Skip to main content
Salad

To Cure Meat, in the Best Manner

This method cures meat using a mixture of coarse sea salt, saltpetre, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

To Cure Meat, in the Best Manner

cures 12 pounds of meat

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the salt, saltpetre, and sugar well together.

  2. Rub 1 pound of this mixture into your meat.

  3. This amount is sufficient to cure 12 pounds of meat.

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

What each ingredient does

Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the meat and helps preserve it during curing.
Saltpetre
Helps preserve the meat and keeps its colour pink during curing.
Sugar
Balances the saltiness and adds mild sweetness to the cured meat.

The step that matters

Rubbing the cure evenly into the meat. Salt and saltpetre only preserve the parts they reach. Uneven coverage leaves some areas under-cured and others overly salty, so the mixture should be worked into every surface.

“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

Chicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipesCold SlawCold Slaw160 recipes