Skip to main content
Main

Leicestershire Spiced Bacon

A cured pork product seasoned with salt, saltpetre, allspice, black pepper, treacle, and smoked over oak, beech, and peat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Allspice and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,395 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Leicestershire Spiced Bacon

Ingredients

Directions

Cure the pork

  1. Cut well-fed pork into suitable pieces for salting.

  2. Rub both sides of the pork with warmed treacle.

  3. Let the pork sit for a week, turning daily.

  4. Mix coarse sea salt, saltpetre, allspice, and black pepper.

  5. Rub the mixture on the fleshy side of the meat.

  6. Let the meat sit for a week, turning every other day for two weeks.

Dry and smoke

  1. Dry the meat with cloths.

  2. Suspend the meat in a draft, turning every third day.

  3. Coat the meat with bran or pollard.

  4. Smoke the meat with oak and beech for two weeks.

  5. Add peat to the smoking fuel.

  6. Continue smoking for an additional week.

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. Allspice + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Coarse sea salt
Draws out moisture and preserves the meat while seasoning it through curing.
Saltpetre
Helps preserve the pork and gives the cured meat its characteristic pink colour.
Treacle
Adds sweetness and helps the surface brown and develop colour during curing and smoking.
Black pepper
Contributes pungent aroma and heat to the cured surface.
Allspice
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour to the cure.

The step that matters

Turning the meat during the long cure. Salt and curing agents must penetrate evenly; turning the pieces regularly keeps the brine and cure distributed so no area is left under-salted or spoiled.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes