Pigs

Bottesford c1900. Courtesy of the Records Office for Leicestershire, Leicester & Rutland.

Mrs Challands: They had a pig club in the village, yes, they had a pig club, and this pig club they paid into it, and if the pig died or wanted vetinary surgery or something like that, well the money came out of the pig club.

Interviewer: And how did you have the animals slaughtered?

Mrs Challands: Oh they were slaughtered at home.

Interviewer: Can you explain to me how that…

Mrs Challands: Yes, there used to be a man come round, Mother’d say well, pigs to be killed, and this man used to come along and he used to bring, like a long board on legs, and they used to get the pig out, and of course they used to cut its throat. Us children used to say, oh Mrs so-and-so’s pig’s being killed, and we used to hare round to see it – wasn’t it awful?

Interviewer: You used to go and watch it being killed as a form of entertainment?

Mrs Challands: Yes, it was. Wasn’t it dreadful though, of course they don’t do things like that now. Later on, as time went on, they used to take it back to the butcher’s and they’d cut it up and bring it back, but in the first instance they used to do it at home. Used to have a kitchen and do it at home. Then my brother used to salt it down, and then when the time was to come the hams used to hang up, and we had boards on the kitchen that we hung the slices of bacon, you know, the sides of bacon.

Interviewer: Can you remember any of the special things that you used to have to eat just after it’d been killed, you know, had you used to eat the liver then and things like that?

Mrs Challands: Oh well, the liver and all the offal, Mother used to put them on plates with a sort of a veiling over the top, a bit of fat veiling, bit of this, bit of that and the other on a big plate, and she would take them to neighbours who had given her probably bread or potato peelings and that, and Mother had boiled them and that, and they got a… and then later on after I’d got married, during the wartime, people round here [Leicester] used to save me pieces of bread, and I used to dry them in the oven and then take them back home. My mother then, she used to say, well Mrs so-and-so, and I used to come with a big butcher’s basket on the train, from the Belgrave train, and bring these fries for this neighbour and that neighbour.

Interviewer: They used to call it pig’s fry?

Mrs Challands: Pig’s fry, yes.

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