Fried Bacon
Dip the ham or slices of middling in bread crumbs. Put in a frying-pan with chopped parsley and pepper. Just before taking off the fire, pour to the gravy a cup of cream.--Mrs. W.
A three-line contributor's recipe that assumes you already know how to fry salt meat; the only real technique is the cream finish. Read it as pan-fried country ham or salt pork with a quick pan sauce.
- What "middling" isMiddling, or middling meat, is the cured side of the hog between shoulder and ham "streak-o'-lean," essentially salt pork belly. Thick-sliced slab bacon is the closest supermarket substitute; a cured country ham steak covers the other option.
- Soak or taste firstNineteenth-century Virginia cures were far saltier than modern bacon. If you use genuine country ham or dry salt pork, taste a fried scrap before committing, and soak the slices in water or milk for an hour if it is fierce.
- The crumb coatingBread crumbs here means dry, fine crumbs from stale bread, not panko or seasoned crumbs. Press them on a slice patted dry, or they will slide off into the fat.
- Fat and heatNo fat is called for because the meat renders its own. Start the slices in a dry pan over medium heat rather than high, so the fat comes out before the crumbs scorch "a coated slice burns much faster than a bare one."
- The hinge: cream off the heat"Just before taking off the fire" is the whole point. Add the cream to the hot pan, swirl to loosen the browned bits, and pull it immediately. Cream boiled hard in a very salty, very hot pan will break and turn greasy.
- Cream, not half-and-halfNineteenth-century cream was unhomogenized and, skimmed from the top of the pan, often richer than modern table cream, though farm cream varied. Heavy cream is the safer choice; lighter dairy is more likely to curdle against the salt and the fond.
- Pepper and parsleyThe parsley goes in the pan with the meat, which will darken it. If you want green in the finished dish, hold back half and stir it into the cream at the end.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a cup of cream makes enough pan sauce for several slices. Good spooned over hot biscuits, rice or grits.
Fried salt meat with a cream or milk pan gravy is a forerunner of what later cookbooks call milk gravy; red-eye gravy is a different thing, made with water or coffee rather than cream. It belongs to a hog-centered kitchen where the smokehouse was the pantry: Virginia households cured hams, middlings and shoulders after the autumn hog-killing and ate their way through them over the year. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), edited by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, is full of these initialed, telegraphic entries -- Mrs. W. is one of many named and half-named contributors -- and their brevity is telling: they were written for cooks who already knew the basics and needed only the one idea worth copying down, here the crumb coating and the cup of cream. The book appeared as the postwar South was rebuilding its household economy, and its heavy reliance on cured pork and cream reflects what a farm could produce without buying much.