Bacon, Boiled
INGREDIENTS.- Bacon, water. AVERAGE COST, 10d. to 1s. per lb. for the best parts.
As bacon is frequently excessively salt, let it be soaked in warm water for an hour or two previous to dressing it; then pare off the rusty parts, and scrape the undercome BOILED BACON. side and rind as clean as possible. Put it into a saucepan of cold water; let it gradually to a boil, and as fast as the scum rises to the surface of the water, remove it. Let it simmer very gently until it is thoroughly done; then take it up, strip off the skin, and sprinkle over the bacon a few bread raspings, and garnish with tufts of cauliflower or Brussels sprouts. When served alone, young and tender broad beans or green peas are the usual accompaniments.
TIME.-1 1/2 lb. of bacon, hour; 2 lbs., 1 hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
BACON, BROILED.
This is a joint of cured bacon simmered whole, not rashers in a pan — the single most important thing to understand before shopping for it. What Mrs Beeton calls bacon is closest to what a modern butcher sells as gammon, collar or a piece of green (unsmoked) streaky.
- What to buyAsk for an unsliced cured pork joint: gammon, collar, hock or a slab of belly bacon, 2-4 lb. Supermarket rashers will disintegrate. Modern wet-cured joints are far less salty than Victorian dry-cured bacon.
- The soakAn hour or two in warm water was necessary when bacon carried weeks' worth of dry salt. Today, taste the cooking water after ten minutes of simmering; if it is aggressively salty, drain and start again with fresh cold water. Much modern wet-cured gammon needs little or no soaking.
- "Rusty parts"Rusty means the yellowed, rancid surface fat that develops on long-kept bacon. On a fresh joint there will be none to pare away, but do scrape the rind clean.
- Cold water, gentle heatStarting in cold water and bringing it up slowly keeps the meat from seizing and lets the scum rise where it can be skimmed. Once it reaches the boil, drop the heat so the surface barely trembles — a rolling boil makes bacon stringy and dry.
- TimingThe printed times here have lost their fractions and cannot be relied on. Work on roughly 20-25 minutes per pound plus 20 minutes, and check for an internal temperature of 160F at the thickest point away from the bone.
- Bread raspingsRaspings are dried breadcrumbs, made by grating or crushing hard-baked crusts. Toasted dry crumbs from a low oven, 300F for twenty minutes, are the same thing. They are sprinkled over the hot fat after the skin is stripped off.
- ServingA 3 lb joint feeds six to eight hot, and the cold remainder slices well the next day. The suggested broad beans or peas are not decoration — their sweetness is the counterweight to the salt.
- The cooking liquorIf the bacon was not desperately salty, keep the strained liquid. It makes the base for pea and ham soup or a lentil broth.
Boiled bacon was the backbone of English cookery long before it became a nostalgia dish. Many farms and some town households kept a pig, and the flitches hung salted in the chimney or the larder gave meat all year; the cost note of tenpence to a shilling a pound, quoted for the best parts, marks it as an everyday purchase rather than a luxury. Serving it with broad beans or green peas is often said to be one of the oldest fixed pairings in the English kitchen, and the habit of dressing the fat with raspings was simply a way of giving a plainly boiled joint a presentable browned surface without a second cooking.