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Pork, Pickled
As pork will not keep unless it is salted, it should be cut up as soon as it is cold, and in such pieces as will lie quite flat in the pan. Strew a layer of salt and a slighter one of sugar at the bottom of the salting-pan. Rub the sides of the pork over with sugar and salt, lay the pieces skin downwards in the pan, and between each layer of meat put one of sugar and salt. When the pan is full, cover the whole with a layer of salt sufficiently thick to exclude the air. Lay a cloth over the pan, and put a board with a weight upon it over the cloth to keep the meat in the brine. Leave it for a week or ten days. If at the end of that time the salt has not dissolved into a brine, sprinkle a little warm water over the top layer of salt. It is better, however, to avoid doing this if possible: it should only be found necessary in very dry weather. Pork pickled in this way will be ready for use in three or four months, and will be found excellent. If guarded from the air, it will keep good for two years. Although salt-petre is more commonly used than sugar in pickling meat, the latter imparts the finer flavour, though there is no reason why both should not be used for pork as well as beef.
This is a nineteenth-century dry-salt cure for a whole cut-up pig, written for a cold larder and a household that killed its own animals. It cannot be reproduced safely in a modern kitchen, and the reasons are worth spelling out.
- No quantities anywhereThe method gives layers of salt and sugar by eye, with no weight of meat, no weight of salt, and no ratio between them. Curing safety depends entirely on the salt concentration reaching the centre of the meat within a defined time; "a layer" is not a measurement, and undersalted pork held for months is exactly the condition that breeds trouble.
- No temperature at allA cure of this kind was carried out in an unheated winter larder or cellar, and the book assumes the reader has one. Salt penetrates slowly, so the meat must be held near refrigeration temperature for the whole of the week or ten days in the pan and for the months of storage after. Nothing in the text tells the reader that, and at room temperature spoilage organisms outrun the salt.
- Anaerobic conditions without nitriteMeat packed under a thick cap of salt, weighted down and shielded from air, is the kind of low-oxygen cured-meat environment in which Clostridium botulinum is a recognised hazard. Saltpetre was the traditional guard against it, and the recipe treats it as interchangeable with sugar, preferring sugar for flavour. Modern cured pork uses curing salt at a controlled, measured nitrite level partly for this reason.
- The warm water instructionSprinkling warm water over the top layer to start the brine adds moisture and a little warmth at the surface of the pack, at the point where the cure is least advanced. The book itself says it is better to avoid this if possible, and it should only be a last resort.
- "Will keep good for two years"That claim rests on a salt concentration high enough to make the meat inedible without long soaking, plus a cold, dry store. Read as a shelf-life guarantee for a modern pantry it is simply wrong.
- Trichinella and the wider pictureSalting alone was long assumed to destroy parasites in pork. It does not reliably do so; freezing or thorough cooking does. Salt pork was in practice generally soaked and boiled before eating, which this entry does not say.
- If you want to cure porkUse a current recipe that specifies weight of meat, weight of salt and cure, percentage by weight, holding temperature and days per inch of thickness. Every one of those numbers is missing here.
Salting was the whole point of the autumn pig. Before mechanical refrigeration a household that killed an animal in cold weather had to convert most of it into something stable within a day or two, and pork took salt better than any other meat — hence the flitches, hams and barrels of salt pork that underpinned English and American cooking well into the twentieth century. Cassell's is written for a servant-keeping household that still expected to do this at home, and the argument it makes here is a flavour argument, not a safety one: saltpetre (potassium nitrate) was the standard curing agent, and the writer is pushing sugar as the finer-tasting alternative while conceding that both may be used together. That preference tells you the period. The conversion of nitrate to nitrite was only worked out around the 1890s, and the specific anti-botulinal role of nitrite was not established until well into the twentieth century, so a cookery writer of this generation could treat saltpetre as a matter of taste and colour rather than the one ingredient standing between a weighted, airless tub of meat and a serious poisoning.