Vintage Cooking From the 1800s - Pork: In Great Grandmother's Time

By Angela A Johnson

Journey back into the 1800s and discover how people prepared, cooked, and preserved pork, making use of the whole animal. With no electrical refrigeration or modern conveniences, it was a time of thriftiness, resourcefulness, and "making do."

 

"Vintage Cooking in the 1800s - Pork" includes information, advice, and recipes gathered from various cookbooks published in the 1800s. It will provide you with a sense of history and an appreciation of what cooking was like in olden times. 

 

Some How-to Sections: 

 

• Make Sausage
• Prepare (Try Out) Lard
• Cure Bacon and Ham
• Pickle Pork
• Use the Whole Pig, Wasting Nothing
• Cook from Scratch

 

Delicious and Unusual Recipes Like:

 

• Pig Feet Relish
• German Roast Pork
• Boiled Bacon and Cabbages
• Bologna Sausage
• Pork Apple Pot-Pie
• Pork and Peas Pudding
• Fried Salt Pork
• Pork Stew
• Baked Pork and Beans
• Italian Pork
• and so much more....

Also included:

 

Vintage Cooking Terms and Definitions.

 

Sources - Cookbooks that were used to compile and create this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Angela A Johnson
• Release date: Jul 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201070526

Book preview

1

Cooking in the 1800s

When people cooked food, they used either an open hearth fireplace (early part of the century) or wood burning stove.

When Using an Open Hearth, cooks used small piles of embers, ashes, or coals, rather than making a large fire.

A kettle could be hung on a pole built into the fireplace and used to make soups.

A Dutch oven (pot with a fitted lid) was placed near the edge of the fire and sometimes coals were placed on the lid to provide more heat, like in an oven.

A spit could rotate a large piece of meat so it heated evenly on all sides.

A gridiron was used to grill fish or meat.

A tin kitchen or roaster was a reflector oven placed near the edge of the fireplace. The surface of the tin reflected heat back from the fire onto the food, which made it more efficient than cooking over an open flame.

When Using a Wood Burning Stove, cooks had to learn what type wood would provide the heat they needed and how long it would burn.

Cooking in the oven was a challenge. Since oven thermometers had not been invented yet, recipes for baking had no exact temperatures or cooking times.

Oven temperatures were sometimes referred to as slow, moderate, or quick/hot. One way to test your oven's heat was to put your hand in it and count how many seconds you could safely hold it there.

A slow oven was about 200-300 degrees Fahrenheit and you could safely hold your hand in it for 60 seconds.

A moderate oven was about 350 degrees Fahrenheit and you could safely hold your hand in it for 45 seconds.

A quick or hot oven was about 400-450 degrees Fahrenheit and you could safely hold your hand in it for 35 seconds.

Some recipes didn’t provide any temperature guidance at all. They assumed you’d know your own oven well enough to know how long and at what temperature to cook.

2

About Pork

About Pork ~ Fresh pork is in season from October to April. Pigs that have short legs and thick necks are the best. Young pigs, like lamb and veal, are fat and luscious, but afford very little nutriment. Pork, to be the best, should not be more than a year old.

Pork is more indigestible when fresh than when cured, as in bacon and ham. Pork, like all white meat, is quick to taint, and never should be kept long before cooking. If you have the slightest doubt about pork, it is best to reject it.

Feeding Pork ~ The flesh of no other animal depends so much upon feeding as that of pork.

Pigs fed entirely on slop make very bad pork. Pork fed by butchers or at distilleries is very inferior and scarcely wholesome. It is fat and spongy and utterly unfit for curing.

If allowed to eat the garbage of fish, they will not only have a fishy taste, but a smell of fish so intolerable when cooking that such pork cannot be endured in the house.

The offals, &c., with which pork in the vicinity of a city is fattened, make it unsavory and unwholesome. Such stuff should be used for manure and never given as food to animals, whose flesh is to be eaten by man.

Fattening Pork ~ During the two months that they are kept up to fatten, all their food must be wholesome as well as abundant, and let them have plenty of fresh water.

They should not be allowed during the time of fattening to eat any sort of trash.

Pork that is fed from the dairy and fattened on corn is the best - potatoes do very well for part of the feeding.

Pork which is fed on chestnuts, acorns and other nuts is extremely fine.

It does them much good to have soap-suds given to them occasionally.

They will thrive better and make finer pork if their pens are not allowed to be dirty. No animal actually likes dirt and even pigs would be clean if they knew how. It is very beneficial to young pigs to wash them well in soap and water.

To Choose Pork ~ To judge of pork, pinch the lean and if young and good, it will easily part. If the rind is tough, thick, and cannot easily be impressed with the finger, it is old. A thin rind denotes a good quality in general. When fresh, the meat will be smooth and cool: if clammy, it is tainted.

If fresh pork be desired, obtain it, if possible, from a source where you can be sure the animal has been kept in a cleanly manner and fattened on corn.

A pig should not be allowed to eat anything for twenty-four hours before he is killed. After he is butchered, great care should be exercised to keep the pork from tainting.

It is well for a small family in November to buy half of a spring pig. This will furnish several nice pieces to roast, strips for salting, a ham and shoulder for smoking, and fat enough for a pot or two of lard, besides remnants for sausage meat.

3

Cooking Pork

Cooking Pork ~ If pork is not cooked enough, it is disagreeable and almost indigestible. It should never be eaten unless it is thoroughly done, completely to the very bone.

Fresh Pork ~ Fresh pork is very good stewed or cooked slowly in a very little water and with plenty of vegetables in the same pot. The vegetables should be potatoes (either sweet or white), pared and cut into pieces - parsnips the same, or yams in thick slices.

Boiled ~ Pork for boiling is always previously salted or corned.

Corned ~ For corned pork, cook the vegetables separately from the meat or they will taste too salty and fat. Vegetables should be cabbage, green sprouts, green beans or peas, green corn, young poke, squash, pumpkin, or cashaw (winter squash), boiled, mashed, and squeezed.

Salt Pork ~ For salt pork in winter, have dried beans or dried peas, first boiled and then baked.

Roasted Pork ~ The slight sickness occasioned by eating roasted pork may be prevented by soaking it in salt and water the night before you cook it. If called to prepare it on short notice, it will answer to baste it with weak brine while roasting, then pouring the brine off and throwing it away.

4

Bacon

AUTHOR’S NOTE - Bacon was cut and stored as a slab of meat and not pre-sliced.

Bacon ~ Though intended to be a cheap article of housekeeping it is often, through mismanagement, rendered one of the most expensive.

Generally, twice as much is dressed as need be and of course, there is a deal of waste. When sent to table as an accompaniment to boiled poultry or veal, a pound and a half is plenty for a dozen people.

Bacon fat is excellent for corn cake, meat sauces, and soups of peas, beans, or lentils, and is useful for basting lean roasts, fish, or meat loaf.

Good Bacon ~ Good bacon has the lean of a bright pink and fine in the grain, while the fat is white and firm. If the lean is high colored, it probably has been over salted and is old besides.