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Holiday meats a family tradition in the U.P.

Karen Wils photo Making sausage is a family affair.

ESCANABA — Garlic and allspice, onion and pepper make up some of the awesome “meat” aromas of pre-Christmas North town.

Steamy windows, warm kitchens and lots of dirty dishes mean a great meal!

North Escanaba, where I grew up, has quite a big population of Swedish people (their last names end with s-o-n) and French folks (their last names often end with e-a-u).

That means, back in the 50’s and 60’s, most families took a day to make pots full of potato sausage, a Swedish treat.

In the other homes, many ovens full of meat pies (tortiere) were prepared by those of French or Canadian decent.

Back in the olden days, it was considered a fun family project to prepare these ethnic meats for the Christmas meal.

In our great grandparent’s day, people lived closer to the Earth. Meat was often organic — very organic — home raised, butchered and processed right at home.

The turkey in the oven at Christmas was the turkey running around the back yard in August. The ham sizzling in the roaster likely came from the pig raised in the pen all summer.

Venison sausages of many types were also homemade.

Many helpful hands is what it takes to make wonderful potato sausage and meat pies and holiday specialties at home.

I really don’t know how my parents pulled it off, but they made “sausage day” fun at our house. It was like a privilege to be a part of the production.

From young to old, everyone had a job to match their skill level. In the basement of my Dad’s house is a nice work area. It took me years to graduate from casing washer to potato peeler. Casing are real salted animal gut that you buy from the butcher.

I can still feel the long slippery strips all gritty with salt. It was my job to rinse them inside and out with cold water so that they could be stuffed with the meat mixture.

By the time you could handle a jackknife pretty well, you were promoted to potato peeler. My Dad bought potatoes by the hundred pound bags full from the farm near camp. With lots of mouths to feed and the basement cellar to store them in, we ate potatoes until spring!

In the earliest days of potato sausage making, my Mom used a hand meat grinder to grind the spuds. At some point, my Dad rigged up an electric grinder, so this sure sped up the process.

Dad was usually the monitor of the electric grinder, turning it on and off as the peeled, white tatters turned into mounds of juicy mash. After some of the starchy liquid drained, the potatoes were hand mixed with venison and beef hamburger, ground onions, and seasonings.

The most fun part of this whole job was stuffing the meat mixture into the casings. Many years ago, my Mom used an angel food cake pan to stuff the guts. Then my folks got a sausage stuffer. Just press a lever slowly… and out shoots the meat into the casing to form nice loops of potato sausage.

The stuffer would squeak, ooze and gurgle and that made all of us kids giggle.

After many roaster pans were stacked high with sausages, Mom would be ready to drop them into the hot water with the all spice for cooking.

A half-a-ton of sausages were frozen to eat on Christmas Day. The other half-a-ton, were delivered to family, neighbors and friends as a little pre-Christmas gift.

The pre-Christmas season of Advent is all about warm memories and preparing for something greater.

See if you can get your kids to try potato sausage or meat pie. More importantly, do a fun little project with them!

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Karen (Rose) Wils is a lifelong north Escanaba resident. Her folksy columns appear weekly in Lifestyles.

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