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PORK, PICKLED (an easy way)
When pork is to be cooked in a short time, it may be pickled in the following easy way. Take the pig as soon as it is cold, cut it into convenient-sized pieces, and rub them well with common salt. Lay them in the salting-pan, and turn and rub them every day till they are required for use. Remember always to wash the hands in cold water the last thing before touching the meat. The time required for the pork to lie in salt depends upon taste. If it is wished that it should be only moderately salted, the hand and belly may remain in the pan four days, and a leg weighing six pounds five or six days.
This is a dry-salting method for a freshly killed household pig, written for a cold larder and a cook who handled a whole carcass every autumn. It cannot be followed safely in a modern kitchen, and the points below explain where it fails rather than how to adapt it.
- No measured salt, no measured temperatureThe instruction is to rub the meat "well with common salt" and turn it daily. Safe curing depends on a known weight of salt relative to the weight of meat, held within a narrow temperature band (roughly 36-40F), and neither figure appears here. Without them there is no way to know whether the cure has penetrated or merely seasoned the surface.
- The salting-pan was a cold-larder vesselThe recipe names only a "salting-pan" and never says where it stands, but a pan in an unheated larder in the cold months is doing work the text leaves unstated: keeping the meat cold through four to six days of turning. A kitchen at room temperature turns the same procedure into several days in the danger zone.
- No curing salt"Common salt" is sodium chloride only, with none of the nitrite in modern cure blends. Nitrite matters most for cures kept for weeks, or for meat held in sealed anaerobic conditions; for a few days' salting of meat that will then be cooked, cold temperature rather than nitrite is the control that is missing here.
- "As soon as it is cold"This assumes a pig slaughtered on the premises and chilled the same day, going into salt within hours. Retail pork has already spent days in the supply chain, so it does not arrive in the state this instruction takes for granted.
- The hand-washing lineThe recipe insists on cold water immediately before touching the meat but never says why; the likeliest reading is concern about warm hands on the meat rather than hygiene in the modern sense. Either way it is no substitute for temperature control and does nothing about cross-contamination.
- Cuts named hereThe "hand" is the foreleg and shoulder, the "belly" is what would now be sold as side or fresh belly. A six-pound leg is a whole small ham. These are the thick joints least likely to cure through with an unmeasured surface rub.
- If you want cured porkUse a current recipe with stated salt and nitrite percentages by weight of meat, and a refrigerator or curing chamber with a thermometer.
Cassell's belongs to the era when many households, chiefly rural, still bought or raised a pig and dealt with the whole animal at once in the cold months. Salting was not a flavour choice but a way to spread a carcass across weeks, and late nineteenth-century cookery dictionaries commonly printed more than one strength of cure: long pickles in brine with saltpetre and sugar for hams and bacon meant to keep for months, and short dry rubs like this one for meat that would be eaten within the week. The distinction this recipe draws, "an easy way" for pork "to be cooked in a short time", is really a distinction between preserving and seasoning. The cook is told to judge the duration by taste, which was reasonable advice for someone who salted a pig every year and unusable now. Curing salts, refrigeration and commercial slaughter between them made this kind of instruction largely obsolete.