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BACON OR HAM, TO CURE (Devonshire way)
Draw away all the slime and blood from two hams by rubbing them well with salt for two days before they are put into the pickle. Drain them, lay them in a pan, and pour over them boiling hot the following ingredients: two pounds of treacle, two ounces of saltpetre, one pound of common salt, and one pint of good vinegar; turn and baste them every day for a month, then drain and smoke. Time to salt, one month. Probable cost of pickle, 1s. Sufficient for a ham of sixteen pounds weight.
This is a nineteenth-century Devonshire wet cure for whole hams, and it cannot be reproduced safely in a modern kitchen. The points below explain where it fails rather than how to adapt it.
- Saltpetre out of measurable rangeSaltpetre dose hard to pin down -- two ounces of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) is set against "a ham of sixteen pounds weight", though the method opens with two hams, so the meat weight the dose applies to is ambiguous. Nitrate cures depend on concentration relative to meat weight, and modern curing weighs nitrite or nitrate blends against a stated percentage of the meat.
- No temperature specified anywhereA month of curing assumes the cool larder or dairy of an unheated house, colder than a modern kitchen though not necessarily as cold as a refrigerator. At modern room temperature the interior of a sixteen-pound ham may spoil, and spoilage in a low-oxygen salted interior is the condition associated with Clostridium botulinum.
- The pickle is poured on boilingThe recipe pours hot pickle over cold raw pork and then relies on salt penetrating from the surface inward over four weeks, with no control over what the initial heat does to the outer meat.
- Salt strength is far too low for the meat weightSalt strength is hard to judge -- one pound of common salt with two pounds of treacle in a pint of vinegar, following the two-day salt rub, is a basted pickle rather than a measured immersion brine, and the recipe gives no way to know what water activity is reached.
- "Then drain and smoke" is not a processNo smoking temperature, duration or wood is given, and no indication whether the smoke is cold or hot. Cold smoking a nitrate-cured ham is a controlled operation with its own temperature and humidity limits; the instruction as written is a single word.
- Treacle and saltpetre todayFor reference only: treacle is British dark molasses, and saltpetre is sold as potassium nitrate, now restricted in many places and superseded in curing by measured nitrite salts. One shilling for the pickle dates the entry rather than helping cost it.
- If you want to cure a hamUse a current recipe from a food-safety authority or a modern charcuterie text, one that specifies cure weight as a percentage of meat weight and gives holding temperatures.
Devonshire and Somerset were famous for their sweet-pickled bacon, in cures built on treacle or brown sugar rather than salt alone — the sugar softening the harshness of the salt and darkening the finished rind. Such regional cures were catalogued in the Victorian household cookery books because a large household still expected to lay down its own pig: two hams, a month in the pan, then hung to dry. The recipe's vagueness is not carelessness so much as an assumption that the reader had done it before, and knew what a ham should smell like at the end of the fourth week. What it records is a period in which preservation was domestic knowledge passed on by hand; the shift to weighed nitrite cures and measured temperatures belongs to the twentieth century, after the bacteriology of preserved meat was understood.