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TO SALT PORK
Allow the meat to stand until the animal heat is entirely out of it; cut the sides into strips crosswise; cover the bottom of a barrel with salt, and pack in the pork closely edgewise, with rind next the barrel : cover each layer with salt, and proceed in like manner until all has been put in. Make a strong brine sufficient to cover the pork (soft water is best, and there is no danger of getting it too salt), boil, skim and pour into the barrel while boiling hot. Have a board cut out round, a little smaller than the barrel, put over the pork, and on it place a weight heavy enough to keep it always under the brine. If at any time the brine froths or looks red, it must be turned off, scalded and returned while hot. Never put cold brine on old pork, unless you wish to lose it. In salting down a new supply of pork, boil down the old brine, remove the scum, and then pour it over the pork as directed above.
This is a nineteenth-century farm procedure for putting down a whole hog's worth of side meat in a barrel, and it depends on conditions no modern kitchen has. The instructions below explain why it cannot be followed rather than how to follow it.
- The brine has no strength"A strong brine sufficient to cover the pork" with the assurance that "there is no danger of getting it too salt" tells you nothing measurable. Safe barrel curing depends on a known salt concentration, verified with a salinometer or by weighing salt and water; the traditional target was a saturated or near-saturated cure. A cure that reads strong to the tongue can still be well below the level that stops bacterial growth in the interior of a thick strip of side meat.
- No temperature is given anywhereThe whole method assumes a stone cellar or springhouse sitting near 34-40F through a northern winter, and assumes the pork was slaughtered in cold weather. Nothing in the text says so. Curing at room temperature, or in a garage that swings above 50F, lets spoilage and pathogenic organisms work faster than salt can penetrate.
- "Until the animal heat is entirely out"This is one of the instructions the original treats as critical, and it is the one most easily got wrong. Fresh pork must be chilled through to refrigeration temperature before salt is applied; warm meat packed in salt sours from the centre outward. The phrase gave a farmer with a hanging carcass a clear signal and gives a modern cook none.
- No curing salt, and no discussion of botulismMeat packed tight in a weighted barrel under brine is an oxygen-free environment, which is the condition Clostridium botulinum favours. Commercial and modern home cures use a measured nitrite or nitrate salt for exactly this reason, in quantities regulated by weight. Plain salt alone, at an unknown concentration, is not a substitute.
- The spoilage test is a warning, not a fix"If at any time the brine froths or looks red, it must be turned off, scalded and returned while hot" is an admission that the batch has already begun to go over. Ropy, gassy or reddened brine indicates active microbial growth in the barrel; scalding the liquid does nothing for the interior of meat that has been sitting in it.
- Reusing old brineBoiling down last year's brine and pouring it over a new supply concentrates salt but also carries forward whatever organisms and off-flavours survived, and leaves the final salt strength completely unknown. This was thrift in a household that bought salt by the sack; it is not a defensible step now.
- The pork is never cooked in this recipeSalt pork is a raw preserved product, cooked later by the person who uses it. That means the cure itself is the only safety step, which is precisely why the missing measurements matter here more than they would in a stew.
- If you want to cure porkUse a current recipe from a source that gives salt and cure quantities by weight, a target temperature, and a time based on the thickness of the meat.
Buckeye Cookery was compiled for Ohio households in 1877, and where it turns to cutting and curing meat it assumes something few cookbooks assume today: that the reader will one day be standing over a butchered hog with a barrel, a board and a sack of salt, deciding what to do before the meat turns. Hog killing was scheduled for the first hard cold of late autumn, and salt pork was the year's insurance policy, the fat backbone of beans, chowders, greens and skillet gravy in the months when nothing fresh was available. The details that read as vague to us were the parts a farm family already knew from practice: how cold the cellar ran, how long a side took to firm up, what good brine smelled like. What the book supplies is the sequence and the cautionary notes, particularly the warning never to pour cold brine on old pork, a rule it gives without explanation. The frugality of boiling down last season's brine belongs to the same world, where salt was a purchased commodity and waste was a moral failing as much as an economic one.