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Bacon, to Cure and Keep Free from Rust (cobbett's Recipe)
William Cobbett, in his "Rural Economy," gives the following method of curing bacon. Practical persons highly recommend it:--"Take two sides or flitches of bacon, rub the insides with salt, then place one on the other, the flesh-side uppermost, in a salting-trough which has a gutter round its edges to drain away the brine; for to have sweet and fine bacon the flitches must not be sopping in brine, which gives it the objectionable taste that barrel and sea-pork have. Everyone knows how different is the taste of fresh dry salt from that of salt in a dissolved state; therefore, change the salt often--once in four or five days--let it melt and sink in, but not lie too long; change the flitches every ten days; put that at bottom which was first on the top. This mode will cost a great deal more in salt than the sopping mode, but without it the bacon will not be so sweet and fine, nor keep so well. The time required in making the flitches sufficiently salt depends on circumstances. It takes a longer time for a thick than a thin flitch, and longer in dry than in damp weather, or in a dry than a damp place; but for the flitches of a hog of seven or eight stones, in weather not very dry or damp, about six weeks may do; and as the flitches should be fat, it receives little injury from over salting."
Cobbett's dry-salting method is the foundation of English farmhouse bacon, and the reasoning behind it is sound, but as written it gives no quantity, no temperature and no nitrite — the three things a modern cure is judged on. It is worth reading for what it explains; it is not worth following.
- No measured salt, no measured timeThe instruction is to rub with salt, renew it every four or five days, and stop when the flitch seems salt enough. Safe curing depends on a known salt concentration reaching the centre of the meat within a known window, and nothing here lets you verify that. "About six weeks may do" is not a specification.
- No temperature controlThe whole process assumes a cold English larder or outhouse in winter — Cobbett expected hog-killing weather. At any temperature much above 4C a large flitch spoils from the inside before the salt penetrates, and the recipe never mentions temperature at all.
- Nitrite is absentModern bacon cures include a measured curing salt containing sodium nitrite, which suppresses Clostridium botulinum in the anaerobic interior of a large salted joint and is what gives bacon its pink colour. A plain salt cure of this scale, at uncontrolled temperature, carries no such safeguard, and spoilage or toxin formation need not announce itself by smell.
- Pork parasitesCobbett's readers cured meat from their own pigs, fed on scraps. Salt curing alone is not a dependable kill step for Trichinella unless salt concentration, temperature and time are all controlled and verified; the risk is one reason pork has long been cooked through. If you want cured pork, use a current recipe with weighed cure and stated temperatures.
- "Rust"The rust of the title is not corrosion but the rancid, yellow-brown streaking that develops in the fat of badly kept bacon, sometimes with a mite infestation in the same breath. The quoted passage does not use the word itself; Cobbett's argument there -- dry salt, frequent renewal, no standing brine -- is put in terms of keeping the bacon sweet, fine and long-lasting.
- Flitch, and the stonesA flitch is one whole side of the pig, from shoulder to ham, cured in a single piece. Taking a stone as the usual 14 lb, a hog of seven or eight stones is a carcass of roughly 100 to 112 lb (smaller stones of 8 lb were also used for meat), giving two very large sides -- a scale no domestic kitchen now works at.
- The salting-troughA shallow wooden or stone trough with a gutter cut round the rim, so the brine drawn out of the meat ran away instead of pooling. Cobbett's objection to "sopping" bacon is the difference between a dry cure and a wet one, and his description of the flavour of barrel pork is accurate enough.
William Cobbett published Cottage Economy in 1821 and wrote at length on rural self-sufficiency; the passage here is credited to his "Rural Economy", but his bacon instructions circulated for decades afterwards and were still being quoted, as in this book, late in the Victorian period. His interest was political as much as culinary — he argued that a labouring family that kept a pig, cured its own bacon and baked its own bread was a family beyond the reach of the shopkeeper and the parish. The dry-salt method he describes was common farmhouse practice, and the distinction he draws between it and the wet, barrelled "sea-pork" of ships' stores is a real one: brine-cured pork was the notoriously grim staple of the navy and the emigrant ship, while a dry-cured flitch hanging in a cottage was a mark of a household doing well.