I often find myself quite the novelty in my age group when I mention one little known fact from my childhood.

We never had store-bought meat at my house until I was well on my way to high school.

Don’t get me wrong. We ate meat at every meal. We just never bought ours from a store.

We raised ours-pork, beef, poultry and even a healthy crop of catfish-out at my grandparents’ place. Every so often, when the freezers got skimpy, the whole family would gather up for a busy weekend at the butcher block.

For me, those gatherings were like Easter and Thanksgiving rolled all into one. Boyhood as the only child out on a farm could border on lonely from time to time, so having everyone come-especially those cousins of the same age-was always a treat.

They trucked in from all parts. And regardless of age or physical condition, each gravitated instinctively to his seemingly clandestine task.

Hog killing days were some of my favorite.

The days began in the wee hours. No matter how I tried, I was never able to wake up when Dad and Grandpa did. It was always cold and still dark out, but you could find them down by the smokehouse, barely illuminated by a fresh flicker of flames as they sipped scalding cups of black coffee, their breath hanging in ghostlike wisps about their nostrils.

At first light, we’d have the carcass hung and the initial stages of the job begun. A scrawny child only single digits old, my brawn was hardly helpful. So I tended the fire, a must for the coals that would be needed for projects later that day.

Then everyone set about their given duties. Some worked the saw, carving chops, roasts and bacon. Others manned the sausage maker, prepping the mechanicals and cleaning casings. Others would tend the kitchen, making meals for the work crew and fixings for the homemade sausage that would fill the rafters of the smokehouse in sleek rows before nightfall. We kids performed mostly gofer duties for the adults, but our job with the grown folk—long before doctors forbid such diets—was carving fat into chunks, which by nightfall found their way into a huge black kettle for lard and, my favorite, cracklins.

As a father of my own scrawny kids of that same age today, I’ve often longed for them to have such memories of their own.

Unfortunately, our equipment has long been put to pasture. Most of the folks who knew how or carried those wonderful mental recipes have long been laid to rest.

So imagine my elation not long ago when I ran across this article in Time magazine about meat cutters in New York offering courses on their craft to interested do-it-yourselfers.

Leave it to some Yankee writer from Time to moralize on meat cutting or blame home butchering on hard economic times.

Some of my family’s best times were born of butchering day.

Sure, they were heaps of work. They involved skills many of us simply don’t possess any more. And I’m sure the safety conscious among us would freak at our food-prep methods and tools.

But no one ever got sick. Skills can be learned, and we were never strangers to hard work.

Admittedly, I’m no complainer when it comes to ready-filled, mile-long meat counters at the store. Those conveniences not only make meat with my meals possible, but they are a tribute to men and women who have made it their lives’ work raising livestock and getting it to the masses in the safest and most efficient means possible.

But what I wouldn’t give for one of those fresh sausage patty sandwiches we always ate on butchering day. And I wouldn’t think twice about trading my paper-thin, boxed bacon slices for one of those hand-hewn hunks we would fry up months afterward from the stocks in our freezers.

It might be an acquired taste, but I sure wouldn’t have wanted to miss it for the world.