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Pork, Pickle For
The same pickle if it is boiled up occasionally may be used again and again for pork. The following are excellent recipes. Boil half a pound of common salt, a quarter of a pound of salt prunelle, a quarter of a pound of salt-petre, one and a half pounds of loaf sugar, and two pounds of bay salt, in two gallons of water for half an hour. Skim the liquor well, and when cold put it into the tub. Or boil six pounds of common salt, a quarter of a pound of saltpetre, and one and a half pounds of moist sugar, in two gallons of water, as above. When the meat is put into either of these pickles, place a weight upon it to keep it covered with the brine. Pickle should be thrown away after a pig's head has been laid in it.
PORK, PICKLE FOR (another way). (See PICKLE FOR BEEF, PORK, AND TONGUES.)
This is a curing brine rather than a dish, and it is the one category of old recipe that does not translate. The ingredients are readable, but the method omits every variable that makes curing safe.
- Why it fails: nitrate load is unmeasured against the meatBoth brines are specified by volume of water only, with no statement of how much pork goes in, how long it stays, or what the finished meat should contain. A quarter pound of saltpetre in two gallons is far above any modern permitted level, and because the salt and nitrate are absorbed unevenly over days, there is no way to know what any given joint ends up carrying.
- Salt prunelle is more saltpetreSalt prunelle (sal prunella) is potassium nitrate that has been melted and cast into balls or cakes, historically sold for medicinal use. The first brine therefore contains half a pound of nitrate in total, not a quarter pound. It is not a distinct curing agent and has no modern equivalent on a grocery shelf.
- Why it fails: no temperature anywhereBrine curing depends on the meat and the tub being held cold throughout, in the region of 36-40F. A Victorian larder or cellar was assumed, not stated. Meat sitting in brine held above that range can spoil in the centre before the salt and nitrate have penetrated.
- Why it fails: the brine is reusedThe instruction to boil the pickle up occasionally and use it again and again was sound husbandry when salt was expensive, but each batch of meat dilutes the brine with its own moisture and seeds it with spoilage organisms. Boiling kills vegetative bacteria and does nothing to bacterial spores, and it drives off water so the salt concentration drifts upward unpredictably.
- The pig's head warning is tellingThe direction to discard the pickle after a head has lain in it is a recognition, in period terms, that some cuts foul a brine beyond recovery. It is good evidence that the household already knew reused pickle was a gamble.
- Reading the ingredientsBay salt is coarse solar-evaporated sea salt, considerably less pure than modern table salt; loaf sugar is refined white sugar broken from a cone; moist sugar is an unrefined brown sugar. Two gallons here is imperial, about 9.1 litres or 2.4 US gallons.
- If you want to cure porkUse a current recipe with a measured curing salt, a stated ratio to the weight of the meat, a fixed time and a refrigerated holding temperature.
Sugar, saltpetre and bay salt were the standard trio of the English wet cure by the eighteenth century, and Cassell's is simply recording household practice as it stood: pork was preserved in a tub in the cellar because a pig was killed all at once and had to last. The saltpetre was there for colour and keeping quality — it is nitrate, which reduces to nitrite in the brine and fixes the pink of cured ham — while the sugar softened the harshness of so much salt. That this chemistry was understood only by result and not by mechanism is precisely the problem: a cure was judged by how the meat looked and smelled, and the safety margin was supplied by cold cellars, heavy salt and the willingness to throw out a bad tub. Sal prunella, the fused nitrate in the first brine, was a druggist's article as much as a grocer's, and its appearance in a cookery dictionary is a reminder of how thin the line then was between the kitchen shelf and the medicine chest.