Community Sausage Making in McCook, TX

You’ve met Curt and Cindy Liljedahl here. They have a podcast, AdventuRetired, in which they interview people who are doing interesting things in their retirement years — living abroad in various countries, being an elephant whisperer, hiking or biking or camping, eating and writing about barbecue, or living a nomad’s life in an RV or a boat. It’s well worth your time to wander through their archives. Curt and Cindy are great interviewers, and the episodes are lively and informative. They’re vivacious people and genuinely interested in others’ activities.

The Liljedahls used to teach school in Hidalgo County, Texas, down on the Rio Grande. The population of nearly 900,000 people, hugs the river. Things thin out dramatically as you move away from the river, and by the time you get 30 miles north, the land empties out dramatically, and the unincorporated community of McCook boasts only 91 souls spread out over a large area. Here’s Curt’s report —

McCook is basically a church, a store, and a bar. The town also has a tradition that the community gets together once a year for sausage making. McCook is in ranch land, and it’s fine hunting country. Curt and Cindy’s friends Paul and Nancy are regulars at the festivities.

Here’s the drill. Residents bring their own hog — or javelina — meat and venison. When it is your turn to make sausage you go into a room and add your secret family recipe of spices and meat ratios for your portion. The portion of sausage you take home is based on how much meat you brought.Paul and Nancy sent some of their sausage to Curt and Linda.

Curt cooked it up on a pellet grill and heated it at 325 degrees

and kept it there until grease was oozing out of the sausage casing.

Perfection. Time to siice it up.

And eat it.

The sausage our friends make is amazing. It has less grease than store bought sausage, and the flavor can’t be beat.

Community events like the McCook sausage making are valuable for communities. Institutions that build up communities have withered in recent years. Some years ago Robert Putnam wrote a book, Bowling Alone, about the shift of Americans away from civic and social organizations to an individualistic outlook and an atomization of society, and a lack of respect and understanding for others’ different viewpoints. Each remaining event and activity that brings us together is a treasure, and my hat is off to the people of McCook. And that really does look like good sausage. I’m not quite ready to move to McCook. It’s too far from Ella and Lily, and Nancy wouldn’t stand for it. I would, however, love to spend a sausage making day with those good folks.

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