Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
Maynard Davies, the last of the apprentice bacon curers, tells his intriguing story in his own distinctive style. Always one to turn a challenge into an opportunity, Maynard took pleasure in learning the skills of the old master curers of the Black Country and he shares with the reader the secrets of top quality bacon, learnt over a lifetime: the methods, recipes, smoking and curing. His passion for, as he puts it, 'good food for good people', is his motivation - made by experts, using the best ingredients, and cutting no corners. Funny, wise and very human, Maynard's unsentimental tale will remind readers that old fashioned virtues of pride in one's profession, hard work, an open mind and a lot of optimism go along way.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 293
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
MAYNARD
Adventures of a Bacon Curer
Maynard Davies
To my late wife Patricia – Thank you.
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am indebted to my wife Ann, for all her help, support and hard work and for making this book possible. I also wish to thank my family and all my friends for encouraging me and supporting me. I am writing another book and if you have enjoyed this book and would like to be kept informed about my future publications please contact me through my publishers Merlin Unwin Books (address on page iv).
All the recipes in this book were good ones, and they were ones we used at the time. But I must make it clear that they may not conform in every small detail to modern regulations. Once again if you wish to discuss with me any matters raised in Adventures of a Bacon Curer, or the recipes, please do so via my publisher.
PUBLISHERS’ NOTE
The publishers wish to extend particular thanks to Maynard’s wife Ann who transcribed his story from the tape recordings he made, because Maynard is dyslexic. With no typing or computer knowledge at the outset, she learnt the hard way, with some help from a computer-literate friend. It was no small achievement.
CHAPTER ONE
Hard Work and Early Mornings
The assembly hall was packed. It was the last day of the summer term and the leavers of that year were about to be presented with their leaving certificates. I was fifteen years old and had been at this school all my life. It was a Catholic school and I was the only Protestant there so I always felt the odd man out. It was a grey school in an industrial area surrounded by cobblestones in a very deprived area of the city. You had to be a good runner or a good fighter.
The customary order of the certificate-giving started with the best first, followed by the rest. I knew I would be at the end as I could neither read or write. In those days dyslexia was an unknown condition.
Our headmaster was Mr Earley, an arrogant man who thought he was a relation to God. Anyway, finally the time came for my report to be read out and I was cheered and clapped like everyone else as I went up to collect it.
‘Well, Maynard I do not know how you are going to go on in life,’ Mr Earley said to me, ‘This report is terrible.’
‘Never mind Sir, that will not be your worry any more, it will be mine,’ I replied.
I knew from that moment on, I would have to do my best: I could not have had a worse start in life and things could only get better.
As was the custom in those days, I went straight to the Youth Employment office, which was housed at the old Town Hall. It was along a narrow passage, badly lit, with two windows which lifted up and down. One window said ‘Girls’ and the other said ‘Boys’. I knocked at the Boys’ window and told the man at the counter that I was looking for a job and would like to be a mechanic. He looked me up and down.
‘We have one or two vacancies for mechanics; there is one at Fenton.’
I said I would go and see that, so he gave me a piece of paper and I walked all the four miles to Fenton and found the garage.
I went in and a very nice man said, ‘What can I do for you?’
‘I have come for the mechanic’s job,’ I said.
‘Right,’ he said, ‘Fill out this form with your name and address and how many certificates you have.’
‘Well, I have not got any of them and I can’t read or write but I can work,’ I said.
‘Lad, you will be no use here,’ he said.
I walked four miles back to the Youth Employment and told the man what had happened.
He said ‘Well, we better get you a simple job because that is the only way you are going to earn a living. There is a job at Theo’s bacon curers; they want a young man to start, so go up there.’
He gave me the address and I knew where it was, so immediately I walked all the way over to the other side of the city and found this old factory, which was at the end of an old cobbled street with an archway door.
I rang the bell outside; a huge man with no hair came down and asked what I wanted.
‘I have come from the Youth Employment for the job,’ I said.
He asked me to come in and we walked across the yard and into a small office which needed a lot of tidying up; he was a very untidy man. He asked my name and when I said ‘Maynard’, he replied, ‘That is a very unusual name.’
‘I might be a very unusual person,’ I said.
He warned me: ‘This is very hard work here, you know, and no time to talk, just get on with the job.’
‘Well I have never had an easy life,’ I said.
‘Alright then, go and clean those windows outside,’ he said.
‘What do I clean them with?’ I asked.
He gave me two sheets of newspaper, so I took them both and went outside and cleaned the windows.
I saw him looking at me from the other side of the window and I did make a good job of them; I cleaned every nook and cranny and then I went inside and cleaned the other side. He was watching me carefully. I had a good look at the finished job and I knew they were right. So I knocked at the door again and he was sitting in his chair.
‘What’s your name again?’ he asked.
‘Maynard,’ I repeated.
‘Hmmm,’ he said, ‘You’ve got the job.’
Well, I thought, that’s not a bad start.
‘What time do I start, Sir?’ I asked, and he said, ‘Half past six, and if you are not here for half past six, don’t bother coming.’
I thought, my word he is a hard man!
So half past six it was. Next morning I was up at home at half past five. I was at work at about quarter past six and rang the bell. The same manager opened the door and he gave me a clean overall and a pair of Wellingtons.
‘But you will have to buy your own clogs and you will need two pairs,’ he said.
I agreed and started to work.
It was an interesting job because it was the last link with an industry that produced good food. The traditional bacon curers were at that time just going a little bit out of favour; everybody wanted to go to the supermarkets with a wire basket and collect their own.
You can’t wear the same clogs each day. We were paid weekly, so at the end of the week, I went down to the clog maker’s tiny shop.
‘What do you want?’ he said
‘I have come from Theo’s. He’s told me you will make me two pairs of clogs,’ I replied.
‘Yes, we make all the clogs for Theo’s. Come over here and take your shoe off.’
I did as I was told. He put a piece of wood on the floor and told me to put my foot on it. He then took a piece of hard chalk and drew round my foot.
‘If you come back in a few days, I will give you another fitting,’ he said.
I went back in a couple of days and this time he put some black dye on the bottom of my feet. I put them back on the wooden block and he said, ‘Yes, I will have to take a bit off here and a bit off there. Come back at the end of the week and the first pair will be ready. You can have the second pair the following week, as it will be too expensive to have both pairs at the same time.’
I went back to the shop a few days later and my new clogs were ready and they were wonderfully made.
‘What a wonderful craftsman,’ I thought.
Why did we wear clogs? It was safer and they were also comfortable to wear. Wearing Wellington boots all day was bad for your feet and the curers knew that; they all wore clogs which were warm and they never skidded even though some of the floors were very slippery and difficult to walk on, because the clogs had ridges on the bottom of them. The other advantage with clogs was that they never wore out. When the ridges on the soles wore down, you took them back and had new ridges put on, so once you had bought the two pairs of clogs, they were there for life. It was what you call a good investment!’
Anyway, I worked on the sausage end of things first and learned how to make their full range of sausages: the machines must have been older than me but they were in good condition. We made good products. Theo’s also made good old-fashioned bacon. They had an old fashioned smoke house and the bacon was smoked in the traditional way with old English oak, and all in all they were good craftsmen. They never gave anything away, but what they did was to give you a good trade. They were hard taskmasters, they never thought you should sit down and always found you something to do, so you earned your money, the little bit you got.
The custom was that the new apprentice would have to sit at the bottom of the table. It was a long pine table, scrubbed with bleach and soda and it was as white as you could get it, in an old room that we used to call the mess room. As you progressed in the firm, you moved up the table and I started at the bottom. I can honestly say it was a very enjoyable time of my life.
We started at half past six in the morning and we had breakfast at nine o’clock till half past nine. This consisted of two slices of brawn and two slices of toast. Then we had lunch at half past twelve until one o’clock, a tea break from four o’clock until quarter past four and we finished at half past six, so that was a twelve hour day. You would earn your money, but looking back, it was good training and they were very good people.
One of my jobs when I had been there a year or two was to take Old Theo to the market. Nobody wanted this job because it meant getting back at seven o’clock at night and Theo’s were not noted for paying overtime, they were very sparing with money although not short of it. So my job was to take Old Theo to the local cattle market to buy the pigs on a Monday. On that day, I would arrive at work at half past six and get out the old Trojan van. It was an old-fashioned, high thing with an old wooden container on it and it was used to fetch the pigs from market. I used to start it up and wait in the yard until Old Theo came down and we would set off for the market. He never said a word, only grunted.
At the cattle market I would park the truck and then he would throw me the marking pen and say ‘Mark ’em right; don’t make any mistakes, because what we buy is what we want.’
The pigs would be in pens and Theo used to walk alongside inspecting them. He was a good pig buyer. He might have been short on manners but he wasn’t short on knowledge and he would select the pigs with the expertise of a lifetime.
Theo used to view all the pigs, walking up and down all the aisles. He never used a piece of paper, he had everything in his head. He would know by the plonkers in the pens what the pigs had been fed on and exactly what condition the pigs were in. He also knew at a glance if they were in pig, not in pig or if they were unable to pig, how much they would weigh at point of slaughter and how much he would get as dead weight. In fact he had a wealth of knowledge about pigs and I used to think to myself, ‘If only I could borrow a little of his knowledge, how good it would be.’ I respected the man because he knew his job and, as the years went by, it was a sad thing that those kind of men were no longer with us, because they really did know the curing business. Sadly, today, that expertise is missing, and there are a lot of people who should know but don’t know.
Anyway, Theo quickly selected the pigs and as the auctioneer knocked them down, it was my job to put a blue mark on their backs as soon as they were sold, so I had to be sprightly. The auctioneers had a lot of work to do and they didn’t hang about.
So if he bought seven pigs, I would put Theo’s name on them straightaway, jumping over the rails to get to them – you had to be damn quick, you know! After Theo had bought all his pigs, he would throw me the cheque book and say, ‘Pay for ’em and pick me up at the Sutherland Arms.’ So I used to go to the pay office and wait for my turn to pay and then I would walk round to the chippie and buy myself some chips. I’d already been given the money for the chips because the farmers used to give me a shilling or a sixpence ‘good luck money’ for buying their pigs.
When I’d had my dinner, I used to get the old Trojan van, take my turn in the line and eventually pick out all our pigs and drive them along an enclosed gantry. Then I would fetch a bottle of vinegar and pour it over the pigs. This was to stop them fighting, because they couldn’t smell their own smells, only the vinegar, so they all smelled the same and this took away their aggression. I would then load them all up and go to the Sutherland Arms to pick Old Theo up. All the pubs were open all day long on market day. The Sutherland Arms was a typical market pub, crowded with farmers and market dealers and always thick with smoke.
Theo would have been in the pub since about 12 o’clock and it would be 4 o’clock or half past four when I got to the Sutherland Arms and pulled up outside. It was the usual thing; he’d be in a corner of the bar as drunk as a lord and I used to say to the barman, ‘Just give me a hand, will you, and let me get him over my shoulders?’ And I used to put him on my shoulders in a fireman’s lift and take him to the truck.
I always had to leave the truck ticking over. while I did this. The Trojan truck was a little bit too high and I could not really get him in the cab, so the only way to do it, was this: there was a little wooden door in the truck, what we called the peep door, and I used to open this and drop him in with the pigs! That was the only way. I used to shut him in and carry on through the town.
‘There’s a man in with the pigs!’ people shouted at me but I didn’t let that bother me! I carried on and arrived back at the factory; it was always late at night, and I used to drop the tail and give the pigs a drink of water and a little bit of sugar and that seemed to soothe them a bit, and again I would get another bottle of vinegar and put it on top of the pigs. I saw that they were alright and then I would go back for Old Theo.
He was a big man, and the only way I could get him out of the truck was to take the muck barrow, put him in it, wheel him straight into his office and put him into his chair, still with the muck on him and leave him until the morning.
‘Maynard, when I got home last night, I was all over pig muck,’ Mr Theo used to say the following morning.
‘Well, Mr Theo, I don’t know how that happened!’ I used to reply.
The factory was an old red brick building at the end of a cobbled road. The factory was lined with glazed bricks and had quarry tiles on the floor, very clean and orderly. In the factory at one end there was the main cooked meat area and then there was the slaughterhouse where we had a stunning area, a scalding tank and a place where we split the pigs. The next area was the sausage house, where all the sausages were made and there was the cutting room; and next to this, the curing room – that was the layout of the factory.
The most important place was the mess room, which was long and narrow with a big old-fashioned range at one end and in the middle a large scrubbed table, where we ate our breakfast, lunch and afternoon tea. Theo’s used to supply us with twelve loaves of bread a day and three pots of pork brawn and we all had two slices of toast and two slices of brawn for our breakfast and big mugs of tea; good food in those days. On a cold day after that early start, you really enjoyed your breakfast. It was one concession they gave us: a good breakfast every day. It was a very enjoyable meal with the old curers and if you listened a bit, you used to hear their really good stories. They were a jolly bunch because they were all characters, these old curers, all with their own do’s and don’ts and whys and wherefores.
One of the old curers was named Daniel: he must have been about seventy years old and all his skin was wrinkled and he had very white hair, sunken cheekbones and bright blue sharp eyes. He had been in the curing business for a good sixty years and he knew what it was all about. He used to smoke a pipe and when he had to buy a box of matches he used to spend the dinner time splitting them down the middle making 32 matches into 64, something I had never seen done before, nor since!
Another curer was George, a fanatical supporter of the local football team and I remember one day when we were working late and the two local teams were playing against one another.
Old Theo came in about half past four and he said, ‘You needn’t pack up at six this evening; we are working on tonight.’
Everybody thought, ‘Well, this is a situation!’
But George, who lived only for football and a pint, decided he was going to do it another way! So about half past four he decided to faint. He went ‘Phoooah,’ and fell on the floor.
The foreman shouted, ‘Maynard, pick him up.’
I was a very strong young man and I picked him up and as I approached the door, he winked an eye and said, ‘Watch my head,’ and I thought to myself, ‘George, you are in the wrong profession here, you ought to be on the boards.’
Anyway, I took him into the mess room and Old Theo said, ‘You had better go home George, you don’t look too grand at all and be early in the morning!’
So next morning at work we learned that George had had a miraculous recovery and had managed to struggle to the local match with the biggest rattle and the longest scarf you have ever seen!
The next department – it seems a grand name now – was the boiler house with twenty boilers, ten steam and ten gas, all in a row, and that is where all the cooked meats were produced, all the hams and the brawn. Then there was the bake house which was a large room about twenty yards by ten yards, where the women worked and made all the pastry. This was all made by hand using the traditional methods, then hand risen with a wooden block to bring them into the traditional shape. The women knew what they were doing and were very experienced. They had a very old oven to bake the pies in and they always seemed to put a bit of magic in the product.
The following department was the cooked meats, which included tongue, brawn and roast ham. The tongues and the brawn were put into moulds and the hams were roasted in the big ovens. The next room was the area for preparing the skins for the sausages. These were cleaned and dressed ready for the sausage-making department.
At the end of the factory was the curing house and attached to this was the slaughterhouse and the layerage where the pigs were kept prior to being slaughtered.
Then you had the main boiler house which was run on coke and coal, to give you the steam.
That was the general layout of the factory.
I shall tell you about the curing end because this was the most interesting end, where the bacon was cured. It was the end of an era in the food industry around 1960, because after three or four years it was never produced like this again. This was the original method, which went back about two hundred years or more.
We used to get the pigs and cut them up. We would take the leg off, the shoulder off and leave the middle, which is the middle part of the bacon. We would divide the lean middles from the fat middles because they would produce different types of bacon. The hams would be divided from fat hams to lean hams and these would make York hams or Wiltshire hams. The shoulders were made into what is called a picnic ham, which in those days was the poor man’s ham.
We used to put the green hams (the unsmoked ones) in a bath of water with added honey to soften them. Then we would lift the hams out, and with a long thin knife, we would take out the femur bone and the hock bones, very carefully. You did not want to cut the membrane inside the hams because if you did, the ham would fall to pieces when you sliced it. When you had removed the femur bone, you tied a piece of string round it, then slotted the bone back in the ham. This was so that, when it was cooked, you could pull the piece of string and the bone would come out, leaving the ham in a good shape and easier to carve.
With the smoked hams, we never soaked them. We used to cook them separately because their aroma would taint the green hams, so it was better to do both types separately.
COOKED HAMS
The hams were put in a large container with a cup of water in the bottom and put in the oven to roast. If you put some salt in the bottom of the roasting tin, that would stop the ham from sticking. Once they had started to sizzle they would be taken out and we would use this basting to flavour them:
8oz muscovado sugar
8oz orange juice
2oz honey
Equal parts of water
Put all the ingredients in a saucepan and dissolve, then baste the hams with this mixture, and return them to oven. Once cooked, remove from oven and leave in tin for one hour to rest.
Put on a clean platter with a piece of greaseproof paper underneath to prevent ham sticking to the platter. Once cool, put in fridge, then remove bone by pulling the piece of string.
We used to dress the hams when they were cold. They were removed from the fridge and put on a wooden cutting board. We used three knives which we kept in a bucket of very hot water. We used these knives to dress the hams, and when one knife went cold, it would go in the bucket and a fresh one would be used. This way the hot knife went through the fat like nobody’s business, taking it off easily. We would take the rind off and square them off. They looked very nice and then we would put breadcrumbs on the top, put two sheets of greaseproof round them and then the muslin. That was the job done.
Next came the sausages and the sausages were made by taking all the bones and gristle out of the hock. It was quite a technique because when you bone out a hock you must leave the sinews on the pigs trotter, quite a skillful job, to prevent any of the gristle going in the sausage. Watching these old curers work was a lesson in skill; they worked a lot and spoke a little, and I learnt many tips by just watching them.
The original sausage was made out of the big gilts, which are lady pigs bought at the cattle market. They were ideal for making sausage because they were mature and that gives the meat good binding qualities. If young pigs are used, the binding quality is not there, so only heavy gilt pigs were used. There would be no smell from gilts, whereas the male pigs, would give the meat an odour called boar taint.
We used to cut up the gilts and make sure all the gristle, arteries and all the bits of bone were taken out. We had to be careful how we did this as there is nothing more awful than rind, bits of gristle and bones in sausages, so we always took our time over this. We used to divide the lean from the fat and put it in two separate bowls. We minced the lean meat until it was fine, then added the stock seasoning - lean meat will take flavours whereas fat will not. Then we would mince the fat meat, but more coarsely than the lean meat. This is because the fat holds the sausage better if it is not too finely minced, and it holds the moisture in the sausage later, rather than letting it all run into the pan when the sausage is cooked.
The recipe for Theo’s traditional sausage:
25lb lean pork
5lb of hard back fat
3lb rice
½ lb milk powder
Theo’s Pork Sausage Stock Seasoning
17lb salt
7oz fine ground coriander
6oz fine ground pimento
6oz ground nutmeg
1oz cayenne pepper
1oz jamaica ginger
Mix the above spices together and use ½ oz to each pound of meat.
With cheap sausages, the butchers haven’t the time to separate the meat into lean and fatty, nor to mince it to two different textures, so this method is rarely used today, but it is the best way.
Once all the mixings were done for the day, the whole lot was put in the fridge until the next day. The mixture had to be cold to go through the machines as the machines generate heat and the product has to be kept as cold as possible. Rice was cooked and fully cooled before it was put into the sausage mix. Today, the chemical polyphosphate is often used to bind the sausage by holding in the fat instead. We used no artificial preservatives - the milk powder did that for us naturally.
In the curing department, all different types of sugars were used including demerara sugars and muscovado sugars. We used to cure all the different types of bacon using traditional cane sugars, not the processed sugars. We produced about twenty types of bacon: black bacon, which we did with treacle; spicy bacon, which we did with spices and herbs; and then we did the York hams. These were a long maturing ham; we used to put them in sea salt at the start of the cure in a long trough, cover them with sea salt for seven days, fetch them out again, cover them with sea salt for another seven days, then we would wash them off and allow them to mature. Some people wanted the hams smoking and some of them wanted them ‘green’, without smoking. Whichever way you ate them, they were grand food.
The middles were done the same way and they were dry salted and then put in long troughs, with salt on the bottom and a layer of mixtures on top and we built them about ten high and they were done for the same amount of time. When you fetched them out and dried them off and put them on the rails, there was no better sight to see than that.
Next came the smoking. The hams had to be very dry, about a month old, before they could be smoked, because if they were wet, the smoke would not take. They were smoked with pure oak. The smoke house was a little cell, with hanging rails in it and the walls were as black as coal. All the bacon was put hanging up, with enough space left between them so that the smoke would go around. Then you would light the fuel in the smokeroom. The sawdust was loaded and was lit with a bit of paper and sticks, sometimes a bit of pork fat to get the fire going. You let that dry all the moisture out of the chamber and when all the moisture was out of the chamber, the door would be shut and it would smoke for about four days to a week. When the hams came out, it was a fine sight, the colour was a deep golden and the smell was out of this earth, no description could do it justice.
Today the smoke flavour is usually painted on, but that is cheating in my opinion and the taste is not the same. Still, who is to say what is right and what is wrong? At Theo’s there were many kinds of smoking. There was an apple wood smoke and a hickory smoke. We also used all the different kinds of herbs including coriander, mace and many others. The smoked product was good. Funnily enough, I always found people who ate a lot of smoked products seemed to have a nice complexion. I often used to wonder why, so I asked one of the old curers and he said that, as there was creosote in the bacon which came off in the smoke, that clung to the body and got rid of all the impurities and to me that sounded right!
TRADITIONAL BACON SMOKING AT THEO’S
This is how the bacon was smoked. It was a very interesting practise and a very skilled job as you had to judge which way the wind was blowing and adjust the dampers in the smoke-house accordingly. The smoke house was a traditional building of red brick, the best material to use when building a smoke-house because the bricks never perish. The walls in the smoke-house would become completely black from the years of smoking. The smoke-house was about twelve foot wide by fifteen foot and about eight foot high, with iron rods in the roof where the bacon was hung to smoke. The rods could be moved to accommodate different cuts of bacon.
The first thing to do was to make sure the bacon was very dry because, if wet, it would only sweat and cause a lot of moisture and mildew in the kiln. The other consideration was that smoke and water won’t mix - if a product isn’t dry, it won’t absorb any smoke.
The bacon should be a month old and dusted with pea flour. The bacon was hung in the smoke-house with a clear twelve inches between each item. When fully smoked, they would come out with a nice bloom. If you want a lighter smoke on some of the pieces of bacon, you place a piece of stockinette over them, so this produced two different types of smoke from one load: one dark and the other lighter. All ovens are different - they are like women really - none of them alike. We used to smoke about a hundred middles at a time.
The next job, once the smoke house was packed with the hung meat, was to lay the fire. This was done by scattering wheat straw on the floor, then spreading the sawdust on top of that in a zig-zag pattern.
Finally we used to get some scraps of pork fat and scatter them on top, then, with a piece of newspaper, we would light up the smoke oven. We never shut the door until we made sure the oven was smoking. It took about half an hour for the sawdust to catch and start the smoking process. You knew by experience if it was working because the smoke would be a nice blue colour.
Then you opened the vents from the outside, to remove any residual damp from the walls or the ceiling, so that you would always have a dry chamber. So long as you had a dry chamber, you knew the smoke would be good, and as soon as the smoke got bigger and bigger, you shut the door and left it for another half hour. Then you partially shut the vents, in order to let half the smoke out. On this particular oven at Theo’s, there were two chimneys, which was unusual but effective because if one chimney became blocked, the other one was there to use. Whoever designed it knew what they were doing.
Today, the modern smoke-house is electronically controlled, but in those days it was pure skill.
If we wanted different types of smoke we would put juniper berries in the sawdust or coriander or nutmeg for a taste of spice in the bacon.
Theo’s smoked bacon cure
40 gallons water
56lbs fine salt
16oz saltpetre
9lbs light muscovado sugar
9lbs molasses sugar
½ oz pimento
½ oz juniper berries
½ oz coriander
Method
Put all the herbs in a saucepan and boil in the water until dissolved: then put the meat in brine when the brine is cold.
As the brine matures, the colour will deepen and the aroma will mature. The longer you keep the meat in, the better it will get – about 5 days. The pickle never goes off, it is the bits of meat that drop off that are the danger, and they need fishing out. Particular attention must be made to keep the brine clean, but a skilled curer can keep it going perfectly with the right attention.
We used to create different, one-off flavours of smoke for special orders. Different people liked different flavours and you could accommodate them by adding a variety of spices and herbs to the sawdust. The smoking process used to take about four days. Every so often, we used to open the door and have a look to see if she was alright. You could tell by eye – you could see the bacon
