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PORK, LEG OF, BOILED (another way)
Take a leg of pork, rub it over with salt, and put it, well covered with salt, in a vessel, wherein it must be left for ten days. At the end of that time boil it in soft water, and serve with green cabbage all round, and a peas pudding, made as follows. Take a quart of dry peas, wash them, wrap them in a clean towel, and throw them into the same vessel as the pork. When the peas are done, strain them through a sieve, put in a large lump of butter, some salt, and two yolks of eggs, and poach the pudding, wrapped up in a clean towel, to make it of a good substance. Observe that the peas must be put in cold soft water for two hours before being boiled, otherwise they will never boil mellow.
The peas pudding is straightforward Victorian cookery; the pork is not. The recipe's first step is a ten-day home cure with no weight of salt, no temperature and no nitrite, and that is the part that cannot be reproduced today.
- The cure is the problem"Well covered with salt" for ten days gives no salt concentration and no storage temperature. Safe dry-curing depends on both: enough salt penetrating fast enough to outpace bacterial growth in the deep muscle and around the bone, at a temperature held low throughout. Neither is specified here.
- Bone taintA whole bone-in leg is the hardest cut to cure by rubbing the surface. Salt reaches the femur last, and spoilage organisms working outward from the marrow produce the sour, off smell old butchers called bone taint. Nineteenth-century recipes handled this with cold cellars, brine pumped to the bone, or luck.
- No curing saltThis recipe specifies plain salt only; many nineteenth-century cures also included saltpetre. Modern cured pork uses a measured nitrite cure precisely because it controls Clostridium botulinum in a low-oxygen, low-acid, salted mass held for days at cellar temperature.
- If you want boiled salt porkUse a current, tested curing recipe with weighed salt and cure, a stated temperature and a stated time. That is a different procedure from the one on this page and should be followed on its own terms.
- "Soft water"Rainwater or any low-mineral water. Victorian cooks believed hard water toughened pulses and prevented the peas going "mellow", which is why the two-hour cold soak is specified with soft water rather than tap water from a chalk district.
- A quart of dry peasRoughly 2 lb, or about 900 g, of dried peas — a large amount, probably enough pudding for eight or more. Halve it for a household of four.
- "Poach the pudding"Here it means tie the mashed, buttered, egg-enriched peas tightly in a clean cloth and simmer, not boil hard, until the pudding sets firm enough to turn out and slice. The yolks and the cloth together are what give it "good substance".
- Cooking the peas with the meatThe recipe puts the towel-wrapped peas into the same pot as the pork, so they take up salt and fat from the meat. Cooked separately they need salting properly and benefit from a knob of butter beyond the "large lump" the recipe assumes.
Boiled salt pork with pease pudding and cabbage is a long-established pairing in English cookery: the pudding cooked in the same pot as the meat, cloth-wrapped and hung from the pot handle, so that nothing was wasted and one fire did two jobs. Dried peas were the staple winter pulse of Britain long before the potato became universal, and salting a leg down in a stone-lined salting trough was ordinary domestic practice for any household that killed a pig. Cassell's, compiled for late-Victorian middle-class kitchens, still assumes both a cool larder or cellar where a leg could sit in salt for ten days, and a cook who thought nothing of judging "well covered" by eye. The insistence on soft water and a long cold soak reflects a genuine and much-discussed problem of the period: hard water and old peas together produced pudding that stayed stubbornly gritty.