ound
its edges to drain away the _brine_; for, to have sweet and fine bacon,
the flitches must not lie sopping in brine; which gives it that sort of
taste which barrel-pork and sea-jonk have, and than which nothing is more
villanous. Every one knows how different is the taste of fresh, dry salt,
from that of salt in a dissolved state. The one is savoury, the other
nauseous. Therefore, _change the salt often_. Once in four or five days.
Let it melt, and sink in; but let it not lie too long. Change the
flitches. Put that at bottom which was first put on the top. Do this a
couple of times. This mode will cost you a great deal more in salt, or
rather in _taxes_, than the _sopping mode_; but without it, your bacon
will not be sweet and fine, and _will not keep so well_. As to the _time_
required for making the flitches sufficiently salt, it depends on
circumstances; the thickness of the flitch, the state of the weather, the
place wherein the salting is going on. It takes a longer time for a thick
than for a thin flitch; it takes longer in dry, than in damp weather; it
takes longer in a dry than in a damp place. But for the flitches of a hog
of twelve score, in weather not very dry or very damp, about six weeks may
do; and as yours is to be _fat_, which receives little injury from
over-salting, give time enough; for you are to have bacon till Christmas
comes again. The place for salting should, like a dairy, always be cool,
but always admit of a _free circulation of air_: _confined_ air, though
_cool_, will taint meat sooner than the mid-day sun accompanied with a
breeze. Ice will not melt in the hottest sun so soon as in a close and
damp cellar. Put a lump of ice in _cold water_, and one of the same size
before a _hot fire_, and the former will dissolve in half the time that
the latter will. Let me take this occasion of observing, that an ice-house
should never be _under ground_, or _under the shade of trees_. That the
bed of it ought to be three feet above the level of the ground; that this
bed ought to consist of something that will admit the drippings to go
instantly off; and that the house should stand in a place _open to the sun
and air_. This is the way they have the ice-houses under the burning sun
of Virginia; and here they keep their fish and meat as fresh and sweet as
in winter, when at the same time neither will keep for twelve hours,
though let down to the depth of a hundred feet in a well. A Virginian,
with some p