Very interesting. Keep the thread going, please.
Preserving meat so that it will last, is near a lost art. I can remember my parents, and neighbors killing hogs, and all the work they did to preserve it. If we ever get to where we must do that, and raise a garden and preserve that, or go hungry, and no longer have acess to the internet, most people will go hungry? I should have learned this when I had the chance, but at that age, I had important things on my mind! My folks raised a huge garden and canned, and preserved all the vegetables they ate until they were in their 80's. My mother would cook, then can pork sausage, and I said something about how good I remember that being. The next time I went over she had canned some pork sauasage for me. It didn't quite live up to what I remembered!
For the hams I cure I just soak them 24 hours in a brown sugar molasses solution with cloves, all spice, ginger, and some other stuff. It seems to pull enough salt out to make it good. That being said I remember my grand mother doing something similar to what you describe as a child.
I have read about doing this stuff and the way the world is going we moved way out in the country and have begun to learn the practical side of the stuff we have read. One of those things where I wanted to make sure I not only knew what the instructions said, but also had done them to verify they work and if they failed find a wat that would work. So we did and will do the garden much of the produce from it was canned. We harvested the fruit from the trees on our land and canned them. We got some pigs, goats, rabbits, chickens, turkeys, and ducks (not to mention the deer, squirrels, wild ducks, geese, and fish we harvest). we have a goal to be 90+% food independent by the end of the year, and intend to stay that way with or without main power.
Anyway this was the simplest salting method I could find and it is really simple
In a 5 gallon food grade bucket I layered about .5-1 inch of salt to 1-1.5 inches of boneless sliced pork up to about 5 inches from the top with the first and last layers being salt. Then I put a foil wrapped piece of plywood cut to fit with about 1/16th clearance around the edges of the bucket. Lastly I placed a 25# weight on top and sealed the bucket.
There are usually many ways to do everything on the internet. Some work well, and some not so well, it's a really good idea to figure out the best way to grow and, preserve food, before it's needed. We have a mole/gopher problem in our front yard. My wife found a method of trapping these things without harming them, on youtube. She took a two letter coke bottle, filled it with water, and turned it upside down into a gopher hole. The theory was, the water would force the gopher to come up into the bottle! Needless to say it didn't work, for many reasons, but I still have fun reminding her of her trapper days!
So I just ate the last of the salt pork Sunday, and at 2 years and 10 months, it was essentially the same as 6 or 9 months. You have to purge the salt, but after it is still edible and still tastes like cheap over-salted canned ham or cheap bacon with salt up from and pork after with a rubbery texture ( I imagine that could be boiled out of it with a pot of beans or something. My experiment is concluded, and at this time, I would be comfortable packing a 5-gallon bucket of salt pork and storing it against need.
