being packed in dry ashes or powdered charcoal, or 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 smaller pieces, is put into powdering-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 piece 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 middlings last, which may be piled up two feet above the top of the 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
