If your meat is to be dry salted, allow one teaspoonful of pulverized saltpetre to one gallon of salt, and keep the mixture warm beside you.  Put on a hog’s ear as a mitten, and rub each piece of meat thoroughly.  Then pack skin side down, ham upon ham, side upon side, strewing on salt abundantly.  It is best to put large and small pieces in different boxes for the convenience of getting at them to hang up at the different times they will come into readiness.  The weather has so much to do with the time that meat requires to take salt that no particular time can be specified for leaving it in.

The best test is to try a medium-sized ham; if salt enough, all similar and smaller pieces are surely ready, and it is well to remember that the saltness increases in drying.  Ribs and steaks should be kept in a cold, dark place, without salting, until ready for use.  If you have many, or the weather is warm, they keep better in pickle than dry salt.  Many persons turn and rub their meat frequently.  We have never practiced this, and have never lost any.

When the meat is ready for smoking, dip the hocks of the joints in ground black pepper and dust the raw surface thickly with it.  Sacks, after this treatment, may be used for double security, and I think bacon high and dry is sweeter than packed in any substance.  For sugar-cured hams we append the best recipe we have ever used, though troublesome.

English Recipe for Sugar-Curing Hams.—­So soon as the meat comes from the butcher’s hand rub it thoroughly with the salt.  Repeat this four days, keeping the meat where it can drain.  The fourth day rub it with saltpetre and a handful of common salt, allowing one pound of saltpetre to seventy pounds of meat.  Now mix one pound of brown sugar and one of molasses, rub over the ham every day for a fortnight, and then smoke with hickory chips or cobs.  Hams should be hung highest in meat-houses, because there they are less liable to the attacks of insects, for insects do not so much infest high places—­unlike human pests.

Pickle.—­Make eight gallons of brine strong enough to float an egg; add two pounds of brown sugar or a quart of molasses, and four ounces of saltpetre; boil and skim clean, and pour cold on your meat.  Meat intended for smoking should remain in pickle about four weeks.  This pickle can be boiled over, and with a fresh cup of sugar and salt used all summer.  Some persons use as much soda as saltpetre.  It will correct acidity, but we think impairs the meat.

WASHING PREPARATION.—­Take a 1/4 of a pound of soap, a 1/4 of a pound of soda, and a 1/4 of a pound of quicklime.  Cut up the soup and dissolve it in 1 quart of boiling water; pour 1 quart of boiling water over the soda, and 3 quarts of boiling water upon the quicklime.  The lime must be quick and fresh; if it is good it will bubble up on pouring the hot water upon it.  Each must be prepared in separate vessels.  The lime must settle so as