The Vermont watchman. [volume] (Montpelier, Vt.) 1883-1911, 1889-01-09
Curing Pork.

The English people understand good
living very well, but are unnecess alily
elaborate and somewhat quackish in
many of their methods; though the re-
suits are not, therefore, necessarily
bad. Poverty sometimes makes us
aware of the beauty of simplicity and
it is a fact that western and back
woods ways of curing and cooking
often give by far the best results. No
one, for instance, who has not had the
privilege of sharing with camp of
lumbermen the time-honored Yankee
dish of pork and beans knows what a
delicious luxury can be made of such
simple food, so simply cooked. Who
ever has hunted and camped with old
time backwoodsmen in the West has
also had the chance to learn that they
know more about the culinary art, in
some of its fine points, than the most
renowned "chefs" of our big and
luxurious cities. We are led to these
remarks by noticing in the columns of
an exchange some instructions in re-
gard to curing pork, copied from an
English paper, the Farming World.
For barrel pork, they are quite in ac-
cordance with the best practice in this
country, with the exception of requir-
ing the brine to be boiled. If the best
sun-made salt is used for packing, the
brine for filing is best made of good
dairy salt in pure soft water, frequently
stirred for several days, until no more
can be dissolved
But when it comes to the treatment
of smoked meat, the old method of
compound pickle, with sugar and salt
peter, is approved as the proper prepa-
ration of the meat, before smoking.
In the first place, it ought to be said
that no good bacon can be made with
out having, first of all, properly fed
pork to make it of. To have really
choice bacon, the pigs must be of
strain that does not run all to fat; and
they must be fed with mixed diet
that will promote the formation of
good proportion of lean meat But
feeding alone will not give us what we
want in perfection. This lean meat is
muscle, and muscle can not be developed
by feeding alone, even the most skillful.
To get up his muscle, the pig must
have exercise, and a good deal of it.
Really the old razor-back" swine of
the past made much better bacon than
any meat made in close captivity can
be. But there is medium between
the two extremes, and it seems TO us
that there never was, or could be, bet
ter bacon than once was, and to some
extent now is, made in the wooded parts
of the middle West, where the hogs
were pastured most of the year, had the
run of the woods, and got but little
corn until the last two or three months.
The sweetest meat was that made in
5OON 0N"A AOi lhdSli u e., NUS.
When the ground under the chestnut,
hickory, beech and butternut trees was
covered with these, the pigs which had
been running in the pastures, with only
little old corn thrown out to them
daily, fatted fast in the long, mild
autumns of the Ohio valley, on this
mast, and made, at killing-time, that
fine " streaked" side-meat, and those
meaty hams, which we rarely see in
these days of penning and corn-fatten-
ing-and hog cholera, and trichonosis.
Where we have few nut trees, or in
nutless seasons, we must provide a sub
stitute of some sort. For the summer,
nothing is better than clover pasture,
which should be so proportional in eX-
tent that the pigs put upon it can not
destroy it, or so prevent its growth as to
prematurely exhaust it. AS fall comes
on, green ears can be thrown to them
in the field, to supplement the failing
clover; and when the time comes that
they must be put up, the corn itself
should he supplemented with mill
feed and oats, in order to supply its fair
proportion of nutriment to the muscu-
lar system, and thus develop the lean