Kielbasa, the word brings back memories. Some good, others nightmarish. The family grocery store business owes its success to that word? Every week on Wednesday my father, uncle John and the keeper of the secret family recipe would gather at the Waldo Street store and start the process of making a thousand pounds of Poland's most famous delicacy. For Easter and Christmas, we would prepare 3 or 4 thousand pounds of Busia's extra fancy holiday sausage.
Every step along the way was done manually. The difference between holiday and the kielbasa we made weekly was in the ingredients. The special variety was made of leaner, higher quality pork products with no fillers added. The work started early. We would cut up the loins and other ingredients into chunks that would pass through our heavy duty grinder. That meat and other ingredients proportions and heritage were known only to Busia and God. It would be coarsely ground, seasoned then placed in 40 gallon galvanized tubs. Each tub weighed around 300 lbs. they were hand mixed and squeezed until the consistency satisfied the boss lady. Over my short apprenticeship, before I was married, I personally hand mixed tons of sausage meat and in the process developed very strong and muscular arms, fingers and shoulders and a lifetime of back problems, a family trait.
That coasely ground and seasoned meat was put through an old fashion sausage machine from which it was forced into the pig intestine casings, then hung on heavy wooden sausage smoking poles for the final stage ... the smokehouse. The old brick smokehouse in the back yard of the store held 12 sticks, each able to handle about 30 links of kielbasa. The fire was built in a corner of the smoke house where after a time the fire was extinguished, leaving only smoldering logs and hickory and apple flavored smoke to finish the process. The smoking would continue the rest of Wednesday and finish sometime Thursday ready for sale Friday and Saturday. Customers from all over the city line up out the door to get their share. It all sold through by Saturday late afternoon.
We all smelled of smoke, garlic. No matter how great the sausage turned out, we could always count on one or two disgruntled customers to call us at home during the holiday dinner, to complain that it was too fat, too lean, or that they found a bone or some damned thing in their batch.The whole family dreaded the process but it brought a steady anount of high profit business to the family.
Had we mechanized our methods, we could easily have become the foremost kielbasa processor of the time, The Kielbasa Kings of the West Side -- bigger than Kowalsi Kwality Sausage and who knows who else.
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