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In Praise of Country Ham AND Sausage
| Article
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12362 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1987 |
3,078 Words |
| Author
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Edward Clark
Edward Clark was a photojournalist for Life magazine
from 1944-1963. His photography gained him world recognition
and reveals a man who has lived a life to chronicle the events
of a half-century. Mr. Clark currently resides in Bethesda,
Maryland. |
In my opinion, two of the superior culinary delights of the world are country ham and smoked sausage. To understand this, you must know that I was born on a farm in Bedford County, Tennessee, about sixty-five miles south of Nashville. Although I left the farm as a young man to become a photographer for Life magazine, which sent me to such great cities as Paris, London, and New York with their celebrated restaurants and illustrious cuisines, I never surrendered my love for the simple delicacies made from the hog.
Some of my sharpest memories of my early life on my father's farm circa 1915 were of winters when the temperature got cold enough to kill hogs. The first "killing" I remember as a small boy was really a traumatic experience. My father had several hogs that he had fattened up for several weeks. I would go with him to the small pen to help feed them, and always we were greeted by squeals of delight and anticipation. When he entered the pen on hog-killing day with a .22 rifle, the pigs went wild - they sensed danger at once and fled to the far corners of the pen and squealed hysterically until they were shot. Pigs are smart animals.
I forgot all that when my mother started serving fresh sausage for breakfast and wonderful pork chops for dinner. It was a great treat that started me on my lifelong search for good country ham and sausage.
I grew up to be a photographer, and my first job was with the Nashville Tennessean in 1941. When I joined the staff of Life magazine in 1944, I was assigned to the Paris bureau for a year, covering the Nuremberg trials in Germany as well as other stories in France, Germany, and England. World War II was at an end, but I remained under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Army as an American correspondent. In Paris, we were billeted in the Scribe Hotel near the beautiful Paris Opera.
We were lucky. Instead of Army personnel, we retained the French cooks and waiters of the hotel staff, and using Army field rations, they prepared our meals. What those chefs could do with field rations of Spam and powdered eggs was extraordinary. No mess sergeant would have recognized their concoctions.
Still, I missed my old favorite - Tennessee sausage. I wrote my wife back in Nashville and asked her to send me some.
When the sausage arrived in Paris in about twenty No. 2 cans, I took this treasures
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