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TO CURE HAMS AND BACON
-When killed and cool cut up, and begin immediately to salt them. Rub the outside of each ham with a teaspoon of powdered saltpetre, and the inside with a teaspoon of cayenne pepper. Having mixed together two pounds of brown sugar and salt, mixed in the proportion of one pound and a half of sugar to a pint of salt, rub the pork well with it. This quantity of sugar and salt will be sufficient for fifty pounds of meat. Have ready some large tubs, the bottom sprinkled with salt, and lay the meat in the tubs with the skin downward. Put plenty of salt between each layer of meat. After it has lain eight days, take it out and wipe off the salt, and wash the tubs. Make a pickle of soft water, equal quantities of salt and molasses and a little saltpetre; allowing five ounces of saltpetre to two quarts of molasses and two quarts of salt, which is the proportion for fifty pounds of meat. The pickle must be strong enough to bear up an egg. Boil and skim it, and, when it is cold, pour it over the meat, which must be turned frequently and basted with the pickle. The hams should remain in the pickle at least four weeks; the bacon three weeks. They should then be taken out and smoked. Having washed off the pickle, before you smoke the meat, bury it while wet in a tub of bran. This will form a crust over it, and prevent evaporation of the juices. Let the smoke-house be ready to receive the meat immediately. Take it out of the tub after it has lain half an hour, and rub the bran evenly over it. Then hang it up to smoke with the small end downward. Tongues may be cured in the above manner.
This is a nineteenth-century farmhouse cure written for a household that butchered in cold weather and hung meat in its own smokehouse. The method cannot be reproduced safely in a modern kitchen, and the points below explain where it fails rather than how to adapt it.
- Saltpetre is unmeasured against the meatThe recipe calls for "a teaspoon" of powdered saltpetre per ham and five ounces to fifty pounds of meat in the pickle, with no way to know how much any given piece absorbs. Potassium nitrate is regulated as a curing agent precisely because ingoing quantities must be calculated by weight of meat; uncontrolled amounts can push nitrate/nitrite intake well past safe limits, and nitrate cures also depend on bacterial conversion that this method does nothing to manage.
- "Strong enough to bear up an egg" is not a brine specificationThe floating-egg test tells you only that the solution is somewhere in a broad saline range. A cure that must inhibit Clostridium botulinum over weeks needs a known salt concentration and a known nitrite level, not a buoyancy test.
- No temperature is given anywhereFour weeks in pickle is safe only if the meat is held at refrigeration temperature throughout. The recipe gives no temperature at all; its only cue is to cut up the meat 'when killed and cool', and it presumably relied on a cold cellar and cold-weather butchering. At room temperature the same brine period is a spoilage and botulism risk, not a cure.
- The smoking is cold smoking, not cookingHanging meat in a smokehouse flavours and dries it; it never brings the interior to a temperature that kills pathogens. The finished ham is a raw product whose safety rests entirely on the salt and nitrate having done their work correctly, which this recipe gives no way to verify.
- The bran crust makes matters worseThe bran crust works against surface drying -- Burying the wet meat in bran to form a crust deliberately slows moisture loss; the recipe says as much itself. Surface drying is one of the things that protects hanging meat, and a damp, sealed exterior is more hospitable to surface spoilage organisms and mould -- though the recipe keeps the meat in the bran for only half an hour before it goes straight to the smokehouse.
- Tongues are singled out for the same treatmentThe closing line extends the method to tongues, which are dense, slow to take cure and slower still to lose moisture. Whatever margin of safety the process had with a thin side of bacon is reduced with a thick, irregular cut.
- If you want to cure at homeUse a current recipe that specifies a curing salt by name, gives ingoing nitrite in parts per million or as a percentage of meat weight, states brine and hanging temperatures, and tells you a finished water-activity or weight-loss target.
Buckeye Cookery (1877, out of Marysville, Ohio) is the source given for this text, compiled for households that still did their own butchering; the instructions read like farm work rather than kitchen work -- cut while the carcass is cool, salt at once. The sequence here -- dry salt for eight days to draw water, then a sweet pickle of molasses, salt and saltpetre, then weeks in the brine, then the smokehouse -- is recognisably the American sugar-cured ham of the period, and the molasses and brown sugar are what distinguish it from plainer English salt bacon. Saltpetre (potassium nitrate) had been used in curing for centuries for its preservative effect and for the pink colour it fixes in the meat, though the chemistry of its conversion to nitrite by bacteria was not worked out until the closing years of the nineteenth century, well after cooks like these had settled by trial on quantities that seemed to answer. The instruction to hang the hams small end downward is traditional practice, explained as keeping the juices in the thick part of the meat. The whole procedure depended on a seasonal cold that the recipe never mentions.