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Wiltshire Method of Curing Bacon
Cut up a moderate-sized hog, sprinkle salt upon the flitches, and let the blood drain from them for twenty-four hours. Mix thoroughly four pounds of common salt with one pound and a half of brown sugar, one pound and a half of bay salt, and six ounces of saltpetre. Rub this mixture into the flitches and turn, and rub them in every part each day for a month. Hang them up to dry; then smoke them for ten days.
This is a whole-hog dry cure of the kind farmhouses ran in unheated larders, and it cannot be reproduced safely in a modern kitchen. The notes below explain the archaic terms and the specific reasons this method fails today.
- Saltpetre far out of rangeSaltpetre out of proportion -- Six ounces of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) mixed into seven pounds of salt and sugar is an unmeasured nitrate dose. Modern regulation limits ingoing nitrite in cured meat to roughly 120-200 parts per million, calculated against a known meat weight; because the recipe never states the weight of meat, the concentration here is unknowable, and excess nitrate/nitrite in cured pork is a genuine hazard rather than a matter of flavour.
- No weight, no ratio"A moderate-sized hog" is not a stated weight, and the hogs cured this way varied widely. A dry cure is only safe when the salt and curing agent are calculated as a percentage of the actual meat weight, and this recipe gives no weight at all, so the cure cannot be scaled or checked.
- No temperature anywhereThe blood drains for twenty-four hours, the flitches are rubbed daily for a month, then hung and smoked for ten days, all at ambient temperature. Modern practice holds curing meat below about 40F throughout, and keeps smoke either cold (below about 90F) or hot enough to cook the meat through; a month at an unknown room temperature carries a real risk of spoilage.
- FlitchA flitch is one whole side of the hog, cut from a split carcass: belly, loin and streak in a single slab. It is not a form in which bacon is ordinarily sold at retail today.
- Bay saltBay salt was coarse sea salt produced by solar evaporation in shallow bays, chiefly in France, Spain and Portugal. It was prized for curing because its large, slow-dissolving crystals penetrated gradually. It is not "bay leaf salt" and has no direct modern equivalent beyond coarse grey sea salt.
- Common salt"Common salt" here means plain salt without the anti-caking agents or iodine standard in modern table salt; curing recipes generally specify pure salt for this reason.
- If you want to cure baconUse a current recipe that specifies the meat weight, a measured commercial cure with a stated nitrite percentage, refrigerated cure times and a monitored smoker temperature. Read this one as a document of how it was done, not as instructions.
Wiltshire was the centre of English bacon curing from the eighteenth century onward, fed by the pig-rearing dairy farms of the West Country and by a trade in cheap imported Irish pork; Calne in particular became a curing town, and the "Wiltshire cure" survives as a term of art for a mild sweet cure of whole sides. The sugar in the mixture is the signature -- it moderates the harshness of the salt and helps the meat keep a redder colour, and by the late nineteenth century the sweet cure appears to have been steadily displacing the ferociously salty bacon of earlier generations. Preserving a whole hog was reckoned a foundational household skill, not a dish, and the winter pig-killing that supplied the flitches was still an annual event in rural England when the book was compiled.