Pork, to Pickle
INGREDIENTS. - 1/4 1/4 lb. of saltpetre, salt. AVERAGE COST, 9d. per lb.
Cut suitable pieces for pickling directly the pig is cold, rub these with salt, and put them in a pan with a sprinkling of that and the saltpetre between the pieces; as it melts on the top, strew on more. Lay a coarse cloth over the pan, a board over that, and a weight on the board, to keep the pork down in the brine. If excluded from the air, it will continue good for nearly 2 years.
SEASONABLE. The best time for pickling meat is late in the autumn.
PORK PIES.
This is a dry-salt cure built around a quarter pound of saltpetre and an unmeasured quantity of salt, held at whatever temperature a late-autumn larder happened to be. Read it as a historical document rather than a working method.
- Saltpetre is out of rangePotassium nitrate is now a regulated curing agent. A flat quarter pound against an unstated weight of pork and an unstated weight of salt gives no way to calculate nitrate concentration in the finished meat, and the instruction to "strew on more" as it dissolves compounds the problem.
- No meat weight, no salt weightEvery element that makes a cure safe is missing: the weight of the pork, the weight of the salt, the strength of the brine that forms, and the temperature at which it is held. Modern curing is specified in percentages of green meat weight for exactly this reason.
- Temperature is left to the weather"Late in the autumn" was the only temperature control, in an unheated larder. Salt penetrates slowly, and until it does the interior of a large piece of pork can sit at temperatures where spoilage organisms, including Clostridium species, remain active. A modern kitchen cannot reproduce the assumed conditions.
- Two years is not a shelf lifeThe claim that the meat keeps nearly two years if air is excluded reflects a period when heavily salted pork was soaked and boiled hard before eating, and when rancidity and off-flavour were tolerated. It is not a food-safety statement.
- The weighted cloth and boardThe cloth, board and weight held the pork below the brine that forms as salt draws water out of the meat. The technique itself is sound and survives in modern brining; it is the uncontrolled cure chemistry around it that does not.
- If you want cured porkUse a current recipe with cure quantities given as percentages of meat weight, a specified curing salt, and a specified refrigeration temperature.
Pickling here means salting, not vinegar: through the nineteenth century households that kept a pig commonly turned much of it into salt pork, bacon and ham soon after killing, since salting was the main way to carry the meat through the year. The autumn timing in Mrs Beeton's note follows the old agricultural rhythm - pigs were fattened on the harvest's leavings and killed as the weather turned cold enough to let the salt work before the meat spoiled. Saltpetre earned its place in these cures because it fixes the pink colour of cured meat and firms the texture, effects that were understood empirically long before nitrate chemistry was; the microbiological reason it also suppresses botulism was not established until well after this book was compiled. The abrupt "PORK PIES" at the end appears to be the heading of the following entry rather than part of this recipe.