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Ham Pickle
To 100 pounds meat, nine pounds salt, five ounces saltpetre, four ounces ground pepper, one quart molasses or two pounds brown sugar, one tablespoonful saleratus.
This is a curing formula rather than a recipe in the ordinary sense: a list of proportions for preserving a hog's worth of ham, with no method, no temperature and no time. Several things about it fall outside what can be done safely in a modern kitchen.
- The saltpetre is above modern limitsFive ounces of saltpetre (potassium or sodium nitrate) to 100 pounds of meat works out to roughly 3,100 parts per million, above the amount permitted in dry cures today. Nitrate and nitrite are genuinely useful curing agents, but they are dosed by weight against a known meat weight and within a regulated ceiling, and this formula exceeds it.
- No temperature and no timeCuring is a race between salt penetration and bacterial growth, and the whole of it depends on holding the meat at refrigeration temperature — roughly 36-40F — for a defined number of days per inch of thickness. The original assumes a winter smokehouse or cellar and a killing season, conditions the writer did not need to spell out and a modern reader cannot reproduce by guesswork.
- It is not clear whether this is a brine or a dry rub"Pickle" in nineteenth-century usage usually means a wet brine, but no water is given. Without knowing the volume of liquid, the salt concentration is unknowable, and salt concentration is the entire safety margin of the process.
- The specific hazard is botulismCured, smoked, low-oxygen meat held at cellar temperature is the classic environment for Clostridium botulinum. Nitrite is what suppresses it, and suppression depends on the right dose reaching the interior of the meat within the right window — none of which this formula controls.
- SaleratusSaleratus is an early form of baking soda (historically potassium bicarbonate, later sodium bicarbonate). A single tablespoon across 100 pounds of meat does essentially nothing chemically, and the reason for its inclusion here is not clear.
- If you want to cure a hamUse a current, tested curing recipe with weighed curing salt, a stated meat weight, a stated refrigerator temperature and a stated number of days. The proportions here are of historical interest only.
Formulas like this one belong to the farm calendar rather than the kitchen: hogs were killed in the first hard cold of late autumn, the hams and shoulders went into salt soon after, and the meat was drawn on through the following year. Salt did the preserving; saltpetre was added for the pink colour and the characteristic cured flavour, though the chemistry behind it nitrate reduced to nitrite by bacteria in the cure was not understood at the time. The molasses or brown sugar softened the harshness of so much salt. That a general-purpose household cook book carries a 100-pound cure at all is a reminder of how recently the line between household cooking and household butchery was drawn.