One year she and her sister Iris, who lived a few miles from our farm home, decided to raise chickens. They would raise about 500, they would each keep 100 chickens for the freezer and canner and sell the rest to pay for the costs. It was decided to use our garage, convert it to a chicken coop. So the baby chicks were bought, kept warm in our kitchen until they were big enough to move to the coop. We strung heat lamps up out there and I remember seeing them huddling under the warm glow. After three months they were ready for the butcher block. If you let them age longer the pin feathers become almost impossible to remove, so its a trick to get them as big as you can, without going too far and making the job impossible.
On butchering day my aunt and cousins (some of them babies and toddlers) would arrive. We all pitched in. My dad would have buckets of water boiling on the camp stove outside. My brother would go into the coop and catch two or three chickens, dangling by their feet we would hand them one by one to my Dad. He would grab the axe, lay the chicken over the block of wood, and WHACK! He would pitch the chicken into the back yard where it would flap around like crazy! Pretty soon the back yard was full of chickens reeling around like drunken sailers.
Next it was up to us younger kids to run into the flapping hoard, running after the slowest ones trying to catch them up. When we were successful we would take it to Dad. He would quickly dunk the chicken about three times into the bucket of boiling water, then skin the feathers off, all in under 60 seconds! Another one of us would run the chicken into the kitchen.
My mother was stationed at the sink. She could degut a chicken in under one minute. And if we were really really lucky, she would find an egg in the egg sac inside. The shell would be soft and almost translucent. Magic!! (to me anyway) If the shell were hard enough we would wash it and keep it. The cleaned chicken would then be put on an oilcloth covered kitchen table. My Aunty Iris would be sitting there, in front of a growing pile of naked chickens, pin feathering...the least pleasant job of them all. When we were all done outside, we would all come in and help pin feather. I used my teeth! We didn't know about salmonella back then.
The next day the camp stove would be going again outside but this time it would have a canner set up on it full of jars of chicken. Six hours it would take to process them safely!!!
I am not sure where or how they sold the balance. I seem to think they sold them to the co-op in town. The chicken marketing board today would have a fit and completely disallow that!
I am now going to go make my days worth of juice. I shall be back later.
Those cookies look very yummy!
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