Home › Cookery › To Cure Bacon
To Cure Bacon
Pack the meat in salt and allow it to remain five weeks. Then take the hams up, wash off, and wipe dry. Have some sacks made of about seven-eighths shirting, large enough to hold the hams and tie above the hock. Make a pot of sizing of equal portions of flour and corn meal, boil until thick, and dip each sack until the outside is well coated with sizing. Put the hams in bags, and tie tight with a strong twine and hang by the same in the smoke-house.
This is a dry-cure procedure for whole bone-in hams, and it is the kind of recipe that cannot be followed as printed. The notes below explain what it assumed and what is missing.
- No quantities at all"Pack the meat in salt" is the entire cure. There is no weight of salt relative to weight of meat, no cure ratio, and no nitrite or nitrate — the three numbers that determine whether a ham of this size cures through or spoils from the bone outward. Modern dry-curing is done by measured percentage of green weight for exactly this reason.
- No temperature, and that was the whole point of the calendarFive weeks in salt depends entirely on cool weather; modern dry-curing guidance puts the working range at roughly 36-40F, though a period meat-house would have been warmer and less steady. Virginia households salted meat at hog-killing time in late autumn and relied on the season to hold the cure. The recipe cannot be transferred to a kitchen because it never states the condition it depends on.
- The bone is the riskA bone-in ham cures from the outside in, and the deep tissue along the femur is the last place salt reaches. Under-penetration there is the classic failure mode, usually showing as bone sour or taint at the joint; a low-salt anaerobic pocket is also the situation in which Clostridium botulinum is a recognised, if uncommon, hazard. Nothing in this method verifies penetration.
- Smoking here is not cookingSmoke-house hanging in this tradition is cold smoke — flavour and surface drying, at temperatures far below anything that pasteurises meat. The ham comes out raw and stays raw until cooked, so the cure alone is doing all the preservative work.
- What the sizing and sacks are forThe flour-and-cornmeal paste seals the shirting (a plain cotton sheeting; 'seven-eighths' most likely denotes the trade width, seven-eighths of a yard) into a rigid crust. This is insect exclusion, not preservation: it keeps the ham skipper fly and larder beetle from laying in the ham through a long summer hang. It does nothing about bacteria.
- "Tie above the hock"The hock is the joint above the foot; the sack is tied there and the ham hangs by that twine from its own narrow end, so nothing bears on the meat. Hanging hams by a cord at the hock is still seen in country-ham houses.
- If you want to cure a hamUse a current recipe that specifies salt as a percentage of green weight, a curing salt with measured nitrite, a controlled temperature, and a defined cure time per pound. Those numbers are the recipe; this page is a description of a household routine that assumed them.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, is a collection of contributions from Virginia housekeepers, and its bacon and ham entries record some of the most economically serious work in the annual household calendar. Hogs were killed in cold weather, salted, smoked, and then had to survive a Virginia summer hanging in an outbuilding \being concerns bagging and sizing as much as the cure itself. The dreaded enemy was the "skipper," the larva of the ham fly, and a flour paste hardened over cotton sheeting was a common defence, a method some country-ham operations have continued to use. Virginia hams cured on these lines, aged long and eaten in thin slices, became the region's best-known export food, with Smithfield the most famous name in the trade. The recipe's silence on amounts reads less as carelessness than as the shorthand of a book written for readers already familiar with the process.