SC - Recipe 4-Weekend of Wisdom

[Bernadette Crumb]

Seton1355 at aol.com wrote:
> 
> OK, but why is salt pork used over fresh?  Didn't they have fresh?  Were they
> on a long sea voyage? I always understood that salt anything was saved for
> when you didn't have fresh something.  And having a pig for meat seems common
> enough.
> Phillipa Seton
> >

While my experience with pig slaughtering dealt more with 1700s
and 1800s, I would be surprised if things had changed too
drastically from the middle ages.

Pigs are generally born in the spring.  They are usually fattened
over the course of the summer and early autumn, and then
slaughtered in November (or at least after the daily temperature
has approached the freezing mark--no refrigeration back then.) 
After slaughtering, the pig carcass was scraped free of bristles,
skinned and butchered.  All the meat was salted for preservation
because it would need to last until the following butchering
season to be used throughout the next year.  Perhaps a meal or
two worth of meat might be withheld from the salting process, to
be eaten right away, but in general the meat was salted and
packed in barrels.  Some may have been smoked (not sure of when
smoking meat for preservation was used in Medieval Europe). 
Perhaps wealthy people would be able to have fresh pork at other
times of the year (probably having enough pigs that killing one
out of season wouldn't hurt their annual food supply) but the
non-rich would have kept the pig alive as long as possible to
have it as fat as possible when slaughtering time came.

Hope I haven't confused you...
Bernadette Crumb
(Formerly Lady Sarra Bradhurst
and desperately seeking a name for 
my new Moorish persona)
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