Shengliver’s Note: A trip back to my home village in the summer made me keenly aware that the village now is not the village then. Most folk I met about the ancestral grounds were either kids whose grandparents I know, or aunts and uncles and great aunts and great uncles, who were in their sixties, seventies or eighties. Ways of life there are far removed from what I remember of the early 1970s, my salad days. In this blog series, Extinct Trade, the blogger will share with his readers about nine trades which have died out where his roots are.

Cooking oil or fat came from two sources in my village, sesame and hogs. Sesame plants were raised in sunny hilly plots; their seeds were processed into oil by the oil squeezers.

Peasants for the best part of a year, the oil squeezers were not professional, either. When sesame was harvested, farmers from around the community came to their workshop and swapped their sesame seeds for oil. No fee was charged, but I bet they made a profit by fixing the ratio of sesame to the amount of oil it was exchanged for. Sesame cakes, which were the solids left over from the squeezing, belonged to them.

The oil making process was labour intensive. The seeds had to be steamed first so that oil would come out readily. After being heated up, the seeds were packaged in grass bags before they were stuffed into a wooden press. The workers then squeezed in wedges. As more wedges were being hammered in to the press, oil started to ooze out. Hitting the wedges in was hard work. I saw the squeezers slamming down on them, the upper part of their body bare, and a loud exclamation accompanying each go.

Walking by the workshop was an olfactory feast, for the smell was nice and strong. If I was lucky enough, the squeezers would offer me a piece of the sesame cakes, which were left behind after oil was extracted. The cakes were prized animal feed or fertilisers, but they tasted good when there was little stuff in your tummy. A lot of my buddies then had a soft spot for them. Once I saw the squeezers at mealtimes, holding a bowl of steamed noodles glazed with sesame oil. Lord, the colour, and the aroma, that was mouth-watering. Mother could never have afforded as much oil in her wok. Without any chance to eat the meal, a trip to the shop allowed me to feast my nose on the perfume. That was better than nothing.