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Bacon Cheeks, to Pickle
To about sixteen pounds of meat, take of salt and sugar each one pound, and one ounce of saltpetre thoroughly blended together; sprinkle the cheeks well with salt, let them lie till next day, then drain well, and rub in the above ingredients. Turn and rub often, and in three weeks or a month, or less, they will be fit for use. Probable cost of pickle, 4 1/2 d.
This is a dry cure for pig's jowls, and it is one of the recipes in the book that has been overtaken by what we now know about nitrate and about curing temperature. The notes below explain what the instructions leave out rather than how to carry them out.
- The saltpetre is far out of rangeOne ounce of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) to sixteen pounds of meat works out at roughly 0.4 per cent by weight of the meat, several times the level permitted in modern curing practice, where nitrate and nitrite are used in the low hundreds of parts per million and are almost always supplied pre-diluted in a measured cure salt for exactly this reason. Nineteenth-century books treat saltpetre as a bulk seasoning bought loose by the ounce; there is no way to reconcile that with current limits by eye.
- No temperature is given anywhere"Turn and rub often" for three weeks or a month says nothing about how cold the meat is kept. A dry cure of this kind depends entirely on being held just above freezing, typically 36-40F, throughout; at larder temperatures in a warm season the interior of a thick jowl can spoil before the salt has penetrated it. Safe curing is defined by measured temperature and time together, and this recipe supplies neither.
- "Or less" is not a curing timeCure penetration in a dry rub is governed by the thickness of the piece, not by the calendar, and jowls vary enormously in depth. A recipe that offers "three weeks or a month, or less" is leaving the most important variable to the cook's judgement, which is precisely what modern curing guidance refuses to do.
- The pickle is a dry rub, not a brineDespite the title, nothing here is dissolved in water. "Pickle" in Victorian usage covers dry salting as well as wet, and the liquid that appears in the dish is brine drawn out of the meat itself. Readers expecting an immersion cure will be misled by the heading.
- Bacon cheeks are pig's jowlThe cut is the fatty cheek and throat of the pig, sold today as jowl or, boned and rolled, as a Bath chap. It is still a butcher's item in some places, though it will rarely be labelled as in this book.
- The costing dates the page"Probable cost of pickle, 4 1/2 d." is four and a half old pence, from before decimalisation in 1971, and it tells you the cure was considered a trivial expense against sixteen pounds of meat. It places the book in the pre-decimal era, though pence alone will not narrow the date much further.
- If you want cured jowlUse a current curing recipe that specifies a commercial cure salt by weight, a working temperature, and a time based on the thickness of the piece.
Pig's cheek was one of the cuts a household got almost incidentally when a pig was killed and broken down, and it is fat, thin and awkward. Cassell's places this among its curing notes because a late-Victorian kitchen was still expected to handle whole carcass work, or at least to know what the butcher ought to have done. Cured and boned cheek is generally traced as the ancestor of the Bath chap, a West Country speciality served cold in slices, and the word chap is usually explained as a variant of chop in its older sense of jaw. Saltpetre appears here for the reason it appears throughout nineteenth-century curing: it keeps the meat red and was believed to help preserve it, an effect later understood to come from nitrate being converted to nitrite in the cure.