TENDERLOIN IS MORE THAN MAIDRITE

Rex Burress

I had some tenderloin today. I got a nice slab down at Oroville, CA's Raleys Grocery, a long ways from my initial tenderloin tastes in Trenton, MO. I have no idea what hog it came from, or where it was raised. That's the mystery of the meat market: it's laid out on the racks, labeled and priced, but leaving a gap as to origin or what the animal even looked like!

We take the butcher's word for it. Even hamburgers undergo a transition and the ham is usually beef, but we don't really know what all is in a hamburger patty. What we eat is sometimes a surprising revelation!

Does tenderloin come from a pig or a hog or a swine? Answer at the end of this article.

When our family lived on the farm east of Trenton in the 1940's, we certainly knew where our meat came from and what animal was involved, because when you butcher your own meat it is completely vivid, especially to a 12-year-old-boy.

Butchering day usually came in mid-November, sometimes during a snowstorm in a farm operation that was conducted rain or shine, but you could depend on chilly weather that repelled flies and made you step lively. The objective was to harvest the meat off one of our big spotted Poland China hogs we had fed nutritious slop all summer long. It was my job to take left-over skimmed milk down to the slop-barrel and mix it with a grain mixture. There was no civility among pigs of all ages, and sounds of slurping and grunting and squeals were the norm. Between meals they scoured the pasture for any offal or herb they could find, rooting to the point we would have to clamp steel rings into the nose to save the meadow. It's a wonder I didn't become a vegetarian, but nobody knew what that was in farmland where meat ruled!

Even though meat was a mainstay, there was plenty of plants for foraging or raising in the garden and truck patch. Mother knew the wild herbs, and it was a spring ritual to gather a basket of weedy things, like dandelions, plantain, wild pea and etc to supply us with fresh 'spring greens.' Sassafras tea for blood purifier. Mushrooms in season. Nuts. Wild game. Fish and turtles from the creek...and squirrels from the trees-- That was the life we led.

There was a particularly memorable butchering day when Grandpa Burress came over from his Black Oak community farm and a few other neighbor's gathered. Grandpa brought his pampered knives, because he was the 'sticker' of some renown. For better meat you had to get the blood out of the carcass as quickly as possible, and Grandpa knew where the jugular was. For a non-hunter, he was awash in a lot of blood after the shooting and the sticking.

I watched through squinted eyes as Dad would line up the .22 rifle and made a clean head-shot, followed up by a quick stab in the neck. Earl Foster, John Tolle, and Leon Spencer had joined the force by then, and a single-tree was stuck through the back leg tendons and all pulled all 400 pounds of dead hog down to the barrel of boiling water. A tripod with a pulley was attached, and all pulled the sacrificial offering up above the barrel, and the hog was pulled up and down until the hair was loosened to be scraped with, what else, butcher knives, until only a snow-white carcass hung there like some outlandish albino deer! That was quite appropriate as snow flakes were falling from the leaden quiet sky, hissing in the hot fire.

More butcher knife work was busy cutting parts off that hog—shoulders, backbone, ribs, and most revered—tenderloin! I got to carry the tenderloin to Mother in the kitchen as she was cooking a big dinner [lunch] for the crew, and everyone got a piece of meat to take home.

Grandpa was again the master crackling maker. A bucket of fat cut off the hog was put in the big black kettle to be rendered into lard, and it took a veteran's touch to stir the mass and keep the fire at the right heat in order to not scorch the bubbling brew, since scorched lard would be a disaster.

Clamped to the kettle was a crackling press to squeeze rendered fat until nothing was left but crisp , crunchy cracklings that were a treat, although most of them would be stored for hound food. Like Indians utilizing all parts of a buffalo for living needs, all parts of that hog had a use. The head meat would be made into mince-meat pies, and even the feet were kept for a simmering 'pork and beans' stew.

But the tenderloin was the queen of hog parts, in spite of the hog's untidy living habits and grubby diet. What animals eat doesn't always define what deeds they do, or what sweetness is converted from the foulest of matter! [“Even bees, the little almsmen of spring flowers; Know there is richest juices in poison flowers.” -John Keats]

Wild feral hogs have carried their wholesale eating habits over into prime habitats all over America it seems. I hear of big hunts for monstrous-sized gone-wild hogs in the Carolina's and Florida, and I know they are a menace to wildlife in Arkansas. In this sector of Northern California, gangs of hogs root prime woodlands, causing great damage. As close as the Sutter Buttes, a famous isolated “smallest mountain range” about 20 miles from Oroville, pigs and hogs have plague the ground growth. There is a lot of tenderloin for the taking. I have seen wild flower bulb beds wiped out by the omnivorous pig on that range.

What is the wild hog situation around Grundy County? Hunting hogs is a different way to get your tenderloin, but hunters can help and they have the green light. What could be better than wild tenderloin, invigorated by the sun, freshened by wild winds, purified by black loam, sweetened by the most alluring flower bulbs, tenderized by nature, and blessed by the good fairy?

In definition, a pig is a young swine under 120 pounds, and a hog is a swine that weighs over 120. Domestic swine [Sus scrofa domesticus] descended from the Asian Wild Boar [Sus scrofa] about 9000 years ago. They are even-toed, ungulate mammals, and they all produce “Tenderloin!”