curing, chimney smoking and cellar storage as described here are recorded as ethnography, and modern curing requires controlled temperature, measured salt and nitrite, and tested humidity.