The Manner of Curing Wiltshire Bacon
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Sprinkle each flitch of bacon with salt and let the blood drain for 24 hours.
Mix the coarse sugar, coarse sea salt, saltpetre, and common salt.
Cure
Rub the mixture well onto the bacon, turning it every day for a month.
Dry and smoke
Hang the bacon to dry, then smoke it for 10 days.
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 sugar
- Adds sweetness and balances the harshness of the salts.
- Coarse sea salt
- Draws moisture out of the meat and seasons it during the cure.
- Saltpetre
- Preserves the meat and helps give cured bacon its pink colour.
- Common salt
- Draws out moisture and inhibits spoilage bacteria during curing.
The step that matters
Rubbing the cure in and turning daily. The cure must reach every part of the meat evenly. Uneven coverage or skipped turning lets some areas spoil or cure unevenly over the long curing period.
“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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