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To Boil Pork, Hams, and Bacon
470. Pickled pork is boiled like beef. If very salt, it should be soaked three or four hours before boiling. The time required is nearly double that for beef, or about twenty-five minutes per pound, very slow boiling. The vegetables eaten with it are the same as for beef, but pease-pudding is almost constantly taken with pork. Great care should be exercised that pork is sufficiently boiled, as, when underdone, it is neither wholesome nor well flavoured. The skin is left on. 471. HAM AND BACON, generally, require soaking, the former, from eighteen to twenty-four hours, and the latter for twelve. After soaking, the dirty and rough parts should be scraped off, and then the ham or bacon may be boiled in the way detailed at page 47, allowing twenty-five minutes for each pound, and boiling very slowly. When taken up, the skin is peeled off, and the fat is covered with grated toast. The knuckle of a ham is generally guarded with a roll of paper, fringed.
Two linked entries on boiling cured pork, written when almost all bacon and ham was heavily dry-salted and needed long soaking. Modern cures are far milder, which changes both the soaking and the timing.
- Soaking is mostly obsoleteEighteen to twenty-four hours for a ham reflects Victorian salt levels. A supermarket gammon or wet-cured ham needs no soaking at all; a traditional dry-cured or country ham may want 8-12 hours in several changes of cold water, in the refrigerator rather than at room temperature.
- "Very slow boiling" means a bare simmerThe water should sit at about 180-185F, with the surface barely trembling. A rolling boil tightens and shreds the muscle fibres and squeezes out fat, which is exactly the fault the instruction is written to avoid.
- Twenty-five minutes a pound is too longTwenty-five minutes a pound is long by modern standards -- work to about 20 minutes per pound for gammon or bacon and check with a thermometer: 145F at the centre for a raw cured joint, rested at least three minutes. A large joint will take several hours.
- "Not sufficiently boiled" and trichinosis"Not sufficiently boiled" -- the warning that underdone pork is "neither wholesome nor well flavoured" predates any germ theory, and the parasite behind trichinosis was not linked to pork until the 1860s, so the book cannot be pointing at it directly. Trichinosis is now vanishingly rare in commercial pork, and 145F with a rest is the current standard rather than the grey-through cooking of the period.
- Grated toastWhat other cookery books call raspings: crusts dried hard in a low oven, then crushed fine and pressed over the peeled fat while it is still warm and tacky. Dry breadcrumbs browned in the oven do the same job.
- Pease-puddingSplit yellow peas, soaked and boiled in a cloth or, traditionally, in the pot alongside the pork. Allow about 8 oz dried peas for four people; it wants the salty liquor, so do not season it heavily before tasting.
- The paper frillIt gives a clean handhold on the knuckle bone when carving. Cut a strip of stiff paper, fringe one long edge, and wrap it round the exposed bone at the table.
- Cooling and the skinIf the ham is to be eaten cold, let it cool in its own liquor for an hour or two before skinning; it stays much moister. Peel the skin while the joint is still warm, or it will not come away cleanly.
The British Cookery Book (1859), compiled under the editorship of J. H. Walsh, belongs to the generation of manuals that treated salt pork as a staple rather than a luxury. Before reliable refrigeration, much of the pork eaten came as pickled pork, ham or bacon: in country households the pig was killed in the cold months and the carcass converted largely into salted and smoked cuts that would keep through the year. The long soaking specified here is a measure of how much salt those cures carried. Pease-pudding as the standing accompaniment is equally telling, a cheap, filling boiled pulse seasoned by the pork liquor, and the pairing survives in the North of England still. The fringed paper frill and the coating of grated toast are small pieces of Victorian table presentation attached to what was otherwise an entirely ordinary economical joint.