Early Texas: How to Make Sausage
This is Passport to Texas
Buying ready to cook food wasn’t an option for early Texans. The majority grew vegetables and raised animals to feed their families. Timing was everything when processing certain foodstuffs.
05—Things like this butchering that we’re doing today, or making sausage, has to be done in the wintertime.
Summer heat would spoil fresh meat, says Stephen Baethge, Sauer-Beckmann Living History farm park ranger and interpreter. The farm, at the LBJ State Park and Historic site, interprets early Texas life.
05—What we’re doing on a daily basis down here is just trying to show you how people would have lived a hundred years ago.
Which means this early 1900s farmstead did not have the benefit of refrigeration. If families wanted bacon or sausage in summer, for example, they had to plan ahead and make it during the cooler months of the year.
05—Because a lot of the meats we prepare, they take about ten days to cure.
Taking 10 days in Texas’ summer heat to cure meat would raise a stink. Staff uses 60 % beef to 40% pork when making sausage, a favorite of the German families that settled Texas Hill Country communities.
10—You know, these people ate a lot of lard, they ate a lot of fat. But they were working so hard that it really didn’t make them fat, because they burned it all off. They worked their way through all those calories.
Something to consider next time you’re in air conditioned comfort, eating a BBQ sandwich, needing to unbutton the top button of your jeans. That’s our show… For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.
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