Meat and Right

John Mitchinson on the devotional art of curing pork

Flickr: Caleb Phillips

In the opening sentence of her 1966 classic, Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery, Jane Grigson makes a bold claim: ‘It could be said that European civilisation – and Chinese civilisation, too – has been founded on the pig.’ Once, even the lowliest agricultural family would have kept, fattened and killed a pig to feed themselves in the long cold months of winter, and some of us are still going at it.

What sets pigs apart from the other ungulates we’ve domesticated for food is that delicious layer of subcutaneous fat. This, combine with salt, enables us to preserve pig for longer, keeping precious calories in suspension in the form of cured hams, bacon, sausages and salamis. This is the bit of pig keeping I love. The challenge of turning the two sides of a 120kg Gloucester Old Spot into something memorable. Time is of the essence even on a cold winter’s morning when you’ve just returned from the abattoir; you don’t want to risk any of the meat spoiling.

I now have something of a routine. I will have always prepared a brine. I like to use our village cider as the base liquid, adding to it the best possible salt – we don’t do salt here in Oxfordshire so I use Welsh sea salt from Halen Môn, down in Anglesey, and I order in bulk. It seems to penetrate more quickly and not leave the bitter aftertaste of commercial salt. The salt is matched by an equal quantity of molasses sugar – again the complex flavour adds much more than sweetness. I then pour in crushed juniper berries, black peppercorns, bay leaves and cloves. The liquid should just reach a boil and then be left until it is properly cold – ideally under 5 degrees celsius – another reason for doing this job in winter.