I'm trying to remember details of how we did it now; that was > 50 years ago, a couple of hogs per year. My dad did all the work and I "helped". My dad grew up on a farm (krauts) in central Texas during The Depression. I don't think we were all that poor but we lived like it, mostly. The main point of this might have been for my education.
He shot the hog between the eyes with a .22 to stun it, and then he stuck it to bleed out. I helped hold it for the sticking. I don't think he kept the blood. Then we dragged it up to the house on a sheet of plywood behind the tractor; meanwhile there was a cast iron wash-kettle full of water heating up. We poured hot water (I think it was purposely not boiling, but almost boiling. Maybe 190-ish) over it and scraped the hair off.
At some point, it got hoisted up in the joists in the garage and gutted, beheaded, and split in half lengthwise. Then hung in the homemade refrigerated smokehouse to chill.
The hams and the bacon were cured with the skin on, and probably the picnics too. The jowls made better 'bacon" than the belly meat did. The rest got skinned as we cut them up into roasts and chops (there weren't many chops) and a *lot* got ground up into sausage. We rendered all the skin to make lard and cracklin's, but we didn't eat all that much cracklin's. Maybe the dogs and chickens got most of those, I dunno. I also can't remember if we rendered the leaf fat seperately from the skin to make better lard from it.
I remember how good the pound cakes were my mom baked using fresh lard. They were entirely different from making them with butter and Crisco, or with supermarket lard.
