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A. M. G
Cover the bottom of the barrel with salt an inch deep; put down one layer of pork and cover that with salt half an inch thick; continue this until all your pork is disposed of; then cover the whole with strong brine; pack as tight as possible, the rind side down or next to the barrel; keep the pork always under the brine by using an inner cover and clean stones. Should any scum arise, pour off the brine, scald it, and add more salt. Old brine can be boiled down, well skimmed, and used for a fresh supply.
This is a barrel salt-pork cure of the kind every farm household kept going year-round, and it depends on conditions no modern kitchen has: a cold cellar, a wooden barrel, and a cook who checked the brine weekly for months. As written it gives no weights, no brine strength and no temperature, which is why it cannot be followed today.
- No measured salt concentration"Strong brine" was judged by eye or by rules of thumb such as floating an egg or a potato, tests that give no reliable figure. Without a measured salt-to-water ratio or a brine hydrometer reading, there is no way to know whether the meat is preserved or merely salty, and the margin between those two states is where spoilage organisms live.
- No curing temperature givenSalt penetrates a whole side of pork slowly, over weeks. Current curing guidance calls for the meat to be held at refrigeration temperature, around 36-40F, for the entire period. At room temperature the interior of a thick cut can spoil long before the salt reaches it, and the original assumes a cold cellar the reader no longer has.
- Clostridium botulinumAnaerobic conditions under brine, low acidity and an uncertain salt level are precisely the combination that permits C. botulinum to produce toxin. Many historic cures included saltpetre alongside the salt; this one names none, and saltpetre in any case must be used in measured quantities that modern curing salts specify by weight.
- Reusing and boiling down old brineBoiling and skimming a used brine recovers salt but also concentrates whatever proteins, blood and bacterial load the previous batch left behind. Scalding kills vegetative bacteria but not bacterial spores, so the "fresh supply" is not the clean start the instruction implies.
- Scum as a warning signThe recipe treats surface scum as routine maintenance. It is in fact evidence that the brine has weakened enough for microbial growth — pouring it off and re-salting does nothing for meat that has already been sitting in a failing cure.
- What to do insteadIf you want salt pork or home-cured bacon, use a current recipe that specifies cure weight per pound of meat, a refrigerated curing temperature and a defined curing time. Those numbers are the whole of the safety, and this text supplies none of them.
Barrelled salt pork was the backbone of the nineteenth-century North American larder, more so than beef: pigs could be raised on kitchen waste and woodlot mast, they were slaughtered in late autumn when the weather turned cold enough to work safely, and a well-packed barrel carried a household through to spring. The rind-side-down instruction and the weighted inner cover with clean stones are the practical heart of it — meat that bobbed above the brine went bad first. Salt pork of this kind seasoned beans, chowders and greens, and provisioned ships and armies; much of the working knowledge behind it was simply assumed, which is why a book like this can leave out every quantity and still expect to be understood.