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Makes about 1 quart

SALT PORK

Almanzo ate the sweet, mellow baked beans. He ate the bit of salt pork that melted like cream in his mouth.

—Farmer Boy

There was no food I fantasized about more as a child than salt pork, except maybe watermelon rind pickle. But since no one I knew ate salt pork and I had never seen it at the grocery store, I assumed it was extinct, a food we left behind in our sod homes on the prairie, along with the dandelion wine, corncob jelly, and chokecherry jam.

Then, in my twenties in a grim New York City Food Emporium, I came across a square brick of Hormel salt pork in the refrigerator near the baloney. I carried it home to my apartment and unwrapped it reverently. I could not believe how seductive it was, a garish pastrami pink generously striped with white fat that really did look as if it would melt “like cream” in my mouth. I immediately sliced it and fried it and took a bite. I spat it out. It was more mineral than meat. I couldn’t believe that this was what I had been pining for all those years.

Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. We’ll never know exactly how salt pork tasted in days of yore. Pigs were different, preserving methods were different, and tastes were different. Today there’s interest in salt pork among hard-core Civil War reen-actors, but recipes are not in heavy rotation on the Food Network. Salt pork recipes in antique cookbooks, like the 1830 Frugal Housewife (“Dedicated to those who are not ashamed of economy”), generally involve layering the pork with salt in a barrel, putting a stone on top to weight it down, and sticking it in the cellar. From the Frugal Housewife: “Look to it once in a while, for the first few weeks, and if the salt has all melted, throw in more. This brine, scalded and skimmed every time it is used, will continue good twenty years.”

She was a very frugal housewife. There are other methods for salting pork today, like the one in Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn. It’s worth making your own salt pork just to flavor baked beans.

Make it or buy it? Make it.

Hassle: Not bad

Cost comparison: Homemade salt pork: $3.00 per pound. Hormel: $5.85 a pound.

One 4-pound chunk pork belly, skin on

¾ cup kosher salt

6 tablespoons sugar

4½ teaspoons pink salt (see Appendix)

1. Cut the pork belly into chunks the size of your fist. In a small bowl, mix together the salt, sugar, and pink salt. Toss and coat the pieces of pork with the cure. Pack the pork in a crock and store, covered, in a cool place, like the cellar. Alternatively, you can put the meat in a resealable plastic bag in the refrigerator.

2. After seven days, remove from the refrigerator. I mean cellar. Unlike store-bought 7 pork, it will be flabby and a dusty, dispirited pink, but what it lacks in beauty it makes up for in succulence. Rinse the meat, pat dry, and wrap tightly. Store in the refrigerator for 2 weeks. Freeze for longer storage.

Makes 2½ pounds

Pork belly—a luscious and fatty cut from the midsection of a pig—typically requires a special order from the butcher and will cost between $5 and $8 a pound if you shop at a Western supermarket. If you want it cheaper and sooner and happen to live in an area with a large Asian population, Chinese supermarkets stock pork belly as routinely as Western supermarkets stock boneless, skinless chicken breasts. I’ve bought a lot of $2.99-per-pound pork bellies from a local Chinese market, no special order required. I’ll warn you, though: not only are these pork bellies never organic, once I bought a skin-on pork belly from a Chinese market and it came with big, fleshy nipples. Easy to detach, but disconcerting.

BAKED BEANS

In Western novels and movies, cowboys are always stabbing open cans of beans and spooning them up cold by the fire while telling stories. So I suppose canned beans are traditional in their way. My paternal grandmother—the daughter, wife, and mother of cattlemen—was modestly famous for her baked beans, which she ladled from a richly glazed brown ceramic