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PIG'S CHEEK, PICKLED (another way)
Wash a couple of pig's cheeks, strew a handful of salt over them, and leave them for twenty-four hours. Drain them, and dry them well with a soft cloth. Powder and mix the following ingredients. A quarter of a pound of common salt, a quarter of a pound of moist sugar, one ounce of saltpetre, and half an ounce of ground pepper. Dry this mixture thoroughly before the fire, rub it well into the cheeks, and turn and rub them every day for four weeks. They may either be boiled straight from the pickle or hung to dry in a cool place; if they are boiled at once they require only to be well washed before being cooked; if they are dried they must be soaked. When pigs' cheeks are cured and dried like bacon they are called Bath chaps. Probable cost, 8d. per pound. Sufficient for eight or nine persons.
This is a dry nitrate cure carried out at unspecified temperature over four weeks, and it cannot be scaled or verified as written. The notes below explain what the instructions say and where they fall outside anything a modern cook can control.
- The saltpetre is unmeasurable against the meatOne ounce of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) is specified for "a couple of pig's cheeks" with no weight given; cheeks vary from roughly 1 lb to over 3 lb apiece. Nitrate curing is dosed as parts per million of meat weight, and a recipe that never weighs the meat cannot land inside a safe range.
- Nitrate versus modern curing saltVictorian saltpetre converts to nitrite slowly and unevenly through bacterial action. Modern cures use pre-blended nitrite salts at fixed, regulated concentrations precisely because that conversion cannot be judged by eye. Straight saltpetre bought today is not a substitute for either.
- No temperature anywhere in the methodThe salting, the four weeks of rubbing and the drying "in a cool place" all assume a cold larder in an unheated house. Cured pork held above about 40F while the cure penetrates is in the danger zone for the whole period, and Clostridium botulinum is the specific organism nitrite is there to suppress.
- The initial 24-hour saltingA handful of loose salt on raw pork, drained and wiped dry, is a purge step, not a preservative one, and the recipe gives no holding temperature for the day the meat sits waiting.
- "Hung to dry" is an open-ended instructionThere is no target weight loss, no water activity check and no end point; the recipe says only that dried cheeks must be soaked before they are cooked.
- Terms in the textMoist sugar is unrefined soft brown sugar. Bath chaps are the cured and dried cheeks, usually sold cone-shaped and breadcrumbed. The costing is given as eightpence a pound.
- If you want cured pork cheekUse a current recipe with cure weighed as a percentage of meat weight and a stated curing temperature. Do not adapt the proportions above.
Pig's cheek was a common cottage cure: the head was among the parts of the pig least worth selling, and versions of it appear widely in English regional cookery. Cured and dried, the cheek became the Bath chap, named for the city and generally associated with the West Country pork trade, where the cured chaps were sold cooked, coated in crumbs, and eaten cold in slices. Cassell's includes it among the plain economical cures, at a period when salting a pig at home was still ordinary domestic work rather than a hobby. The confidence of the costing — eightpence a pound, enough for eight or nine — belongs to a book written for households that budgeted meat by the joint and expected to keep it for weeks without ice.