A forty-pound box of smoked sack sausage from Father’s Country Hams of Bremen, Kentucky, landed on our front porch in Oxford, Mississippi, at 1:46 last Thursday afternoon. It was just above freezing, so that pasteboard box sat there until I got home, heaved it into the kitchen, and stacked twenty sacks of sausage in our freezer like cordwood. If we go slow, my wife, Blair, and I figure that this, our last order, will last for a year.
Problem is, we’ve never gone slow. Every other weekend, I fry patties of that hyper-smoked sausage, stuffed and hung in muslin sacks, for Saturday breakfasts of soft-scrambled eggs and stone-ground grits. For company, Blair cooks and crumbles Father’s to use as a topping for homemade pizza. Or she stirs some in to punch up her chili. For the last decade, we’ve sent sacks to our Birmingham relatives at Christmas. Newly married friends and family have received two-sack gift packs. When a colleague from the SEC snagged us tickets to last year’s Ole Miss-Georgia game, I sent Father’s his way.
Three years back, I wrote a story for this magazine, “The Quest for Sack Sausage,” in which I traveled Tennessee and Kentucky with three friends in search of the best makers of what seemed like a dying craft. Many of the old guard members of the sack sausage guild had passed on, but a visit to Charlie Gatton at Father’s gave us hope for the future. Most important, that trip gave me a chance to get to know Charlie Gatton.
His people have farmed the rolling hills of southwestern Kentucky since 1840. Around 1950, Charles Gatton, his father, began curing hams. Charlie stepped into the family business in 1962. Under his leadership, the Gatton family won many a blue ribbon for their hams. And a devoted audience for that sack sausage. On our visit, Charlie told me that he hangs the sacks of ground pork and spices for forty-eight hours in a smokehouse stoked with chunks of hickory and sawdust. Sometimes he adds a hickory slab or two.
Standing at the threshold of the family smokehouse, Charlie told me that the smoke inside can gets so dense that, the year before, he got turned around. Even with a flashlight, he struggled to find his way out of his own smokehouse. In the years since, when somebody has asked what Father’s tastes like, I’ve tried to describe the pervasive smokiness, failed, and then launched into that story.
On the morning of February 7, I received an email from Charlie Gatton telling me that, owing to health reasons, Father’s County Hams will soon close. I did what I always do when there’s a family emergency. I called Blair. She gasped. And then she teared up, thinking of how the work of their family has long brought joy to our family. Soon after, I began cleaning out our freezer, getting it ready to lay in those twenty sacks, in a vain effort to stave off what we know will be a less smoky and delicious future.
To move stock, Father’s County Hams is offering “retirement specials.” The sausage went quick. But as of this writing, you can still score the last of those beautiful hams the Gatton family will sell to the public. Godspeed, Charlie.
