Curing Culinary Blues

Salt-cured meat is luxurious: ruby, silky protein, bursting with flavor. It is the perfect thing to feed people around the holidays, because most of the work will have been done a week or two before the party. A thin slice of duck, striped with fat, is just the thing to warm the soul and comfort the mind. Plus, everyone will be impressed when you say that you did this yourself.If you’re lucky enough to live near a cave off of the Mediterranean where the legs of pigs are hung from the rocks and bathed in the briny air, you know all about salt curing. Or perhaps you’re a pig farmer from Virginia or Kentucky. In which case, thank you very much for your ham, read no further. Having ejected that small, brilliant fraction of The New York Sun readership, it’s time to share their secrets.Stock, when triply reduced, becomes the magical ingredient called demi-glace, a seemingly impossible concentration of flavor. Tomatoes, when cooked all day, become ragu, an explosive, unparalleled tribute to fully developed taste. Reduction and concentration are the keys to mind-blowing flavor. With salt and a cool breeze, you can achieve the same transcendence with meat.Originally, salt-cured meat was not a product of aesthetics but rather practicality: Salted meat stays edible. If you were a poor farmer in the ante-fridgidaire era, you were going to think hard about how you might save some of that pig you just killed for the leaner times in spring, when the new crops weren’t yet in and the old ones had all been eaten. The first idea, apparently, was to bury it by the seashore for the winter.This to me is one of those remarkably gutsy moments in gustatory history akin to the first guy that looked at an artichoke and figured he might as well try to eat it, or the lunatic who decided he was going to dig around inside a sea urchin until he found something tasty. Ever seen the inside of a sea urchin? Eating it is not what comes to mind, believe me.But some adventurous individual walked down to the seashore and buried the meat. I suppose it was simply to keep it from being eaten by bears or wolves or stolen by marauders. When he returned to his spot, the salt water had filtered through the sand, and bathed the joint of meat until it had become something else entirely. Not quite cooked, but not raw either. What’s better: it was now vividly flavorful, seasoned inside and out. And what’s even more than that: It hadn’t spoiled.Suddenly, our poor dirt farmer in his shack made of peat and dung had a realization. With a little refinement of the process, he would no longer have to pay $24 a pound for air-dried beef. He would never have to set foot in Schaller & Weber again!Here’s how it works. Salt is a solute, which means that it can be dissolved by water. When you pack a piece of meat in salt, the two environments (ham, not ham) will attempt to become equally salty. The water is moving out. The salt is being drawn in. Getting the water out of the meat is what you’re doing when you heat it up, too. No water equals no microbes, no bacteria.You can cure anything. I wouldn’t particularly want to eat a salt-cured chicken breast, but duck takes the richness of evaporation well. You end up with the most sophisticated ruby-colored transparent slices of dense meat you can imagine. Cure pork tenderloins yourself; they’ll be done in a week or two. Just like our dirt farmer, you’ll never have to pay for prosciutto again.Salt meat is wonderful on its own, but it also is an intense ingredient that can really up the ante on any table. Always cut the meat in the thinnest slice possible; the pieces should be translucent. Drape them across a simple salad. I make one with an artichoke creme dressing (just blend hearts in a food processor with lemon and olive oil), romaine, and thinly sliced red onions. Or eat the salt meat julienned and tossed with pasta, extra virgin olive oil, and grated Parmesan Reggiano. Or just put it on a cracker with a shave of Romano cheese.The result will be so delicious that you’ll overcome whatever nervousness you might have about unheated meat.The process is the same for all types of meat, from duck to venison. You’ll need an incredible amount of salt, some cheesecloth, and good meat. (Now is the time to go to some nice Italian butcher you know out in Sunnyside or visit the friendly folks at Citarella.) Following are specific recipes for spices I used, with instructions tailored to the different kinds of meat.Mr. Watman cooked in restaurants before becoming a professional writer. His book “Race Day,” is forthcoming from Ivan R. Dee.

Curing Culinary Blues

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