The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery by T. J. Smith

Author:T. J. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2019-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

Placing meat in a cotton sack to be hung in the smokehouse.

Simmie Free preferred sugar-cured pork to anything else:

You kill your hog. Let the heat go out’a your hog. Lay it down on a table durin’ the night and let th’heat of the hog get out of it. Then, take your sugar cure and just rub it all over—you know—just plumb over both sides of it. Then you got it and, boy, it’ll go all through that meat. I hung mine up over yonder in the crib. […] When you sugar cure it, ain’t nothin’ else’ll ever happen to it—just good all the way through. It makes some awful good breakfast eatin’. Good!

The 1970 Spring/Summer issue of The Foxfire Magazine contained an extensive article on slaughtering and preparing various types of meat. We’ve excerpted it here to wrap up our discussion on curing meat.

Taylor Crockett preferred eight pounds of salt for each hundred pounds of meat. He mixed the salt with one quart of molasses, two ounces of black pepper, and two ounces of red pepper. Then he smeared the mix on the meat, allowing it to stay six to eight weeks depending on the weather (longer if it got very cold). “Valley John” Carpenter used simply five pounds of salt for a two-hundred-pound hog, while Lon Reid used ten pounds of salt per hundred pounds of meat. Lake Stiles, rather than putting the meat in a smokehouse, would take it to his cellar, which had a dirt floor. He would put the meat right on the floor with the flat side down, and allow the earth to draw the animal taint out of the meat, keep it cool, and prevent souring or spoiling.

If meat was needed during the winter months, the family simply cut what they needed off the curing pork, washed the salt off, soaked it overnight, parboiled it the next day, and then cooked it. If it was left all winter, it would go through a second operation in the spring.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.