Home › The Principles of Cookery › Pork, Pickled, Boiled
Pork, Pickled, Boiled
If the pork be very salt, let it soak for an hour before it is cooked. Put it into a saucepan, cover with cold water, and bring it slowly to the boil. Skim the liquid carefully, draw the pan to the side, and let the meat simmer very gently until it is done enough. If boiled quickly it will not be good. Pickled pork is generally served as an accompaniment to fowls or other white meats. If underdone, pickled pork is very indigestible. Thick pieces will require longer boiling than thin ones: as a general rule, half an hour per pound from the time the water boils will be sufficient.
A method rather than a formula: the only variables are the saltiness of the meat and its thickness. Two things decide whether it comes out well — the soak and the refusal to let the water boil.
- What pickled pork isPork, usually belly, shoulder or hock, cured in brine — the ancestor of what is now sold as salt pork, unsmoked bacon or green bacon. Modern salt pork can be very heavily salted, so treat it as "very salt" and soak accordingly.
- The soakAn hour suits a lightly brined piece. Heavily salted pork from a butcher's crock may need several hours or an overnight soak in the refrigerator, with a change of water. Taste a shaving of the boiled meat before committing to a sauce.
- Never let it boilThe recipe brings the water slowly to the boil and then holds it at a very gentle simmer, warning that pork boiled quickly "will not be good." A rolling boil tightens cured muscle fibre and the meat turns stringy and dry however long it cooks. Around 180F, where the water barely trembles, answers to "simmer very gently" — a lid set ajar or the pan drawn half off the burner does it.
- Half an hour a poundGenerous but not wrong for a bare simmer. A 3 lb piece will take roughly 90 minutes; check from about 70 minutes. Better to judge by feel — a skewer should slide out with no resistance — and by an internal reading of around 160–170F, bearing in mind that collagen breakdown depends on time held as much as on the temperature reached.
- "Done enough" and indigestibleThe book says only that underdone pickled pork is "very indigestible" — a period term used broadly, and it does not say what lay behind it. Trichinae in commercial pork are now a negligible risk, and the textural point stands in any case: cured belly and shoulder are unpleasant until they are well past the merely safe temperature.
- SkimmingThe grey scum that rises in the first ten minutes is coagulated protein and brine residue. Take it off before the water gets hot enough to disperse it, or it settles back onto the meat.
- The cooking liquorDo not discard it, but taste it first. Lightly salted liquor makes the base for pea soup or a pease pudding cooked alongside; from a hard-cured piece it will be far too salt to use undiluted.
- ServingThe book's pairing with fowl reflects a period habit of serving a salt meat beside a bland one. Reckon on 6 oz of raw pork per person. Parsley sauce, mustard, or boiled greens dressed in a little of the fat all work; the meat also slices well cold once pressed.
Before refrigeration, a brine crock or barrel in a cool corner was a common way for British households to keep pork through the year, and "pickled pork" in a book of the period means simply pork out of the brine tub rather than anything vinegary — the older sense of "pickle" as a salt cure. It was the everyday meat of both cottage and ship: cheap cuts, long keeping, and requiring only water and patience to cook. The rule of thumb was what mattered — half an hour to the pound, and never let it boil. The instruction to serve it alongside fowl belongs to a Victorian table logic in which a salted meat was set against a fresh white one, the same reasoning that puts boiled bacon next to chicken or ham beside veal.