Old concepts: chamber pots, head cheese

 I’ve had several conversations this week that have left me feeling like I’m older than dirt.

Somehow, what comes out of my mouth makes me seem like I’m 100, and all that’s missing is the quad cane and the shaky voice reminiscing, “I remember when...”

Why is this? Why do I sound like ancient history when I’m really on the younger side of the baby boomers?

I blame my sparse Northern Minnesota upbringing.

When the conversation in my pod of the newsroom turned to chamber pots the other day — don’t ask me how we got on this topic — one of our 20-something reporters didn’t know what a chamber pot was, so I told her.

Then I told her my family had to use them because we didn’t have indoor plumbing until I was 6.

It was the early 1960s, and I’m sure 98 percent of the rest of the country had indoor plumbing decades before that, but since my closest aunt and uncle down the road and other neighbors also didn’t have an indoor bathroom, I thought that’s just the way it was.

When my young colleague inquired why we didn’t just use an outhouse all the time, I told her it wasn’t much fun to trudge outside through snowbanks during a frigid Minnesota winter.

“Oh,” she contemplated. “Ohhh...”

I remember Saturday-night baths in the galvanized steel wash tub — how ancient is that? When my parents finally converted a small pantry into a real bathroom and we got an actual bathtub, we still didn’t have running water for awhile. My mother would heat “bath water” on the stove and then ration it so we’d have about two inches of water in the tub. Still, we were in our glory to stretch out in that wonderfully roomy tub.

We hand-pumped water from a cistern, a rather old-fashioned means of storing water. Cisterns were a topic in the pastor’s sermon last Sunday, and when he asked the congregation how many knew what they were or had grown up with a cistern, my hand shot up along with a few others, mostly elderly parishioners. Once again, older than dirt, I thought to myself.

What further cinched these feelings of being old was another conversation about a Food Network episode of “Chopped,” during which the contestants had to cook several parts of a pig, including the head.

When one co-worker wondered what in the world you could do with a pig’s head, I said, “That’s easy. Make head cheese.”

She shuddered as I told her the cheek meat from a pig’s head is some of the best. I remember my mother simmering not one, but several pig heads in a huge vat on the stove and then picking the meat off the press into loaves of head cheese. It was rather tasty. Mom served it with vinegar.

Mom also made a heavy-duty blood and potato dish, a Norwegian dish that involved occasional trips to the local butcher to stock up on pig’s blood.

Served with butter and slices of sidepork baked on top, it was stick-to-your-ribs food.

What was so routine for me during my childhood seems ghastly to many. I may not have had the luxuries most of my fellow boomers had growing up, but I’m somehow proud of my austere upbringing.

As my dad would’ve said, it builds character.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.