Page 12 - Guide_EN

Hallway (Ground Floor) Upon entering the farmhouse through the main entrance you can see the open, wooden chimney for both the fire in the kitchen and the wood burning oven in the dining/living room. It was very important that trees were felled at the right time. This was and often still is based on the phases of the moon. In around 1900, the wheelwright Michael Ober from St. Johann wrote a book about when wood should be cut. He said that, “Wood that should not burn should be felled on one day only, ideally after sunset on 1st March”. This wood was then used to build chimneys. On the wooden ceiling in the hallway you can see two holes. These were used to hang the slaughtered animals whilst they were disemboweled and butchered. The pigs were usually slaughtered in the wash house. The slaughtered ani- mals were butchered as quickly and with as little waste meat as possible. The blood was collected in a container and was stirred continuously to pre- vent it from solidifying. The blood was seasoned, mixed with leftover meat and made into sausages.Once the hair had been removed the pig was hung from ropes in the ground floor hallway where they were butchered. The small intestine was washed and used as the skin for the sausages. The large intestine was also washed, cut up and combined with various innards such as the liver and kidney and made into a kind of stew. The intestines were washed in the stream in order to keep the water trough clean for the animals to drink from. The loin and belly pork were marinated in a mixture of salt, herbs and juniper berries, before being hung above the fire in the kitchen to cure. 10