No. 14

Breasts of Pork Salted and Smoked, English Bacon

Lard de Poitrine Sale et Fume. Petit sale a l'Anglaise

If needed for summer use, begin toward the end of March to dry-salt some breasts of pork for four days, then pack them tight in a salting tub and cover over with a thin layer of salt. Pour over them a freshly made, and highly salted brine, place on top a perforated cover, and lay over some heavy stones, so that the breasts are entirely submerged, and leave them in this state until needed, setting the tub in a cool well-aired place.

This salt pork will keep well until the fall, although it will be much saltier than if prepared in the usual way. The usual way is to wash the breasts and put them in brine in a special salting tub without any other meat; use a fork to remove them from the brine, as the hands cause fermentation, and when the salt pork is needed for use, it can be unsalted in cold water for several hours or till sufficiently done. Bacon or smoked salt pork is prepared the same, putting it in a brine half as strong and keeping it in a 50 degree Fahrenheit temperature, but no more. Drain and dry in an aired place, then smoke for three days in the cold.

← No. 13 To Bread with Bread Crumbs, English, Flour, Elementary Methods No. 15 Brine →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a curing procedure rather than a dish, and it belongs to a kitchen with a cold cellar, a daily-tended salting tub, and no expectation that the pork will ever be eaten without long cooking. The gaps that mattered less then are the ones that make it unusable now.

No measured cureThe brine is described only as "highly salted" or "half as strong," with the actual formula deferred to No. 15. Curing safety depends on a known salt concentration and a known nitrite level, measured by weight against the weight of the meat; "highly salted" is not a specification, and guessing at it is how spoilage and botulism risk enter.
Cold smoking is not cookingThree days of cold smoke leaves the pork raw throughout. Smoke below roughly 90F adds flavor and surface drying but no pathogen kill, so the entire safety burden falls on the cure — which here is undefined. Cold smoking is a controlled process requiring nitrite, monitored temperature and humidity, and it should not be improvised from a nineteenth-century paragraph.
Months at cellar temperatureThe salted breasts sit from late March until fall in a tub in a "cool well-aired place," and the bacon brine is held at 50F. Fifty degrees is well above modern refrigeration and inside the range where spoilage organisms work slowly but steadily. The margin that a cool stone cellar once provided does not exist in a modern house.
The fermentation warning is real, and datedHandling the meat with bare hands rather than a fork was the period's understanding of contamination: hands introduce organisms that sour the brine. The observation is sound, but it is the whole of the sanitation program here, and it is not enough.
Terms, for readingLard de poitrine is pork belly — the breast, the cut that becomes bacon or petit salé. Petit salé means lightly salted pork, typically boiled and served with lentils or cabbage. "Unsalted in cold water" means soaked to draw the salt out, not desalinated by any chemical means.
If you want the resultFor bacon or salt pork at home, use a current recipe with cure weights given as percentages of meat weight and a specified nitrite source. The technique described here — brine, press, submerge, drain, smoke — survives essentially unchanged in those recipes; only the numbers have been supplied.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) was Charles Ranhofer's record of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its "Elementary Methods" chapter covers the unglamorous groundwork a large restaurant kitchen did for itself: breading, brines, stocks, salted pork. The instruction to begin at the end of March points to a seasonal rhythm — meat salted while the weather was still cold enough to keep the tub from souring, laid down against the warm months, when ice rather than mechanical refrigeration was still the usual resort in most kitchens. Petit salé was and remains a French domestic staple, salt belly boiled and served with lentils or cabbage; the subtitle "a l'Anglaise" appears to point to the English treatment of the same cut, smoked into bacon, and the two are handled together in the one entry. That an American luxury restaurant still cured its own bellies is a reminder of how recently the commercial supply chain took that work over.