Pork: Cream
Cream the butter. Work gradually into it lemon juice, salt, tabasco, and parsley. After removing the cloth from each piece, brush with melted butter and dust with salt and pepper. Broil over a clear fire for six minutes. Transfer to a hot platter, and spread with prepared butter. The pigs' feet may be prepared the day before needed.
Fried Salt Pork, Cream Gravy. pound salt pork, cupful cream, 1 teaspoonful flour Pinch pepper.
Wash the pork, trim off the rind, and with a sharp knife cut in thin slices. Spread in a large spider and place at the side of the fire until the fat is well fried out, then draw gradually forward until the slices begin to color. Transfer them to a heated platter and keep hot. Pour off most of the fat, leaving about 2 tablespoonfuls in the pan; stir into this the cream, and when it comes to the boiling point, thicken slightly with flour blended with a little cold milk.
Season with pepper; boil up once, and pour over the pork. :
The page runs two recipes together: the last lines of a broiled pigs'-feet dish, then Fried Salt Pork, Cream Gravy complete with its own ingredient list. The second is the workable recipe here, and the notes below deal with it.
- The truncated ingredient listFractions have clearly dropped out of the typesetting before "pound salt pork" and "cupful cream"; the likeliest reading is a half of each, though the original figures cannot be recovered from this page. A half-pound of pork and a half-cup of cream, with a teaspoon of flour, makes a sensible two-person portion.
- A spiderA spider is a cast-iron frying pan, originally with three short legs for standing over coals. Any heavy skillet does the job; the weight matters more than the shape, because you want steady, gentle heat.
- "At the side of the fire"On a wood or coal range the side of the firebox was the cool zone. Start the pork over low heat so the fat renders out slowly and clear, then raise to medium to brown, as the direction to "draw gradually forward" indicates. Rushing this gives you scorched fat and pork that is crisp outside and raw-tasting within.
- Salt pork todayModern salt pork is a cured belly or fatback, still sold in many supermarkets and butchers, though not everywhere. Washing is not optional cosmetic work — it removes surface salt. If your pork is very salty, blanch the slices a minute in simmering water and pat dry before frying, or the gravy will be inedible.
- SlicingCut as thin as you can manage, about ⅛ inch. Chilling the piece thoroughly first makes this far easier, and thin slices render properly instead of curling into hard knots.
- The gravyTwo tablespoons of rendered fat is the right amount; pour off the rest and keep it for frying potatoes or cornbread. Blend the flour into cold milk before it goes in, as directed, and boil only once — cream held at a boil with a floury slurry breaks and turns grainy.
- SeasoningPepper only. The pork and its fat carry all the salt the dish needs, so taste the gravy before you reach for anything else.
- Yield and servingOn the assumed half-pound, it makes roughly two servings as a main, or four alongside eggs. Potatoes, hot biscuits or fried apples suit it — something starchy to take the gravy.
Fried salt pork with milk or cream gravy is a long-established North American farmhouse dish, kept in circulation because salt pork was cheap, kept without refrigeration, and produced its own sauce. Salt pork was a standard winter meat on farm and ship alike, and the fat rendered from it did much of the work that butter and oil do now. The dish belongs to a family of "milk gravy" preparations recorded from New England to Appalachia, where the drippings from a fried meat were extended with dairy and a little flour to stretch across a table of potatoes and bread. It is thrift food, with the cream as the one small luxury.