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Fried Salt Pork, with Cream Gravy
Cut the slices thin, and place them in a cold water. After they have soaked one hour, drain well and dry them on a napkin. Heat the fryingpan very hot. Place one-half cup of flour on a plate, and, dipping each piece of meat in it fry until crisp. Drain off all but two tablespoons of the fat and stir two tablespoons of flour into that remaining in the pan. Cook two minutes, stirring well; then draw the pan back on the range, and slowly add one pint of milk. When the gravy is smooth and well mixed together, cook only one minute, and add pepper, and salt also if needed. Turn the gravy over the meat and serve.
A plain skillet supper built on the cheapest cut in the barrel. Two things decide whether it works: how much salt you pull out in the soak, and how patiently you add the milk to the roux.
- The soak is not optionalSalt pork out of the package is aggressively cured; an hour in cold water draws off enough to make it edible, and drying it thoroughly afterward is what lets it crisp rather than steam. Taste a fried scrap before you season the gravy at the end.
- What salt pork is nowLook for slab salt pork or fatback, sold near the bacon. It is unsmoked, so bacon is not a substitute in flavor, though thick-cut unsmoked side pork comes close. Slice about 1/8 inch thick.
- "Heat the fryingpan very hot"Medium-high on a modern burner, in a heavy skillet, dry. The pork renders its own fat within a minute or two; adding any is unnecessary and will make the gravy greasy.
- Drawing the pan back on the rangeOn a wood range this meant sliding to a cooler part of the top. Take the skillet off the burner entirely, or drop to low, then add the milk in a thin stream while whisking so the roux takes it up without lumping.
- A pint of milkTwo cups, whole milk. With two tablespoons of flour this gives a thin pouring gravy, which is the point here; use three tablespoons of flour if you want it to coat.
- Cook the gravy longer than a minuteOne minute is barely enough to lose the raw-flour taste. Simmer three to five minutes, stirring, until it thickens and the pasty edge is gone.
- Yield and servingRoughly 3/4 lb of pork with this quantity of gravy would serve about four, though the recipe gives no amount of meat and no yield. It was commonly eaten with boiled or baked potatoes, hot biscuits, or cornmeal mush, and wants something plain and starchy under it.
Fried salt pork with milk gravy is a working staple of nineteenth-century American rural cooking: pork was the meat that could be salted down in a barrel and kept without ice, and flour and milk were what a farm kitchen had at hand. The dish traveled under many names, among them white gravy and, in the South, sawmill gravy, and the same method applied to bacon or ham drippings produced the breakfast gravy still served today. Its appearance in the Butterick Cook Book (published by the pattern company alongside its magazines for homemakers) is a reminder that even a turn-of-the-century book aimed at aspiring middle-class households kept a firm hold on cheap, salt-barrel cookery. The one-hour soak suggests a cure pitched at keeping rather than at taste.