How to Preserve Baked and Roasted Meats
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the meat
Select suitable portions of the carcass for salting.
Set aside those portions for immediate use.
Cut the remaining meat into joints of appropriate size.
Bake or roast the meat to your desired doneness.
Seal in fat
Melt a large kettle of lard or drippings while the meat cooks.
Place each cooked joint into a jar or tub with a reversed plate at the bottom.
Pour the hot fat around and over the meat until fully covered.
Allow the fat to cool, which will exclude air and preserve the meat for several months.
Melt the fat in a kettle of water.
Let it cool to form a cake on the surface.
Serve
When ready to use, remove the meat from the fat.
Heat the meat quickly.
Serve.
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
What each ingredient does
- Meat joints
- Provide the main body of the preserved meat, which is cooked before sealing.
- Lard or drippings
- Forms a fat layer that excludes air and helps preserve the cooked meat.
The step that matters
Covering the meat fully with hot fat. Fat must completely cover the meat so no air reaches its surface. Exposed meat can spoil, since air carries oxygen and microbes that the fat seal is meant to block.
“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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