[Sca-cooks] RE: Slaughtering

[Diamond Randall]

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Beatrix sez:
>Hi, I'm going to be a boor here, but how do you consider period slaughter
>more neatly done than real mundane slaughter practices? or are you simply
>talking about processing?

Generally, I am talking about throat cutting, which we use on goats and sheep.
Young pigs, we shoot with a .22 in the head.  Fowl we wring their little necks
except for large geese which are sometimes drowned. My experiences with
commercial
methods are way out of date as it was over 30 years ago when I worked in a
slaughterhouse.  Fowl slaughter methods date back over 20 years ago when I
designed a chicken processing plant in Alabama.  I am sure things are done
somewhat differently now.  They shot the hogs and cattle in the head. If they
missed or didn't kill it outright, a guy was waiting down line with a
sledgehammer.
The chickens were herded into a narrow line and a mechanical part "goosed"
the bird so it would raise its head and get it caught in a narrowing track at
the right time.  The moving belt dropped away and another function snared its
feet,
then the head popped off and the flapping chicken was inverted to drain as it
moved into the defeathering parts.  None of these were particularly humane as
far as I was concerned.

As to period slaughter, the only thing I have seen are in paintings in the
backgrounds.
Otherwise, the slaughter of game is well recorded in the Booke of Hunting and
other
illustrated manuscripts in which game is killed with an impressive variety of
spears,
swords, arrows, traps and snares.  Some of them show on the spot dressing and
buthchering.  Of course dogs also rip out the throats of many kinds of game
and
predators like wolves are killed with baited meat full of curved needles.

As to information on period slaughter, one must rely on accounts that catch
blood
for cooking uses and the various texts that state a common preference for
organ meats
as opposed to muscle tissues.   Again clues to period butchering come from
language
rather than diagrammed cutting methods.  You don't see references to say
cutlets or
filet in period recipes very much.  Gobbets or haunch is what you see.  Has
anyone
done an extensive time/culture study of terminolgy in surviving recipes to see
the
evolution of meat cutting practices.   I suspect that there are folks on this
list who are
qualified to do such research.

Akim


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