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Pork, Chine of, Boiled
Lay the chine in common brine and turn it every day for ten days. Wash it from the pickle, drain it, put it into a saucepan, and cover with cold water. Bring it to the boil, skim the liquid carefully, then draw the saucepan to the side of the fire, and let the pork simmer very gently until done enough. Garnish the dish with small boiled cauliflowers or Brussels sprouts. Time to boil, half an hour to the pound from the time the water boils. Probable cost, 9 1/2d. to 10 1/2d. per pound.
The cooking here is straightforward, but the ten-day cure that precedes it is the problem: it is the whole recipe, and it is written in a shorthand no longer safe to follow.
- "Common brine" is not a measurementCassell's assumes the reader keeps a standing pickle tub and knows its strength. Curing safety depends on the salt concentration reached in the meat, and a brine of unknown strength over ten days gives no assurance that the deep tissue around the bone ever reaches a concentration that suppresses spoilage organisms and pathogens.
- No temperature is given for the cureTen days of turning meat in brine was done in a cold larder or cellar, roughly 4-7C in a British winter. At modern room temperature the same procedure is a ten-day incubation. The recipe gives no temperature at all, which is the second thing that makes it unrepeatable.
- Bone-in pork is the hard caseA chine is the backbone with the meat attached, and bone-in cuts cure slowly and unevenly. Brine has to penetrate along and around the vertebrae; commercial curers inject bone-in cuts for precisely this reason. Surface immersion alone is unreliable here.
- Period brines usually contained saltpetreNineteenth-century "common brine" typically meant salt, sugar or treacle, and saltpetre in a proportion that varied wildly from household to household. Nitrate and nitrite quantities are now regulated by weight for good reason, and an unstated amount is not something to reproduce. If you want a cured chine, work from a current recipe with weighed cure and a controlled temperature.
- What a chine isIn older butchery the chine is the backbone section running the length of the pig, sold either as a long joint or, in the Lincolnshire tradition, as a squarish piece from the neck end. Few butchers now stock it under that name outside Lincolnshire; it will generally have to be ordered by description.
- On the boiling timeHalf an hour to the pound is generous even for a heavily salted joint, and reflects a period when cured pork was very salty and very firm. Modern cooks would judge a large simmered joint by internal temperature rather than by the clock.
- The cost line9 1/2d. to 10 1/2d. per pound is pre-decimal British currency, under a shilling, in a book aimed at middling households.
The chine was one of the classic pieces of the home-killed pig, and in parts of eastern England it carried real ceremonial weight: stuffed chine, packed with parsley and boiled, is still associated with Lincolnshire and with Whitsun and harvest feasting, and is generally traced to the era when rural households were said to kill a pig and salt down its parts. Cassell's, compiled in the 1870s and reissued for decades afterwards, catalogues such cuts with the flat assumption that a reader has a brine tub in the back kitchen and turns the meat in it as a matter of routine; the whole cure gets a single sentence. The cauliflower or Brussels sprouts garnish is the other period marker, a plain white or green vegetable ringed round a plain boiled joint, and it tells you the dish was meant to look substantial on the table rather than clever.