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Barreled Pork

Pork cured in a barrel with salt, brine, and optional saltpetre.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Meat and pork are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,208 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Barreled Pork

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Cut the pork into strips of uniform width, ensuring proper flanking and no backstrapping.

Pack the barrel

  1. Pack 190 pounds of green meat into a barrel, using no more than 16 pieces.

  2. Layer the meat in four layers on edge without excessive crowding or bruising.

  3. Add 40 pounds of coarse salt and fill the barrel with brine or 35 pounds of salt and cold water.

  4. If using, add 12 ounces of saltpetre to the barrel.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Meat + porktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,208 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Pork
Forms the bulk of the cure and is the meat that is preserved and firmed by salting.
Coarse salt
Draws out moisture and preserves the meat by slowing bacterial growth during curing.
Saltpetre
Helps keep the cured meat's pink colour and adds to its preserving action.

The step that matters

Adding the salt and brine. Salt must fully reach and surround the meat for the cure to work evenly. Crowding or bruising the pieces can leave some areas under-salted, letting spoilage start there.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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