Take pig’s ears and feet, clean them thoroughly, then soak them in salt and water, for several days. Boil them tender, and split them, they are then good fried. If you wish to souse them when cold, turn boiling vinegar on them, spiced with pepper-corns, and mace. Cloves improve the taste, but it turns them a dark color. Add a little salt. They will keep good pickled five or six weeks. Fry them in lard.
After being scoured, should be soaked in salt and water seven or eight days, changing the water every other day, then boil it till tender, which will take eight or ten hours. It is then fit for broiling, frying, or pickling. It is pickled in the same manner as souse.
Chop fresh pork very fine, the lean and fat together, (there should be rather more of the lean than the fat,) season it highly with salt, pepper, sage, and other sweet herbs, if you like them—a little salt-petre tends to preserve them. To tell whether they are seasoned enough, do up a little into a cake, and fry it. If not seasoned enough, add more seasoning, and fill your skins, which should be previously cleaned thoroughly. A little flour mixed in with the meat, tends to prevent the fat from running out when cooked. Sausage-meat is good, done up in small cakes and fried. In summer, when fresh pork cannot be procured, very good sausage-cakes may be made of raw beef, chopped fine with salt pork, and seasoned with pepper and sage. When sausages are fried, they should not be pricked, and they will cook nicer, to have a little fat put in the frying-pan with them. They should be cooked slowly. If you do not like them very fat, take them out of the pan when nearly done, and finish cooking them on a gridiron. Bologna sausages are made of equal weight each, of ham, veal, and pork, chopped very fine, seasoned high, and boiled in casings, till tender, then dried.
A ham that weighs ten pounds, should be boiled four or five hours; if very salt, the water should be changed. Before it is put on the table, take off the rind. If you wish to ornament it, put whole cloves, or pepper, in the form of diamonds, over it. The Virginia method of curing hams, (which is considered very superior), is to dissolve two ounces of salt-petre, two tea spoonsful of saleratus, in a salt pickle, as strong as possible, for every sixteen pounds of ham, add molasses in the proportion of a gallon to a hogshead of brine, then put in the hams, and let them remain three or four weeks. Then take them out of the brine, and smoke them with the hocks downwards, to preserve the juices. They will smoke tolerably well, in the course of a month, but they will be much better, to remain in the smoke-house two or three months. Hams cured in this manner are very fine flavored, and will keep good a long time.