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Salt Pork in Milk
1 pound salt pork 2 cups skim milk 4 tablespoons fat 4 level tablespoons flour Cut the pork into thin slices; cover with hot water; let stand for ten minutes and drain. Score the rind of the slices; fry until a golden brown and serve in a milk sauce. Heat the flour in some of the fat that has been rendered in frying the pork; add the milk gradually; bring to a boil and pour over the slices of pork or empty into a gravy boat.
A plain fried salt pork with a milk gravy, of the sort that once stood in for fresh meat when there was none. Two things decide whether it works: how thoroughly you draw the salt out first, and how thin you slice.
- Slice thin, and mean itAim for about 1/8 inch, no thicker than 1/4. Thick slices tend to stay chewy no matter how long they fry, since salt pork is largely fat with only streaks of lean rather than muscle you can tenderize.
- The ten-minute soak is the hingeCovering with hot water and draining pulls out surface salt so the gravy is not ruinous. With modern salt pork, which is often heavily cured, give it a full 10 minutes in water hot from the tap or kettle, drain, and pat completely dry before it meets the pan. Wet pork will not brown.
- Salt pork todayLook for it near bacon or in the pork section, sold in a slab or chunk. It is unsmoked cured belly or fatback. Thick-cut unsmoked bacon is the nearest substitute; if you use smoked bacon the gravy will taste of smoke, which is not the original intent.
- Score the rindCut through the tough skin at intervals so the slices do not curl into cups as the fat contracts. If your slab comes rindless, skip it.
- The 4 tablespoons of fat are optionalThe recipe lists fat, then tells you to use the fat rendered from the pork. A pound of salt pork will give up far more than 4 tablespoons; pour off all but about 4 tablespoons for the roux and reserve the rest.
- Skim milk is deliberateSkim milk may well be deliberate -- with that much pork fat in the pan, whole milk makes a heavy sauce, and skim or 1% keeps it lighter. Cook the flour in the fat a minute or two before adding milk, and add the milk in stages, whisking, or it will lump.
- Season with pepper onlyAdd plenty of black pepper and taste before adding any salt at all. The pork and its rendered fat usually carry enough.
- YieldA pound of pork with two cups of sauce serves four modestly, alongside boiled or baked potatoes, which the sauce is really there to cover.
Salt pork was the backbone of American cooking for most of the nineteenth century: cheap, shelf-stable without refrigeration, and available in any general store when fresh meat was not. Fried in slices with a milk gravy poured over, it belongs to a family of dishes found across New England, the Midwest and the South, where cream or milk gravy was the standard way to stretch a small quantity of fat meat over a table of potatoes and bread. The instruction to use skim milk may well be a small piece of period thrift in itself, suggesting an era when households that kept a cow skimmed off cream for butter and cooked with what was left. That such a dish was written down at all is a reminder of how recently salt pork was ordinary supper rather than a seasoning for beans and chowder.