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Pickled Pork
After the pig has been dressed and is cool enough to cut up, pack the side pieces in a cask, with a liberal quantity of salt, and pour in enough water to come to the top of the pork; place a cover over, with a heavy weight on top, keeping the pork well excluded from the air until it is wanted.
This is a whole-hog salting instruction of the kind that assumed a cold cellar, a scalded oak cask and a cook who had done it every autumn since childhood. As written it gives no salt weight, no brine strength, no temperature and no time, and it cannot be followed safely today.
- No brine strength is given"A liberal quantity of salt" and "enough water to come to the top" produce an unknown concentration. Safe wet curing depends on a measured salt-to-water ratio held for a measured number of days per pound; guessing leaves the interior of a thick side piece under-salted while the surface looks cured.
- No temperatureThe recipe says only to keep the pork "until it is wanted," with no holding temperature at all. A method like this depended on a cold storage space that most kitchens no longer have; a brined pork side held near room temperature spoils from the inside, and the cover and weight that exclude air make that spoilage less obvious.
- Anaerobic riskA weighted, air-excluded meat pack held for an indefinite period is the kind of environment in which Clostridium botulinum is held in check only by adequate salt (and, in later practice, nitrite). Neither is specified here, and botulinum toxin gives no warning by smell or appearance.
- No curing saltPeriod cellar curing often relied on saltpetre, which the recipe omits entirely; modern curing uses precisely dosed nitrite blends. Either way the quantity has to be weighed against the weight of meat, and this recipe never weighs anything.
- The caskAn open wooden cask cannot be sanitised to any standard a modern kitchen would accept, and brine that is reused or allowed to grow scum reseeds the next batch.
- Scale"the side pieces" of a dressed pig means a large quantity of meat committed to a single unmonitored vessel. There is no way to test a portion and discard the rest.
- If you want pickled porkUse a current tested recipe with weighed salt, weighed cure, a stated brine ratio and refrigerated holding temperatures. Read this page as a record of how it was once done, not as a procedure.
Pickled pork -- also called barrel pork -- was one of the foundation ingredients of nineteenth-century American cooking, and instructions like this one are a reminder that even a hotel kitchen was still connected to a farmhouse tradition of putting up a whole animal in autumn. Pigs were killed after the first hard cold, when the carcass could be chilled overnight before cutting, and the flitches or sides went into brine while the hams and shoulders were smoked. What came out of the cask was not a delicacy but a staple: it flavoured chowders and baked beans, larded lean birds, gave fat for frying, and fed crews at sea, where brined pork in a cask was for centuries the standard ration. Instructions like this one were written for readers who already knew the missing details by hand and eye, which is why they read as vague now; the disappearance of the cold cellar, and of household hog-killing, took the knowledge with it.