218 THE HOG. 



being packed in dry ashes or powdered charcoal, cr by being kept 

 in the smoke-house if that is secure against theft, or a smoke is 

 made under them once a-week. When meat is fully smoked or 

 dried, it may be kept hung up in any dry room by slipping over it 

 a cotton bag, the neck of which is closely tied around the string that 

 supports the meat, and thus excludes the bacon-bug, fly, &c. The 

 small part of a ham or shoulder should always be hung downward 

 in the process of smoking, or when suspended for preservation." 

 Albany Cultivator. 



The following method of curing bacon which has been practised 

 in Virginia and Kentucky by one person with perfect success for five- 

 and- thirty years, during which time he states that he has cured on 

 the average from six to eight thousand pounds every year, or, in the 

 whole, the enormous quantity of from a hundred to a hundred and 

 twenty-five tons will conclude what we have to say on this division 

 of our subject. 



" The hogs should be killed when the weather is sufficiently cold 

 to ensure that when they are hung up, after having been cleaned, 

 they shall not only become quite cold to the touch, but feel hard and 

 stiff. They should be killed on one day, and cut up and salted on 

 the next. When the weather is very cold they should be hung in a 

 cellar or somewhere where they are not likely to become frozen, but 

 if there be no danger of this, let them hang in the open air. 



" The process of cutting up is too well known to need description ; 

 nothing further need be said than that the backbone or chine should 

 be taken out, as also the spare-ribs from the shoulders, and the 

 mouse-pieces and short-ribs or griskins from the middlings. No 

 acute angles should be left to shoulders or hams. In salting up in 

 Virginia, all the meat except the heads, jowls, chines, and srnallei 

 pieces, is put into powderina-tubs (water-tight half- hogsheads). In 

 Kentucky, large troughs, ten feet long and three or four feet wide at 

 the top, made of the Liriodendron tulipifera, or poplar-tree, are 

 used. These are much the most convenient for packing the meat 

 in, and are easily caulked if they should crack so as to leak. The 

 salting-tray, or box in which the meat is to be salted, piece by piece, 

 and from which each piece, as it is salted, is to be transferred to the 

 powdering-tub or trough, must be placed just so near the trough that 

 the man standing between can transfer the p ? ece from one to the 

 other easily, and without wasting the salt as they are lifted from the 

 salting-box into the trough. The salter stands on the off-side of the 

 salting-box. Salt the hams first, the shoulders next, and the mid- 

 dlings last, which may be piled up two feet above the top of th* 

 trough or tub. The joints will thus in a short time be immersed 

 in brine. 



" Measure into your salting-tray four measures of salt (a peck 

 measure will be found most convenient,) and one measure of clean 



