THEY USED TO CALL IT CARNY, ” Troy Smiley says, standing at the door of his smokehouse. “That whang you get after a sack of sausage hangs.” He wears jeans and a flannel jacket. His eyes glint with mischief. “We used to try to get rid of that whang,” Troy tells us, looking up from the dirt floor. “Now they want it.”
We are they: pilgrims who have traveled here in search of something we fear might go lost. March Egerton, a son of the late Southern thinker and writer John Egerton, stands tall and angular. Tyler Brown, the Franklin, Tennessee, chef, wears a newsboy cap over a mane of graying hair. As they ask Troy questions, I eavesdrop.
Troy’s family has made sack sausage since the early 1800s. That’s when Temperance and David Smiley settled on a ridgetop here in Robertson County, Tennessee, north of Nashville. They raised pigs and ground down the shoulder meat, spicing it and stuffing it in muslin sacks to dry and to smoke. The Smileys did this work for the same reason they made corn whiskey: to get more out of what they grew, so they could keep farming these sylvan hills that roll toward the Kentucky border.
Each winter, Troy still hangs a few sacks from the smokehouse rafters at Smiley Farms, scatters clumps of hickory and sassafras, and sets the wood smoking. The sacks, which some call socks, hang for a week or more, taking on that whang, that smoke, to render pork that tastes round and leathery, the way a Cohiba cigar smells or a Rioja Gran Reserva drinks.
Troy was slow to appreciate this craft. His
