market, or any other, both bacon and hams, must be knocked hard and packed into a sugar hogshead, or something similar, to hold about ten hundred weight. Bacon can only be cured from the middle of September until the middle of April."
The annexed system is the one usually pursued in Westphalia:—
"Six pounds of rock salt, two pounds of powdered loaf sugar, three ounces of saltpetre, and three gallons of spring or pure water, are boiled together. This should be skimmed when boiling, and when quite cold poured over the meat, every part of which must be covered with this brine. Small pork will be sufficiently cured in four or five days; hams, intended for drying, will be cured in four or five weeks, unless they are very large. This pickle may be used again and again, if it is fresh boiled up each time with a small addition to the ingredients. Before, however, putting the meat into the brine, it must be washed in water, the blood pressed out, and the whole wiped clean.
"Pickling-tubs should be larger at the bottom than at the top, by which means, when well packed, the pork will retain its place until the last layer is exhausted. When the pork is cool it may be cut up, the hams and shoulders reserved for bacon, and the remainder salted. The bottom of the tub or barrel should be covered with rock salt, and on it a layer of meat placed, and so on until the tub is filled. The salt should be used liberally, and the barrel filled with strong brine boiled and skimmed, and then cooled.
"The goodness and preservation of hams and shoulders depends on their smoking as well as their salting. Owing to some misconstruction of the smoke-house, and to the surface of the meat not being properly freed from saline matter, or other causes, it not unfrequently happens that during the process of smoking, the meat is constantly moist, and imbibes a pyroligneous acid taste and smell, destructive of its good qualities.
"The requisites of a smoke-house are, that it should be perfectly dry; not warmed by the fire that makes the smoke; so far from the fire, that any vapor thrown off in the smoke may be condensed before reaching the meat; so close as to exclude all flies, mice, &c., and yet capable of ventilation admitting the escape of smoke.
"The Westphalian hams, the most celebrated in Europe, are principally cured at and exported from Hamburg. The smoking of these is performed in extensive chambers, in the upper stories of high buildings. Some are four or five stories high, and the smoke is conveyed to these rooms from fires in the cellar through tubes, on which the vapor is condensed, and the heat absorbed, so that the smoke is both dry and cool when it comes in contact with the meat. They are thus kept perfectly dry, and acquire a color and flavor unknown to those smoked in the common method.
"Hams after being smoked may be kept any length of time by
