Home › The Principles of Cookery › Pork, Hand Of
Pork, Hand Of
The hand of pork is usually salted and boiled, and may be sent to table with greens and peas pudding in a separate dish. It should have lain in salt about four days. If it has lain longer than that, and is very salt, it is well to let it soak a short time before boiling. It should be put into cold water, skin uppermost, the liquid should be brought slowly to the point of boiling, skimmed carefully, and then simmered gently until the pork is done enough. Time, half an hour per pound from the time the water boils. Probable cost, 9d. per pound.
A plain boiled dinner of salt pork, of the kind that anchored working-class British tables into the twentieth century. The only real technique is heat control: the water must never do more than tremble.
- What a hand of pork isThe foreleg cut — the shoulder below the blade, taken with the shank and often the trotter attached. Butchers now sell it as hand and spring, or simply as shoulder; a bone-in shoulder joint of 4 to 6 lb is the right substitute. Ask for it unrolled and skin-on.
- Buy it cured, or cure it properlyThe recipe assumes a joint already lying in the salt tub. Modern equivalents are sold as salt pork, green bacon or unsmoked gammon-style shoulder. If you want to salt your own, use a current curing recipe with weighed salt and a measured cure percentage rather than the vague four days here.
- Never boilThe hinge of the dish. Bring it up slowly, skim, then hold the water at a bare shiver — surface barely moving, around 180F. A rolling boil squeezes the muscle fibres and gives you dry, stringy meat in salty water.
- Skin uppermostThe recipe is specific about it. The fat and rind cap the joint and insulate the lean beneath while it simmers.
- SoakingJudge by taste, not by rule. Slice a coin off the joint and fry it; if it is aggressively salty, soak the meat in cold water for two to four hours, or overnight in the fridge for a heavily cured piece, changing the water once.
- The timingHalf an hour per pound is broadly sound for a shoulder — about 2.5 hours for a 5 lb joint — but go by feel. Shoulder needs an internal temperature near 190F for the connective tissue to break down; a fork should slide in and out with no resistance. The 145F figure quoted for fresh pork is a safety minimum, not a doneness target for this cut.
- Peas puddingThe traditional accompaniment: split yellow peas soaked overnight, tied in a floured cloth or boiled in a covered pan, then mashed with butter and pepper. They are often cooked in a ladleful of the pork liquor, though taste it first — cured liquor can be very salty.
- Yield and the liquorA 5 lb hand serves six to eight with greens and pudding. Keep the cooking liquid: diluted, it makes the base for a pea and ham soup the next day.
- The priceNinepence a pound: a shilling would buy about a pound and a third. The hand was one of the cheaper pork joints, the one you bought when the leg was beyond reach.
Salt pork of this kind was less a recipe than a system: a pig killed at home or bought in pieces, the cheaper joints buried in salt for a few days to buy time and season the meat, then boiled with whatever greens the garden held. The pairing with peas pudding is the giveaway — dried split peas and a cheap shoulder joint are generally associated with the cold-weather dinner of the industrial north of England and the Midlands, and the combination survives in Tyneside and Black Country cooking still. The four days in salt described here is a light cure meant only to carry the meat a short distance and firm its texture, quite different from the weeks-long brines used for hams and flitches intended to last the year. That the book gives a price per pound at all is characteristic of late-Victorian household dictionaries, which expected the reader to be costing the week's meals as carefully as cooking them.