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Waln Brown Interviewing Clifford Falatko -9- 8/20/72
Tape 5-1
WB What was a smokehouse like?
CF Made out of wood this here.
WB Was it made out of wood?
CF Boards if anybody had a shed, yard.
WB Was it a small shed like?
CF Higher than a bridge.
WB Say 6 ft. high?
CF Yeh.
WB Maybe 4 or 5 ft. wide and 4, 5 ft. long?
CF 3, 4 ft.
WB You said it was a pretty small building?
CF Yeh.
WB Was there special wood that was used on the inside?
CF It all depends what kind of taste you wanted, bacon or hams depends on diff-
erent wood.
WB And I guess there was a stove inside for smoking?
CF No.
WB How did you smoke them?
(CF calls his wife and is assured she is outside)
CF This would be the wood here it would have to be level, dig a hole over there, a
big hole, dig the ditch, I'd say the shanty was 5 or 6 ft. away from that
fire, this ditch cover it up so that coal smoke would go in that smoke shanty,
the fire was burin' like a bugger, the smoke would go in the ditch right in
the smoke shanty.
WB I see in other words, I'm just trying to get this straight so excuse me if I
repeat, you'd build a little fire pit back there in the ground away from it and
then you'd put a steel sheet like a pipe to go up under the smokehouse and the
you'd put coal
CF Not coal- wood.
WB You'd burn the wood and then the smoke would go in the pipe and then up in the
smokehouse, how long would it burn, how long would it take to smoke a piece
of meat, say a pig?
CF A piece of meat? Depends on what you're smokin', hams or bacon or pork chops,
you can smoke pork chops in one piece.
WB So then it would burn all day long?
CF One Day? For bacon you have to have more than a week or hams you have about
2 weeks, every day.
WB So it was always burning, you kept the fire burning all the time?
CF Yeh, not in the night, in the night you take everything in because you couldn't
trust anybody, take everything in.
WB This shed, you said most of the people in Eckley had smokesheds?
CF Oh yeh.
444 [be started to whisper, didn't want his wife (on the porch) to hear, something
about a bachelor friend of his that wanted to smoke kilbasi how one night the
friend brought his sausage over and instead of making a fire in the pit they
made a fire right in the smokehouse and put a metal sheet over and her mother
comes up and the fire's burnin' like hell and and she goes and puts more wood on, there
was lots of fat in the sausage and it burnt the whole god dam thing, the neigh-
bors yelled the shanty's on fire because everything went up, all the pork and
464 beef]
WB Did you say on the inside of your smoke shanty, that one, you had a fire on the
ground inside the smokeshanty?
CF No I didn't use that, I just put the fire in a tub under this fresh sausage in
the smokeshanty on the bottom, it started drippin' and all the grease caught