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Pickled Pork Equal to Fresh
Let the meat cool thoroughly; cut into pieces four to six inches wide, weight them and pack them as tight as possible in a barrel, salting very slightly. Cover the meat with brine made as strong as possible. Pour off a gallon of brine and mix with it one tablespoonful saltpetre for every 100 pounds meat and return it to the barrel. Let it stand one month, then take out the meat, let it drain twelve hours. Put the brine in an iron kettle, and one quart treacle or two pounds sugar, and boil until perfectly clear. When it is cold, return the meat to the barrel and pour on the brine. Weight it down and keep it covered close, and you will have the sweetest meat you ever tasted.
This is a barrel-cure for fresh pork, written for a cold cellar and a household that turned over a hog every winter. The method cannot be reproduced safely in a modern kitchen, and the points below explain where it fails rather than how to adapt it.
- The curing salt is far out of rangeOne tablespoon of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) per 100 pounds of meat is a fraction of what is needed to inhibit Clostridium botulinum in an anaerobic brine, and nitrate must be converted to nitrite by bacteria before it does anything at all. Modern curing uses weighed nitrite salts calculated as parts per million of meat weight, not a spoonful stirred into a gallon of liquid.
- "As strong as possible" is not a specificationA safe brine cure depends on a known salt concentration measured by weight or by hydrometer (salinometer), held long enough for the salt to reach the centre of every piece. Pieces four to six inches across, as the recipe directs, may never equilibrate in an unmeasured brine, and the interior may remain effectively uncured.
- No temperature is givenBarrel curing of this kind was done in an unheated outbuilding or cellar in midwinter, at cold-cellar temperatures rather than any figure the recipe states. The recipe assumes that climate silently. A month at room temperature in a covered barrel is a spoilage and botulism risk, not a cure.
- Reusing and re-boiling the brineThe brine that came off the meat carries blood and protein as well as whatever the pork brought with it. Boiling kills vegetative bacteria but does not remove spores, and the salt and nitrate concentration after boiling and cooling is unknown. Current practice discards spent brine.
- Treacle and sugar feed the wrong thingsA quart of treacle or two pounds of sugar added to a brine of unknown strength lowers the effective salt concentration and provides fermentable sugar. In a sweet pickle cure the sugar is balanced against a measured salt and nitrite load; here nothing is measured.
- Archaic terms, for reading onlyTreacle here is cane molasses; saltpetre is potassium nitrate, sold in the period at any druggist and used as both a preservative and a colour fixative. The closing "Weight it down" means pressing the packed meat under a scrubbed stone or wooden follower so the brine covers it entirely; the earlier "weight them" may instead mean weigh them, since the saltpetre is dosed per 100 pounds of meat.
- If you want cured porkUse a current recipe from a food-safety authority or a modern charcuterie text, with curing salt weighed to the meat and a thermometer on the curing space.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, belongs to the last generation of American cookbooks written for households that killed their own hogs. Pork was the backbone of Southern provisioning, and the aim of a recipe like this one was not bacon or ham but ordinary barrel pork that would still taste of fresh meat in July, hence the title. The sweet-pickle method, brine enriched with molasses or brown sugar and set with saltpetre, was widely recommended in the period as milder than a dry salt pack, and treacle was the cheaper option in a cane-sugar economy where molasses was a byproduct close at hand. The instruction is to boil the brine until clear, a step as easily read as clarifying the liquid and dissolving the sweetener as anything else.