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BACON OR HAM, TO CURE (Wiltshire way)
The excellence of bacon depends to a great degree upon the care with which the meat is drained from blood and slime before it is salted. The amount of salt used is not so important if this be well attended to, as will be seen by the Wiltshire mode. The quantity of salt for a whole pig is one pound and a half of bay salt, and one pound of common salt to six ounces of saltpetre, and one pound and a half of the coarsest brown sugar or treacle. Strew common salt over the bacon, and let it drain a day and night. Powder the bay salt and saltpetre, and mix them thoroughly with the other salt and sugar. When well blended, rub each piece of bacon and lay them together in a trough. Turn every alternate day for a month. Smoke nine days. Sufficient for the flitches of one pig of ten or twelve stones.
This is a dry cure for the whole side of a pig, written for a cold larder, a wooden trough and a chimney smokehouse. It cannot be followed safely in a modern kitchen, and the points below explain where it fails rather than how to fix it.
- Why this cure failsNothing in it is measured against the weight of any individual piece of meat, and no temperature is given at any stage — not for the month in the trough, not for the nine days of smoke. Curing safety depends entirely on nitrite/nitrate concentration per pound of meat held at a known, low temperature; both variables are missing here.
- The saltpetreSix ounces of potassium nitrate for the flitches of a 140-168 lb pig works out at roughly 2,200-2,700 ppm reckoned against the whole carcase weight, and higher still reckoned against the flitches alone. It is applied by hand-rubbing, so some pieces will take up more than the nominal dose and others less. Modern curing salts exist precisely because nitrate and nitrite must be diluted and weighed, never eyeballed.
- Cold smoke, uncooked meatThe recipe gives no smoking arrangement and no temperature. Nine days of smoke in a domestic chimney would hold the meat for a long period far below any cooking temperature, and possibly warm enough to favour bacterial growth. In a thick flitch whose interior the cure may never have reached, the hazards include anaerobic organisms such as Clostridium botulinum, which smoke does not touch.
- ScaleTen or twelve stones is 140 to 168 lb of pork, cured in a single wooden trough. There is no way to scale this down proportionally and arrive at a sound recipe, because the missing information is not the quantities but the temperatures and the cure strength per piece.
- If you want to cure baconUse a current tested recipe with weighed curing salt, a stated percentage of the meat's weight, and refrigeration throughout.
- Reading the old termsBay salt is coarse salt made by solar evaporation in shallow basins or 'bays'; the name is often linked to the Bay of Biscay, though the derivation is not settled. "Common salt" is ordinary fine table or dairy salt. Treacle here means dark cane syrup rather than golden syrup. A flitch is one whole side of the pig, and a stone is 14 lb.
Wiltshire's association with English bacon is generally traced to the later eighteenth century, when the pig droves moving from Ireland through Bristol toward London passed through Calne, and the town's curers — the Harris family the best known among them — built a trade on feeding and slaughtering the animals that stopped there. The county's reputation, and the named 'Wiltshire cure', belong largely to the nineteenth century: a mild cure, lightly salted and sweetened with brown sugar or treacle, which is often said to have moved, in factory curing at least, from dry-rubbing in troughs toward immersion in brine tanks. Cassell's is recording the older trough method, and it opens by insisting that the meat be thoroughly drained of blood before salting, since a well-drained side needs less salt to keep and eats less harshly at the table.