Bacon, 100 Years Ago

[Shel_B]

Was bacon from the late 19th and early 20th centuries substantially different than what we generally buy in the supermarket these days?  Was it cured differently, perhaps without nitrates/nitrites, made by smoking it more, or were different cures used?  Thanks!

[rotuts]

don't know.  what they did not do for sure was inject it with water.

[Blether]

 

 

o every thousand pounds of meat, put three pecks (by measure) of salt, with which a pound of pulverized saltpetre has been previously and thoroughly mixed.

 

... from here.  So in this case at least, using nitrate.

[Martin Fisher]

Here in America, bacon was prepared in several different ways 100+ years ago... none of them much like commercial bacon is prepared today.

Saltpetre was often, but not always, used.

[CatPoet]

Well I do have a cook book from 1915 and it  says to use saltpetre or pack it tightly in wooden drum with salt and  oak leaves before smoking.

[Martin Fisher]

Sure that's one way of doing it.
One of my hobbies is collecting old books relating to meat curing and and sausage making.
It's important to note that the world was a much smaller place for folks back then, food craft traditions varied a bit or a lot from place to place, especially prior to The Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act which became law in 1906.

[jayt90]

The raw material for saltpetre in the 19th century was seabird poop (Chile), bat guano, or barnyard manure.

 

Saltpetre is synthesized now, and still favored over nitrites in some parts of Europe.

[rotuts]

What they stared with might be a bit more delicious than what we buy now from Frank Perdue and the Tyson families

 

but you are still going to get a lot of stuff you might not like now, maybe in even greater quantities

 

after all, it didnt kill them then so we have US

 

probably a lot of what 'people' ate was a bit rancid.

 

after all   ...

 

they were hungry

Edited July 4, 2014 by rotuts (log)

[CatPoet]

The world was as tiny as people think, we still  had contact with people  , it just took longer to talk to them. If you had family in USA you did send back a letter and some contained  recipes.  We have plenty of letters from Gus on dad side and Fred on mum side.   There is even on complaining how hard it is to get porridge, Gus is tired of bacon  for breakfast.

I have  a recipe for  Italian bacon, it has herbs packed with the salt and a lot of it and it is from 1905, there is also a  spaghetti recipe  in the same  book.

Edited July 4, 2014 by CatPoet (log)

[Edward J]

Was bacon from the late 19th and early 20th centuries substantially different than what we generally buy in the supermarket these days?  Was it cured differently, perhaps without nitrates/nitrites, made by smoking it more, or were different cures used?  Thanks!

 

Don't know much about the nitrates and stuff, but I do know that refrigeration didn't exist in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and that  bacon was sliced to order in retail stores.

 

My guess is that bacon "of old" was saltier and heavily smoked as a preservation method, as opposed to refrigeration and vacuum packing in supermarket bacon

[CatPoet]

Well   people did have cold stones,  stone cellars  to keep the food cold in the 19th centuries and early  20th  centuries and if you had money you had an ice box too.

 But yes  it was much saltier then today, that why old recipes tells you to put meat into water  or wash the butter before using.

[liuzhou]

The pigs have also changed. Industrialised production and "farming" techniques mean they tend to have less fat than they did 100 years ago,

Edited July 5, 2014 by liuzhou (log)

[Martin Fisher]

The pigs have also changed. Industrialised production and "farming" techniques mean they tend to have less fat than they did 100 years ago,

 

 

Yes, here in America, modern commodity pork is much different than the pork of old.

[andiesenji]

I was born and raised on a farm where hogs were raised in open pastures but the sows in farrow were given pens with a shelter and allowed to graze as well as feed on the corn and sorghum and all the vegetable food waste.

 

Only rarely were young hogs slaughtered and always late in the fall after they had been turned into the orchards to clean up the fallen apples, pears and the nuts after the harvest (pecans, walnuts and hickory nuts).  Most were two-year-old fully mature and some were "meat" hogs and some were "lard" hogs, depending on breed.  (Berkshire, Poland China, Yorkshire were the main breeds grandpa raised but he also had some red Jersey hogs)

 

The hams and bacon were rubbed with a dry cure - salt, sugar, spices, "curing salt" - a mixture of sodium nitrite, sodium nitrate, every day for a couple of weeks in the spring house - which was as cool as a fridge in the late fall and winter, and then hung in the smokehouse for several weeks or months for the large hams which could weigh 50 pounds or more - from one of the big hogs.  The slabs of bacon were much larger than commercial bacon today.

[Mjx]

Host note: Several posts preceding the last have been moved to the Making Bacon topic, as they'd moved into a discussion of pork today, rather than bacon a century ago.