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Hog's Cheeks, to Cure
Take out the snout, split open the head, and remove the brains. Cleanse and trim the head, and strew salt over it. Let it lie for two days, then put it into a brine made by boiling one pint of bay-salt and one quart of common salt, half an ounce of saltpetre, and half a pound of sugar, in three quarts of water, until dissolved. Cover the cheeks with the brine, and let them lie in the pickle for a fortnight, turning them every other day. Drain, and let them hang in smoke for a week. Sufficient for one head. Probable cost, 3s.
This is a cold-cure and cold-smoke for pig's head, and it belongs to a period when curing happened in a cold larder in winter and the result was boiled hard before eating. The gaps in it are the temperatures, and those gaps are why it cannot be followed today.
- No temperature is given at any stageThe head is salted dry for two days, brined for a fortnight and hung in smoke for a week, all at whatever temperature the room happens to be. Modern curing practice requires the meat to be held at refrigerator temperature (below 40F) throughout, because a large bone-in cut in a weak brine at room temperature spoils from the inside out around the jaw and ear canals before the salt reaches them.
- The saltpetre is not measured against the meatHalf an ounce of saltpetre in three quarts of water tells you nothing about how much nitrate ends up in the meat, which is the only figure that matters. Current curing is done with measured nitrite cure calculated as a percentage of the weight of the meat, and old potassium-nitrate quantities cannot be converted to that with any confidence.
- A week of cold smoke is the real hazardA week of cold smoke is a real hazard -- Smoke at ambient temperature is not cooking; it dries and flavours. A week of it on an under-cured, unrefrigerated head, with insufficient nitrite, is a condition in which Clostridium botulinum can grow, particularly in the anaerobic interior of a large bone-in cut.
- The product is never cooked in the recipeThe instructions end with the meat hanging in smoke. Nothing in the process brings any part of the head to a safe temperature, and the cure as specified is not reliable enough to make it safe uncooked.
- Brains and head meat spoil fastThe recipe removes the brains, correctly, but the head still carries lymph nodes, sinuses and glandular tissue that degrade far quicker than muscle.
- If you want cured hog's cheekGuanciale and Bath chaps are made commercially and to measured cure ratios. Use a current, tested recipe with weighed nitrite cure and specified holding temperatures, or buy it cured.
- For reading the originalBay-salt is coarse solar-evaporated sea salt, sold in large grey crystals; common salt is fine refined table salt. A pint of the one and a quart of the other are measured by volume, not weight, so the actual salinity of the brine is anyone's guess. The cost of 3s. is Victorian shillings, for a whole head.
Cured pig's cheek was one of the cheapest cured meats in Britain, and salting and smoking a head was assumed knowledge in a household that bought a pig rather than joints. The West Country version, cured and then boiled and breadcrumbed, is known as a Bath chap -- the word chap is the same as chop in its old sense of jaw. Saltpetre appears in almost every nineteenth-century cure of this kind because it keeps the meat red and inhibits spoilage; the chemistry behind that, the reduction of nitrate to nitrite by bacteria in the brine, was not understood when this book was written, which may help explain why the quantities in recipes of the period vary so wildly from one author to the next.