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To Dress Chine
Rub the large end with salt and saltpetre, and it will keep some time, or you may boil it fresh. Cut the bones of the other end apart, sprinkle with flour and a little salt: add one teacup of water, and stew. It will make two large dishes.--Mrs. W.
A chine is the pork backbone with the meat left along it, a butcher's cut that came out of the annual hog-killing. The stewing half of this entry is straightforward country cookery; the curing half is not, and it is the reason this page carries a warning.
- The saltpetre cure is the problem"Rub the large end with salt and saltpetre" gives no weight of meat, no weight of cure, no ratio, no temperature and no time. Saltpetre (potassium nitrate) is the nitrate source that keeps cured pork from developing Clostridium botulinum toxin, and it is only safe within a narrow range: too little and the meat is unprotected during the weeks it sits unrefrigerated, too much and the nitrate load itself is harmful. A rub applied by feel cannot land in that range reliably.
- "It will keep some time" assumed a cold larderCuring of this sort was ordinarily done in cold weather, in an unheated meat house, on a freshly butchered animal. The text specifies none of those conditions, and dry-curing pork at ambient temperature without them invites spoilage organisms rather than a cure. If you want to cure pork, use a current recipe with cure quantities given by weight.
- What a chine actually isThe backbone section, taken from the carcass with a good deal of meat clinging between the vertebrae. It is close to what is sold today as pork neck bones or country-style backbone, and a whole chine is rarely to be had except from a custom butcher.
- "Cut the bones of the other end apart"Separating between the vertebrae so the piece will fit a pot and so each portion carries a bone. This was work for a cleaver on a block, not a kitchen knife.
- One teacup of waterA teacup in this period is variously reckoned at about four to six fluid ounces, less than a modern cup. It is a small quantity of liquid for a stew, and the meat would have contributed its own.
- Yield"two large dishes" means two full platters. The bones account for much of the bulk, so the number of servings is anyone's guess.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by housewives in Virginia and neighbouring states, many of whom signed their entries with an initial rather than a full name. This one belongs to hog-killing season, the cold-weather work that supplied a household's meat for the year: hams and shoulders went into the salt and then the smokehouse, sides became bacon, and the odds and ends -- chine, spareribs, backbone, feet, chitterlings -- were eaten fresh in the days immediately after, because they would not keep. That the recipe offers the cook a choice between salting the thick end and simply stewing the whole thing fresh captures the moment exactly. Saltpetre had been the standard curing agent in English and American kitchens for centuries by then; the understanding of what it actually does chemically, and how much of it is appropriate, came considerably later than this book.