Posts Tagged ‘Cocker Spaniel’

How to Make Homemade Maple Sausage

Wednesday, August 26, 2015

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When I was a little girl and our town had not yet experienced the rapid building and influx of people of its later years, we had small neighborhood markets. The kind you still see in some larger cities or European countries. Think the Butcher, or the Baker, but no Candlestick Maker. We had small grocery stores and five & dime shops that were breeming with all kinds of curiosities – from hardware to gardening to sewing supplies, all displayed in one shop.

My favorite was the butcher shop; a long narrow store with a meat counter on one side and all kinds of meat accompaniments on the other. Behind the counter were stainless steel tables for slicing and wrapping meat. There was a large band saw for cutting carcasses into quarters or large roasts. Saws and hooks and other tools hung from the “C” shaped track that brought whole carcasses from the cooler to the cutting tables. The walk-in freezer sat at the end of the room, adorned with posters from the Lamb Council, the Pork Producers Association and the American Beef Council. In the fall, the shop owner would put a large poster on the freezer door announcing the time to order special holiday meats like fresh turkeys, hams, ducks, geese and prime rib or tenderloins.

Each week my mom would take us with her as she did her weekly meat shopping. The butcher would talk to her about what was on special, what had come in that day and what would be good choices to feed a family of five on a budget. But, without fail we left with the same thing every week – chicken, ham, homemade sausage, ground beef, stew meat and something dad could grill on the BBQ during the weekend. The butcher would wrap each cut of meat in pink paper and secure it with white butcher tape. There were no plastic bags or carts, just an arm load of meat to feed a hungry family. Before leaving, the butcher would hand us two bones as treats for our dogs, a large one for Sam our Great Dane and a smaller one for Shelly, moms Cocker Spaniel.

Decades have passed and days of neighborhood markets are mostly memories now. The butcher shop of my childhood has been paved over along with many of the stores we shopped at during my childhood. But, I’ve never forgotten the fun I had going to that butcher shop and how polite and helpful and friendly the butcher was. Read the rest of the story »