Bacon
to be boiled, must be put into plenty of cold water and brought slowly to the boiling point. It is then to be simmered, and it takes a long time-say an hour and a half for a couple of pounds. Remove the rind when it is cooked and sprinkle it with bread-raspings. Those who dislike to eat this when cold can have it cut into rashers, sprinkled with bread-crumb, and toasted in a Dutch-oven, or by means of a wire toaster. Raw bacon can be either grilled or toasted in rashers-it is best toasted. To fry good bacon is to show ingratitude to the generous animal that lived and died for your benefit in the hope that feeding on his flitch you might one day become another Lope de Vega. See further on about Lope and his devotion to the flitch.
BADMINTON must have a word here, because the name is exceptional. There are crowds of French dishes named after the titles and country houses of the French nobility. In England the Earl of Sandwich in the last century gave his name to a well-known article of food and that is all, Bain Marie if we except Badminton, the seat of the Duke of Beaufort, which calls up a vision not of food but of drink-claret cup without the sugar and the curaçoa. Attempts no doubt have been made to immortalise great English names in the preparations of the table; but not one has achieved a universal renown except the Sandwich and possibly Badminton. If any English peer in this century could have had his name written in comestibles, we should have expected it might have been the late Duke of Beaufort, who gloried in a Neapolitan cook named Raffaelle. This great artist went one night to hear the opera of L'Elisir d'Amore. In the middle of the night the Duke was roused from sleep by a knock at his bedroom door. "Who's there?" he cried. "It's only me, Signor Duc," said Raffaelle, opening the "I have been to the opera ; I have been dreaming of the music; and I have an idea. I have invented a sorbet-I have named it the sorbet à la Donizetti; and I could not resist coming to tell your Grace." Surely the Duke who showed his appreciation of a cook so enthusiastic deserved to have his good taste recorded in the breast of a partridge or on a neck of venison. door.
BAIN MARIE (Mary's bath). - This Mary was a Jewess who lived in the fourth century of our era, and was devoted to alchemy. She required a bath that would retain heat long at an equable temperature for the metals and vessels upon which she made her experiments. To this end she heated sand and plunged her vessels into it. The modern Mary-bath is an imitation in hot water, which is not so good as sand, since it has no special aptitude for retaining heat, but has the advantage of being easily kept hot by connection with the boiler-and kept thus hot at a temperature which can never exceed 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Transferred with this change of sand into water from the laboratory to the kitchen, the Mary-bath is exceedingly Bake useful as a means of keeping things hot with no danger of their being too hot. Practically, however, this heat is a good way below the boiling point; and it is a mistake to suppose that the same bain marie will at once do for cooking and for keeping things hot. In the language of the French kitchen, to cook au bain marie means simply to cook in a double saucepan-the water in the outer saucepan being kept continuously at boiling point. This should be remembered by English people, who are disappointed when they find that the grand new bain marie they have ordered for their kitchens, though good for keeping things hot after they are cooked, will not at the same time cook like a double saucepan. The fault is probably with the French, who give a more extended use to the name of Mary's bath than that ingenious Jewess thought of. A bain marie in her view, and as commonly understood, is but a means of retaining heat. To cook au bain marie is to create a heat by means of a double saucepan which, rising to 212 degrees of Fahrenheit, shall have no chance of getting beyond that temperature. Let there be no mistake, therefore, as to a fact so elementary. A bain marie cannot have water in it which is both at boiling point for cooking purposes and below boiling point for keeping things hot.
The opening lines are a method for boiling a cured bacon joint — what a British butcher now sells as gammon or a bacon collar, not the thin rashers in a supermarket packet. The rest of the page is Kettner's dictionary running on into unrelated entries.
- What "bacon" means hereA whole cured cut of two pounds or more, on the bone or off, sold to be cooked as a joint. Sliced streaky or back bacon cannot be boiled this way; look for gammon, hock or collar.
- Cold water, brought up slowlyThis is the hinge of the method. Starting in plenty of cold water and easing it to the boil draws out surplus salt and keeps the meat from seizing; dropping the joint into boiling water tightens the outside and leaves it dry.
- Simmer, do not boilHold the water at a bare tremble, around 180F. A rolling boil shreds the fibres and squeezes the fat out of a cured joint.
- The timingAn hour and a half for two pounds suits the heavily salted bacon of the 1870s. Modern cures are much milder and wetter; roughly 20 minutes per pound plus 20 minutes is the usual reckoning, and 145-160F at the centre is the useful test rather than the clock.
- Taste the waterNineteenth-century bacon was often soaked overnight before cooking and the first water thrown away. With a modern cure that is rarely needed, but if the joint is dry-salted, change the water once during cooking rather than serving something inedibly salty.
- Bread-raspingsDried crusts grated to a coarse powder and often browned in the oven — the standard coating for a boiled ham or bacon joint once the rind is stripped off while still hot. Dry breadcrumbs toasted in a pan give the same effect.
- Dutch-ovenIn 1877 this is a tin reflector open on one side, stood before the fire to toast or bake by radiant heat. The equivalent is a broiler or grill, not a lidded cast-iron pot.
- YieldA two-pound joint serves four to six hot, and rather more sliced cold. The author gives no yield; he does, however, mention the meat being eaten cold.
Kettner's Book of the Table (1877), generally attributed to the journalist E. S. Dallas, is arranged as a dictionary, which is why a boiling method for bacon sits a few lines from an essay on the bain-marie and a story about the Duke of Beaufort's cook. The flitch the author invokes is a whole cured side of a pig, the same object as in the Dunmow Flitch custom, where a side of bacon was awarded to a couple who could swear they had not quarrelled in a year and a day. The gibe about Lope de Vega alludes to a story connecting the Spanish dramatist with bacon, which the author promises to tell further on; it is a literary joke rather than anything documented.