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Pork, Belly of, Rolled and Boiled
Salt a belly of pork; young meat will be the best for the purpose. To do this, mix a salt-spoonful of powdered saltpetre with two table-spoonfuls of common salt, sprinkle the mixture over the pork, and let it lie for three days. When ready to dress the meat, wash it in cold water, and dry it with a cloth. Lay it, skin downwards, on a table, remove the bones, and cover the inside with pickled gherkins cut into very thin slices. Sprinkle over these a little powdered mace and pepper. Roll the meat tightly, and bind securely with tape. Put it into a saucepan with two onions stuck with six cloves, three bay-leaves, a bunch of parsley, and a sprig of thyme. Bring the liquid slowly to the boil, skim carefully, draw it to the side, and simmer gently till the meat is done enough. Put it between two dishes, lay a weight upon it, and leave it until it is quite cold. The bandages should not be removed until the meat is to be served. Time to simmer, half an hour per pound. Probable cost, 9d. to 10d. per pound.
This is a nitrate-cured pork belly, rolled and pressed to be eaten cold, and the curing step cannot be reproduced safely from the instructions given. The points below explain where it breaks down rather than how to rescue it.
- The saltpetre cannot be dosedSaltpetre is potassium nitrate, used here for the pink colour and cured flavour. A "salt-spoonful" is roughly a quarter teaspoon, but the recipe never states the weight of the belly, so the nitrate concentration in the finished meat is impossible to calculate. Modern curing works to a fixed parts-per-million of nitrite or nitrate per kilo of meat, and there is no way to work backwards to that from this text.
- Three days at no stated temperatureThe pork is sprinkled and left to lie for three days with no indication of where or how cold. Victorian kitchens assumed a cool larder or cellar; a modern room is not one. Three days of unrefrigerated holding on a lightly salted surface is exactly the window in which spoilage and pathogen growth occur.
- Too little salt to preserve anythingTwo tablespoons of salt over an entire belly is a seasoning, not a cure. It will not lower water activity enough to inhibit bacteria, so the saltpetre is doing decorative work while the meat is effectively raw and unprotected.
- Cooked, then held warm and pressedCooked, then pressed and cooled — The rolled joint is simmered, then set between two dishes under a weight and left until "quite cold", with no chilling method specified. A large dense roll cools slowly, and that slow cool through the 40-140F range is the standard failure point for pressed and rolled meats.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe for rolled, cured pork belly that specifies a weighed nitrite curing salt, refrigerated curing, an internal temperature and a rapid chill. Do not adapt the quantities above.
- Reading the original"Done enough" means cooked through, judged by feel; the half hour per pound is a Victorian rule of thumb for boiled joints and runs long by modern standards. "Tape" is plain cotton butcher's tape, and "bandages" later in the paragraph means the same thing. The cost of 9d. to 10d. a pound marks belly as an inexpensive cut.
Cassell's treats this as a cold-slicing dish, and its shape resembles French charcuterie: a boned belly spread with a seasoned filling, rolled, tied, poached in aromatics and pressed under a weight is also the method behind poitrine roulée and, in grander versions, the galantine. The thin-sliced pickled gherkins and the mace are doing two jobs at once — cutting the fat of a very fatty cut and giving each slice a pattern when it is cut across the roll. Saltpetre appears widely in nineteenth-century meat recipes for the same reason it is here, to fix a pink colour that boiled pork otherwise loses; its preservative role in a three-day sprinkle like this one is slight. What the entry records is thrift: belly was a cheap cut, and rolling, pressing and serving it cold turned an awkward slab into something that could be carved neatly.