Devonshire Way
INGREDIENTS. - Το every 14 lbs. of meat allow 2 oz. of saltpetre, 2 oz. of salt prunella, 1 lb. of common salt.
For the pickle, 3 gallons of water, 5 lbs. of common salt, 7 lbs. of coarse sugar, 3 lbs. of bay salt.
Weigh the sides, hams and cheeks, and to every 14 lbs. allow the above proportion of saltpetre, salt prunella, and common salt. Pound and mix these together, and rub well into the meat; lay it on a stone trough or tub, rubbing it thoroughly, and turning it daily for two successive days.
At the end of the second day, pour on it a pickle made as follows:- Put the above ingredients into a saucepan, set it on the fire, and stir frequently; remove all the scum, allow it to boil for 1/4 hour, and pour it hot over the meat. Let the hams, &c., BACON, TO CURE. be well rubbed and turned daily; if the meat is small, a fortnight will be sufficient for the sides and shoulders to remain in the pickle, and the hams 3 weeks; if from 30 lbs. and upwards, 3 weeks will be required for the sides, &c., and from 4 to 5 weeks for the hams. On taking the pieces out, let them drain for an hour, cover with dry sawdust, and smoke from a fortnight to 3 weeks. Boil and carefully skim the pickle after using, and it will keep good, closely corked, for 2 years. When boiling it for use, add about 2 lbs. of common salt, and the same of treacle, to allow for waste.
Tongues are excellent put into this pickle cold, having first been rubbed well with saltpetre and salt, and allowed to remain 24 hours, not forgetting to make a deep incision under the thick part of the tongue, so as to allow the pickle to penetrate more readily. A fortnight or 3 weeks, according to the size of the tongue, will be sufficient.
TIME.-Small meat to remain in the pickle a fortnight, hams 3 weeks; to be smoked from a fortnight to 3 weeks.
This is a Devonshire dry-and-wet cure for bacon, hams, cheeks and tongues, and it belongs to a world of cold stone larders, unmeasured nitrate and reused brine. Several of its instructions fall outside any range a modern cook can work in safely, so the notes below explain the vessels and vanished ingredients and then set out why the method itself cannot be followed.
- Saltpetre and salt prunella are both potassium nitrateSaltpetre is potassium nitrate; salt prunella is the same salt fused into cakes or balls (sometimes with a little sulphur added), so the recipe is calling for 4 oz of nitrate per 14 lb of meat. That is many times the nitrate permitted in cured meat today, and nitrate at that level is the reason this cure cannot be reproduced. Modern curing uses pre-blended nitrite salts at a fixed percentage of the meat weight because nitrate is toxic in excess and unreliable in effect.
- Bay saltBay salt was coarse sea salt produced by solar evaporation in shallow bays, chiefly in France, Portugal and Spain. It was valued for its large, slow-dissolving crystals rather than any special chemistry; coarse grey sea salt is its nearest descendant.
- Coarse sugar and treacleCoarse sugar here means unrefined or partly refined cane sugar; treacle is the dark syrup left from sugar refining, close to modern black treacle or blackstrap molasses. Both are there to soften the harshness of the salt rather than to make the meat sweet.
- The stone troughA stone trough or glazed earthenware tub was one common curing vessel; salt brine attacks iron, though wooden salting tubs were also widely used. Such a vessel would have stood in a cold larder, which is the temperature control the recipe never mentions and never had to.
- No temperature is given anywhereA safe cure depends on holding the meat between roughly refrigerator temperature and the low fifties Fahrenheit for the whole immersion, and on smoking cold rather than warm. This recipe specifies neither, which means the pickle could sit for five weeks at any ambient temperature the season provided.
- Two to five weeks of unrefrigerated brineSides and shoulders sit a fortnight, large hams four to five weeks (three weeks for hams of smaller meat). The brine proportions are given, but with no target internal salt level and no temperature there is no way to know whether the interior of a 30 lb ham has been preserved or merely kept damp — and an anaerobic, low-acid brine held at whatever the season provided is the kind of environment in which Clostridium botulinum is a concern.
- Reusing the pickle for two yearsThe instruction to boil, skim, cork and keep the brine for two years, topping it up with salt and treacle to "allow for waste", is guesswork dressed as method. Each use strips salt and sugar out and adds meat protein and blood; the replacement quantities are approximations, so the strength of the brine drifts unknowably across two years of use.
- Sawdust and a fortnight of smokeCovering the drained meat in dry sawdust and smoking it for two to three weeks assumes a chimney or smokehouse that stays cold throughout. A domestic smoker run warm for that period holds the meat for weeks in the temperature band where spoilage organisms grow fastest.
- If you want to cure baconUse a current recipe that gives cure weight as a percentage of meat weight, specifies a commercial nitrite cure, and states holding temperatures.
A recipe of this kind is often traced to Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management, which carried several regional bacon cures side by side; the Devonshire method ran to a two-day dry rub followed by a boiled sweet pickle poured on hot. The South-West of England had a long reputation for its bacon and hams, built on farmhouses that killed their own animals in late autumn, when the weather could be relied on to stay cold through the weeks of curing. The heavy hand with sugar and treacle is striking, and the household economy of the thing is worth noticing: the pickle is a capital asset, boiled, skimmed, corked and carried forward for two years, with tongues slipped in cold whenever one came to hand. Recipes of this kind were written for a reader who owned a stone trough and a smoking chimney and who understood that the whole operation was governed by the calendar rather than by a thermometer.