nded to your
taste. The spare-ribs are usually wholly removed from the sides, with
but little meat adhering. It is the sides of small, young hogs cured
as hams that bear the name of breakfast bacon, The sausage meat comes
chiefly in strips from the backbone, part of which may also be used as
steak. The lean trimmings from about the joints are used for sausage,
the fat scraps rendered up with the backbone lard.

The thick part of the backbone that lies between the shoulders, called
griskin or chine, is separated from the tapering, bony part, called
backbone by way of distinction, and used as flesh. The chines are
smoked with jowls, and used in late winter or spring.

When your meat is to be pickled it should be dusted lightly with
saltpetre sprinkled with salt, and allowed to drain twenty-four hours;
then plunge it into pickle, and keep under with a weight. It is good
policy to pickle a portion of the sides. They, after soaking, are
sweeter to cook with vegetables, and the grease fried from them is
much more useful than that of smoked meat.

If your meat is to be dry salted, allow one teaspoonful of pulverized
saltpetre to one gallon of salt, and keep the mixture warm beside you.
Put on a hog's ear as a mitten, and rub each piece of meat thoroughly.
Then pack skin side down, ham upon ham, side upon side, strewing on
salt abundantly. It is best to put large and small pieces in different
boxes for the convenience of getting at them to hang up at the
different times they will come into readiness. The weather has so much
to do with the time that meat requires to take salt that no particular
time can be specified for leaving it in.

The best test is to try a medium-sized ham; if salt enough, all
similar and smaller pieces are surely ready, and it is well to
remember that the saltness increases in drying. Ribs and steaks should
be kept in a cold, dark place, without salting, until ready for use.
If you have many, or the weather is warm, they keep better in pickle
than dry salt. Many persons turn and rub their meat frequently. We
have never practiced this, and have never lost any.

When the meat is ready for smoking, dip the hocks of the joints in
ground black pepper and dust the raw surface thickly with it. Sacks,
after this treatment, may be used for double security, and I think
bacon high and dry is sweeter than packed in any substance. For
sugar-cured hams we append the best recipe we have ever used, though
troublesom