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Bacon, to Cure in the Wilt- shire Way
INGREDIENTS. - 1½ lb. of coarse sugar, 1/2 lb. of bay salt, 6 oz. of saltpetre, 1 lb. of common salt. Sprinkle each flitch with salt, and let the blood drain off for 24 hours; then pound and mix the above ingredients well together and rub it well into the meat, which should be turned every day for a month; hang it to dry, and smoke it for 10 days.
TIME. To remain in the pickle from 3 to 4 weeks; to be smoked 10 days, or rather longer.
This is a dry-cure for whole sides of pork, and it is one of the entries in Beeton that cannot be reproduced as printed. The problems are in the ratios and the temperatures, not in the technique.
- No meat weight is givenA flitch is a whole side of a pig, anywhere from about 25 to 60 lb depending on the animal and how it was cut, and the wording 'each flitch' leaves it unclear whether the quantities are meant for one side or several. The cure quantities are therefore floating: there is no way to tell from the page what concentration of saltpetre the author intended.
- The saltpetre is the specific hazardSaltpetre is potassium nitrate. Modern curing uses precisely weighed nitrite or nitrate blends, sold deliberately diluted in salt so that domestic mis-weighing cannot produce a toxic dose. Six ounces of straight saltpetre rubbed into an unweighed side of pork is outside any current limit and cannot be corrected by guesswork.
- Bay salt no longer exists as soldBay salt is not sold under that name now -- Bay salt was a coarse, sun-evaporated sea salt, traditionally said to take its name from the bays it was imported from; its impurities were held to give a distinctive flavour. Coarse sea salt is the nearest stand-in, but any substitution changes the total salt concentration the cure depends on.
- "Coarse sugar" is not a modern gradeIt meant unrefined or partly refined cane sugar of the period, darker and wetter than granulated. Any substitution alters both the moisture and the fermentable sugar available to bacteria during a month-long cure.
- A month at unstated temperatureThe original assumes a cold larder or cellar of the kind available in winter. The recipe never says so, and a month of daily turning in a warm room is exactly the condition in which Clostridium botulinum and other spoilage organisms outrun an uncertain cure.
- Ten days of smoking is cold smokingThis is smoke below about 30C for preservation and flavour, not cooking. The bacon leaves the process raw, so every safety margin rests on the cure and the ambient temperature having been right, and here neither is specified.
- If you want to cure baconUse a current recipe that gives the weight of the pork, the weight of cure per kilo, a curing-salt product by name, and a refrigerator temperature. Those numbers are the whole substance of the method.
Wiltshire was the centre of English bacon curing through the nineteenth century, and Calne in particular grew up around the trade in Irish pigs driven east to be slaughtered and cured; the county name became a shorthand for a mild, sweet, sugar-included cure as opposed to the harsher salt-only methods used elsewhere. The sugar here is doing real work, softening the harshness of the salt and helping the flitch keep some tenderness over four weeks. Beeton's book carries several bacon cures side by side because in the 1860s a middle-class household with a cool cellar might still buy a whole side at pig-killing time, and it mattered which regional cure you were following. In time the trade moved to commercial curing houses, and instructions like these passed out of domestic use.