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Some Kitchen Kinks: Salt-Fish
Salt Pork with Milk Gravy.
Cut salt or cured pork into thin slices. If very salt, cover with hot water and allow it to stand for ten minutes. Score the rind of the slices and fry slowly until they are a golden brown. Make a milk gravy by heating flour in the fat that has been tried out, allowing 2 tablespoonsful of fat and 2 tablespoonsful of flour to each cup of milk. APPENDIX This is a good way to use skim milk, which is as rich in protein as whole milk. The pork and milk gravy served with boiled or baked potatoes makes a cheap and simple meal, but one that most people like very much.
Bacon is often used in place of salt pork in making this dish.
A fried salt pork with a flour-and-fat gravy — essentially a pan gravy built on rendered pork fat. Everything hinges on how salty your pork is and how gently you render it.
- Find the salt porkSalt pork is still sold, usually near the bacon, as a slab of fat-heavy belly or side cured in dry salt without smoke or sugar. If it is unavailable, thick-cut unsmoked bacon is the nearest substitute, as the recipe itself allows.
- FresheningThe recipe soaks the slices in hot water for ten minutes only 'if very salt.' Modern salt pork varies enormously; taste a small fried scrap first, and if it is aggressively salty, soak the slices longer or change the water once. Pat completely dry before it goes into the pan or it will spit and steam rather than brown.
- Score the rindCutting through the rind at intervals stops the slices curling into cups as the skin contracts. Slices about a quarter inch thick behave best.
- Fry slowlySlow rendering is the point: it draws the fat out for the gravy and leaves the meat golden rather than scorched. Medium-low heat, turning occasionally, over ten to fifteen minutes. Rushed high heat gives you burnt fat and a bitter gravy.
- The gravy ratioTwo tablespoons fat and two tablespoons flour per cup of milk is the standard proportion for a medium white sauce. Cook the flour in the fat a minute or two before adding milk, and add the milk gradually off the heat to avoid lumps. Add no salt until you have tasted it; the fat carries plenty.
- "Tried out"Rendered. If the slices have not given up two tablespoons of fat per cup of milk, top up with butter; if they have given more, pour the excess off.
- On the skim milk claimThe appendix is correct that skimming removes fat, not protein, and this was a standard economy argument of the period. In practice a gravy made with skim milk is thin in flavour; whole milk is better if you are not counting pennies.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities or yield beyond the fat-flour-to-milk ratio; serve with boiled or baked potatoes as it suggests, and scale the pork and milk to the number at table.
- A note on the headingThe section title reads 'Salt-Fish,' but the text is entirely about salt pork.
Salt pork was the backbone of the American larder before mechanical refrigeration: cheap, shelf-stable, and useful as both meat and cooking fat. Pork belly and sides packed in barrels of dry salt or brine travelled with settlers, provisioned ships, and fed farm households through the winter, and the fat tried out of it did the work that oil and butter do now. Milk gravy built in the rendered fat the same technique behind sawmill gravy and the gravies of Southern breakfast tables turned a small quantity of meat into a meal by way of flour, milk and potatoes. The appendix note about skim milk suggests the domestic-science era of the early twentieth century, when household manuals began quoting nutritional reasoning at cooks and pressing the case that the by-products of butter-making were not waste, though the dating is an inference from that note rather than an established fact.