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KENTUCKY BACON
Father's Country Farms (Charles Gatton Jr.)
Father's Country Hams (Lorene Gatton)
Meacham Country Hams (Rodman Meacham)
Meacham Country Hams (William Meacham)
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Interviews and photographs by Amy Evans.
Leslie
Scott
SCOTT COUNTRY HAMS
1301 Scott Road
Greenville, KY 42345
1-800-318-1353
www.scotthams.com
Born just half a mile from his business, Leslie Scott is the third generation to live on his family’s farm in Greenville, Kentucky. He grew up processing hogs every Thanksgiving during hog-killing time and learned a basic cure recipe from his grandfather. As he grew older, Leslie saw that curing hams and bacon for the commercial market could be a good business. In 1965, he and his wife, June, cured their first 100 hams. Soon, their business grew, and today they cure thousands of hams annually. The Scotts do so by hand, with just one full-time employee. They keep things simple. They do things the old-fashioned way. Leslie fills a five-dollar bathtub with hickory chips and lights a fire therein to smoke the meat. He is also one of the few producers who make a nitrate-free product. Many of their customers seek them out for that reason alone, but rest assured that the taste and quality of their award-winning bacon will keep you hungry for more.
• • • Listen to this 3-minute audio clip of Leslie Scott talking about keeping his business small and what he looks for in his product. [Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.]
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What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
SUBJECT: Mr. Leslie Scott
DATE: August 23, 2005
LOCATION: Scott Country Hams-Greenville, KY
INTERVIEWER: Amy Evans
Amy Evans: This is Amy Evans for the Southern Foodways Alliance on Tuesday, August 23, 2005 and I'm in Greenville, Kentucky at Scott Hams with Mr. Leslie Scott. And Mr. Scott would you say your name and your birth date for the record please, sir?
Leslie Scott: Lester Scott, October 1, 1943.
And are you originally from this part of Kentucky?
Just moved a half a mile; I was born here.
Yeah; how long has your family been in this area?
Well three generations I guess that I know of--four generations. Yeah; grand-dad bought this place in 1910.
Okay; and so your family as part of a way of life has been curing hams surely for those--all those many generations?
They had to--couldn't survive. The winter--summer food supply was curing hams in the winter time.
Can you talk a little bit about the old days of curing hams and what that was like?
That was the biggest day; they'd do it on Thanksgiving Day. They killed hogs and that was one of the biggest days. All the family got together and killed hogs--a very important day for them; they did that Thanksgiving Day, yeah.
And when did you start your ham business?
We started business in 1965 and they were just killing for their own personal use and we started with 100 hams in 1965.
And
when you say they were killing, who do you mean?
Grand-daddy and his brothers and sisters--everybody on this road were Scott's. They were all brothers and sisters.
Must be why it's Scott Road. [Laughs]
That's right--that's right.
And so you just decided to get into the business? What precipitated it?
Well we thought--they sold a few to mother's brothers in Detroit. We thought we could sell some; it wasn't no trouble to sell 100 and then we went to a few more and then a few more, so it just grew from that.
And did the curing recipe change over those years as you started the business?
Yeah; we don't use the same that grand-daddy actually used. He didn't use any sugar and he buried his hams in salt and we hand-rub hours and just put--sparingly salt on them, just enough to keep them. It's all we wanted to do.
And then you added sugar to cure?
Added sugar; we use sugar.
What kind of sugar?
Brown sugar, yeah.
And then your bacon, since we're here to talk about bacon, can you talk about it?
Yeah; granddaddy left his bacon in the salt the same number of days he left his hams, which was six weeks. I never could eat his bacon. We actually stay in the salt about five days and then equalize it about another five to seven days, and then we'll smoke it with green hickory wood and sassafras 'til we get the right color on it and that's basically all we do to it--don't put any nitrates on it.
Oh really?
Right; there's not but about three of us probably in the state of Kentucky that doesn't use nitrates that do it as--for their living, you know.
And so what is your reasoning there? Why did you want to stay out of the nitrate?
Well two or three reasons--it gives her [his wife, June] a headache if she eats the nitrates. She will have migraine headaches. We have no additives even in our smoked sausage. We don't use the monosodium glutamate. It will give her a headache; and so we just stayed away with it; no use to using it anyhow. All it does is makes it pretty in color; so--
And how do you think that's affected your business? Has it been beneficial that you're--
Probably so--probably so; there's a group of people that buy our product because there are no nitrates it, and it's probably so.
And so what all do you have in your product line today?
We do the country ham; we bust it up in several ways. We sell it in ground ham, slices, cooked, almost any way you want to buy it, but we'd rather sell it in little bit pieces than to sell it all in one big piece. We can add value to it and charge more for it by cutting it up. The housewife doesn't want to cook anymore; they both work. So they'd rather just have it ready to eat. I made the statement one time that if I could put it on a platter and serve it on a platter, the person would buy it. And we have summer sausage, bacon, hog jowl, and that's--comes off the chin of the hog. The smoked sausage is big for us and we're a small operation anyhow. At Christmas we'll get up to about 14 or 15 employees and now there's three of us here today; you know so--
And how many flavors of bacon do you have?
We just make the two--the pepper bacon and the--and a regular country bacon--just the two.
And you sell quite a lot of bacon?
No, not a lot; we sell--we don't sell a lot of anything,
but it provides me enough money to 
live
and to buy daddy's farm.
Yeah; and so did--when you got into this did you get into it as kind of a hobby and to maintain a tradition or is it something that was going to sustain--
Actually we thought we could make some money and she [June] could stay home and raise our kids. Her education is social worker, and it worked out that way. We would have built it over on the main road if daddy would have sold us any ground, but he wouldn't sell it, so we had to build it back here and we took this and bought out the main road. Nobody has give us nothing. We started the business and--and moved it along as we could you know. Not--in no big hurry though.
Well you also raise cattle, correct.
Yes, ma'am. That's my love--is the cattle.
Yeah; and so your wife, June, has she taken over pretty much the ham business?
She pretty well takes care of the ham business; I don't know much about it, you know other than we're going to put out hams such and such a day and I'm here. I do--I do go and promote her business about--I'll be Nashville this next week for three days and I go to Louisville and stay four days and she will, too. She works the business in Louisville, too. We both go and work booths and have direct sales to our customers.
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Yeah; do you enjoy that part of the business?
Yes; but I have the best of both worlds. I can leave the customer and go out on the farm, yeah. It's quiet and peaceful out there.
Uh-hm; so if you still are primarily interested in raising your cattle and your wife, June, holds down the fort here, who--who puts the rub--the cure on the hands and--
That I do…And the young fellow in there named John. Me and him both--she salted them up 'til she broke her arm severely. She was on one end of the box, and I was on the other until that happened [in nineteen] ninety-nine and that ended her salting. She can hardly pick up a ham and carry it around. But we--we have always salted our hams. I don't clean up the mess; I just leave as soon as I get that done, you know. [Laughs]
But it's important to you that you still be a part of that?
Right, right; I still cook all the cooked hams. Nobody cooks any but me. And yeah; that's--that's very important. We think it is; may not be--we think it is.
Can you explain how you think it's important?
I think we know whether we've got the right amount of salt on. If we're going to blame it on anybody we get to blame it on ourselves and we don't get to say well so and so did that, you know if we mess up. We're totally responsible for our own product; we put our own name on it. So that's the way we think we ought to do it.
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Uh-hm; so is there--I'm curious if when you started the business if there was much of a learning curve that you had to kind of trial and error to get the cure right and get your product where you wanted it to be?
You don't--you're still learning. 35 years you’re still learning. We didn't have any business you know--didn't know any business, anything about a business, didn't have any money, our families didn't have any money to let us have; we had to--what we did--we had to make sure it was right so we could eat, and we--that's probably the reason there's no more product--we're selling no more product. We tried to specialize in what we know. And some people went into it and--big and expanded and got lots of products and--but they didn't do it on their own…Just they come here from Kentucky several years ago. Eighty-eight the National Convention was in Louisville and he shamed all of us that was in the meat business to enter product. If you didn't think enough of your product to enter he thought you ought to go quit you know and he did--me and June has entered it every year since '88 and we missed two years having a champion in that period of time. Now the first year we were the bottom of the line; we was at the bottom, but the next year we didn't have enough money to fly so we drove to Albuquerque, New Mexico with that one ham. She didn't think we'd do any good so she didn't even get up to go to the Award's Banquet. But it's--and that's been good to us; it's helped us by going to that because we--we make a lot of gift boxes--$10, $15, $20 boxes.
And so tell me about some of the other awards you've won over the years.
Well I think we won--we won two at Louisville this week.
We won the Cut Ham Class--that's they taste it; we won that class. We
won Class Two. At the National we took third this year and we showed at
Memphis as long as they had a show at Memphis but they no longer have
a ham show and we won that thing eight times I believe. The business has
given me and June an opportunity to see a lot of stuff that we wouldn’t
have seen you know and--you know we get to go to the Convention and some
idiot elected me to the National Board, you know one time. I served on
it for six years. [Laughs] I knowed nothing; they should have 
throwed
me off, you know. [Laughs]
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And what would you attribute to your long-term success?
Making constant the same quality product over the years. Not changing--of course we had to change--we sell very few whole hams anymore and our business is mostly mail order. We don't sell to stores; so the--you--when they go to pay that shipping you've got to sell them something they want and will buy again and again and again--they'll keep buying. We know some people that are sort of in the same business where the guys expanded fast but they didn't sell the product the second time, so they've quit products along the way. So I think that's--selling the same product and--and improving on it as you go along--lower that salt content down as much as you can.
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Right, yeah; so what--over the years as you've perfected your craft of cured hams and bacon, what--what do you look for in a good ham or bacon?
We like a little tang in the ham--if it's a ham. We like a little tang. We like a pretty pecan color on the ham when we get it smoked. We prefer short-shanked hams so we can get as many center cuts out of that ham as possible. The housewife has no use for that ham hock hardly anymore. They don't cook beans like they used to so you--we try to have as many center cuts in the ham as we can possibly get. And a good firm ham, too; we like for it to be firm to the touch. We don't like it to be squishy and move around a lot. The bacon, we try to keep it down around nine inches--no wider than nine inches. You know we'll trim it and make it no more than nine inches, you know when we get it cured and processed. We like it as lean as possible. The way they breed the hogs now though some of the bacon is too lean for--to taste good, to really have the taste; it's got too lean. But that's what the housewife wants, so you sell her what she wants or you don't sell to her. AE: And so do you--how do you feel when you're pulled in here into the ham house and taken away from your cows when Christmas--If it's a pretty day I'm an ornery son of a gun you know--huh; but if it's not pretty I--I don't mind it a bit and if it's as hot as it's been the last few days, but I also know on the other hand the farming is not making the money. This is what we're living out of. In fact, when we haven't took very little in the farming operation so it would be ours--nobody could take it away from us. So we built that out of our ham operation.
Do you eat your own ham pretty often—or bacon?
When I cook--and I cook and give out samples, you know like I say six days a month, I will probably eat too much, but I sample every batch I cook and they tell me that women who cook sample everything that they cook, you know.
How do you like to cook it?
We cook ours in water, put a lid on it, and--and steam
it, simmer it; probably take longer than most people about 20 minutes
until it's tender until you can cut it with a fork. She learned how to
do that for her grandfather. He didn't have any teeth. Her grandmother
died and she became his cook. So that--that's how she learned to cook
it with the water and a lid 
on
it. And we say so in our brochure to cook it that way. That won't work
on a real short-aged ham, but a long-aged ham six months or more it works
real good.
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Yeah; what do you think brings [your customers] back?
Selling them what they want. It has nothing to do with personality or anything like that; it's selling them what they want.
Do y'all have some customers that you've had since the beginning?
Yes; we've still got some that we had since we started, yeah. They're getting few and we've added a few, too; so--
Well what do you hope the future of the business will be?
We're probably not going to expand anymore when we're done unless the kids want to. If they'd--if they'd want to we'd be willing to do that, but I don't know…Neither one of us want to retire. We want to keep working as long as we're able.
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To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
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