Scarnatura: the first thing to do at the factory
In this videos, originally Facebook Live, I went to the butcher to buy some lamb row intestines to show you the first part of the cleaning.
This should never be done in a river directly, because the clod water will result in a stiffer gut. Normally the gut is left for at least a couple of days in water at 18/20°C so that the fermentation helps the cleaning. But I didn't feel like doing it in my bathroom: opening my facebook page in my bathroom seemed not a nice start, this location is much nicer... and the smell is not too strong this way!
This entertaining video below shows what I had in mind to show you myself. Unfortunately the material I had was already cleaned from the big waste part.
Of course we do not need to put it inside out to make strings...
...and this is how they normally do today, with machines, in modern casings factories:
At the end you see a inox table with intestines arriving from another room, probably from upstairs , on a slide. One after another, this is the “capacity” of the slaughtering process upstairs.
This is how it works in a slaughter house: a different room for each part of the process, so that not all of the workers are directly connected with the death moment. They just see the parts, like in a butcher shop.
Animals are not slaughtered for their guts, but for the meet. So, if you are ethically concerned, before wandering if it is really worth to use gut strings, I would recommend not to waste food. It would already be a great difference. In the world are slaughtered more animals per day than the people living on earth, like if we all ate one animal per day... and I am speaking only about cows, pigs, chickens, not to mention wild animals, fishes and others.
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baroque music, double-bass strings, early music, gut strings, gut strings history, gut strings maintenance, gut strings manufacture, viol strings, viola da gamba strings, viola strings, violin strings, violoncello strings
Bosko and Honey are two ukulele virtuoso players from Australia whom in 2008 toured the world with their project Ukulele Safari. Basically they were able to spend one year around the globe hosted from the network of ukulele players that they knew through their youtube channel. A great couple. They visited Vicenza participating to the first
Read MoreThe “fresh gut” part Let’s get started, and of course we start from Salle, in Abruzzi (Italy). We’ll go and see how a factory was organized in the 18th century. Yes, I said factory, not workshop. When you take out the intestine from a sheep, the first thing you need to do is to empty it someway.
Read MoreThis video is a very accurate reconstruction of the historical manufacturing process. Thanks to Mimmo Peruffo for this. Note that he is using whole lamb gut.
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