The story of bacon is set in the late 1800s and early 1900s when most of the important developments in bacon took place. The plotline takes place in the 2000s with each character referring to a real person and actual events. The theme is a kind of “steampunk” where modern mannerisms, speech, clothes and practices are superimposed on a historical setting. Modern people interact with old historical figures with all the historical and cultural bias that goes with this.
The work is far from complete, but with so many collaborators around the globe, I put this out for review and comment. So, to the curing industry, please fire away with the contributions and corrections.
In the development of bacon curing technology, four iconic curing methods stand between the old dry-cured system and the modern system of the direct addition of nitrites to curing brines and the latest development which is Grid bacon. Here I list the chapters dedicated to these different systems of curing.
In the post above I list all the chapters in Bacon & the Art of Living which deals with the legendary company from Calne, Wiltshire, C & T Harris. I present the chapters for those who desire to restrict their inquiry to the Harris operations.
I fell in love with the story of the Kolbroek from the first time I heard it. It is one of the indigenous South African pig breeds, closely related to the Kune Kune from New Zealand. In trying to trace the origins of these breeds, I had to go back to the development of the English pig. It’s one of the greatest stories of our trade and here I share the complete work from Bacon & the Art of Living on these amazing animals! The list of chapters dealing with these are given in the link above.
In Bacon & the Art of Living, I dedicate three chapters to salt. It remains one of my favourite study subjects. The truth is that I only scratched the surface. It is a subject that I will return to often and I am planning to expand on Chapter 10.12, The Salt of the Land and the Sea. In the link above, I present the three chapters for those who are interested in a more thematic study.
The Afrikaner Nation and Boers feature prominently in my story of bacon. The timeline is such that I returned to South Africa just before the outbreak of the war. So, inserting the Boer War into this work makes perfect sense.
The second role of inserting it is that it is a perfect example of the power of the mental world where we serve images we created and exist only in the mind such as nationalism. It is central to the “art of living” considerations and insights that came to me through the discipline of meat curing.
The use of nitrites and nitrates in meat curing has been one of the most researched matters in food science for many years. Over the years I have dedicated an enormous amount of time to understand not just its chemistry, but also the history of its use. Here I want to list all the work I have done on the subject The one document where I try and pull everything together is Bacon Curing – a Historical Review. I deal with its chemistry in an elementary manner in Bacon & the Art of Living, my book on the history of meat curing in Chapter two, The Curing Molecule.
The quest has been for years to try and find a way to cure meat without using nitrites and nitrates directly. It has recently been discovered that nitrate and nitrite are of huge physiological importance to humans. As such, the value of a quest to eliminate it from food must be reconsidered. This leads me to as the question:
It has been discovered in recent years that bacterial fermentation of meat yields nitric oxide which cures meat. A fundamental question follows namely if it is possible to have cured meat without any nitrites and nitrite present. I am not talking about using nitrite and nitrite but the newly developed meat fermentation systems. It is possible to effect curing without the use of nitrates and nitrites directly or indirectly. However, from a consideration of the various reactive nitrogen species, the question comes up if nitrite and nitrate will not eventually form in meat where nitric oxide is present.
Still, understanding the curing reaction should be the starting point for the serious meat curer. This led me to investigate the various reactions relevant to our trade.
Not just are the reactions beautiful and fascinating, but the history of its use and the development of the art of curing meat is without a question one of the most exciting stories never told!
In the history of our art, one man stands tall as one of the most influential in the development of nitrite curing. I dedicate an entire section to the history of this remarkable man.
Nitrite curing was commercialized in 1918 and the impetus for its global spread following WW2 was the work of the Griffith Laboratories on the back of the work of Nachtmüllner. The German and American affinity for the direct use of sodium nitrite was however not shared internationally and in England in particular they have accessed nitrite for a very long time using bacterial fermentation of the brine itself. In the next section, I explore the development of curing systems pre-1918. In the next section, I review the major curing systems that have been used around the world since before nitrite curing became commonplace.
The story of bacon is set in the late 1800s and early 1900s when most of the important developments in bacon took place. The plotline takes place in the 2000s with each character referring to a real person and actual events. The theme is a kind of “steampunk” where modern mannerisms, speech, clothes and practices are superimposed on a historical setting. Modern people interact with old historical figures with all the historical and cultural bias that goes with this.
The Curing Molecule
Before we get into storytelling, it will be of great value to have a technical discussion about meat curing. The story will be more enjoyable if you understand how curing works. This chapter is designed to give you enough background to understand the fundamentals of curing and some of its complexities. This is not intended to be a science textbook and so I take the liberty to present matters in a somewhat simplified manner. I don’t for example always indicate when I am talking about an ionic compound when I write a simple notation for nitrite as NOO. I also added, “Want to know more?” sections for those who have a chemical background or those who want to gain a deeper understanding. Get through Chapter 2 and a story awaits which will blow your mind!
What is Meat Curing?
The most important question in a work on the history of meat curing is to understand what meat curing is! Meat curing is the process whereby meat is changed into a form that lasts outside a refrigerator. We can say that it imparts longevity to meat. In the curing process, there are two changes that we can identify with our senses. A delicious taste develops and the colour change to a characteristic pinkish/ reddish colour. A slightly less obvious characteristic is cured meat is safe from microorganisms which make us sick. These characteristics are observed through observation but what happens as far as chemical reactions are concerned?
The large molecule which is the building block for muscle or meat is called a protein. An important class of proteins in our body is called hemeproteins (also spelt haem protein or hemoprotein). These are proteins which have something attached to them that biochemists refer to as a heme prosthetic group. A prosthesis helps a person who lost a limb to still accomplish a certain task like a handshake. The prosthesis in the case of proteins is non-protein additions to the protein which accomplish specific tasks. The heme prosthetic group allows proteins to carry oxygen, facilitate electron transfer and participate in oxygen reduction among other processes. Curing is the reaction between protein and the small gaseous molecule called nitric oxide (NO).
In curing nitric oxide is bound onto this heme component. It is this binding of nitric oxide to the protein which we observe as a pinkish/ reddish colour. Nitric oxide is responsible for key characteristics of cured meat. The colour, the longevity and the fact that the product is free from microorganisms, likely to make us sick. Another characteristic of cured meat we observed with our senses is the cured taste. Exactly how the taste is altered through curing is something which we have not completely worked out yet.
Want to know more?
Nitric oxide is the most important molecule related to the cured colour of meat. This does not say that other chemical species also derived from nitrogen do not play a role in changing the colour. This is true related to colour formation as well as anti-microbial ability. An example is nitrogen dioxide (NO2). The researcher Cornforth (1998) showed that pink rings that form in beef roasts cooked in gas ovens and turkey rolls are produced by nitrogen dioxide (NO2). Similarly, we know that both nitrite and nitric oxide plays a very important role in the antimicrobial working of the curing process. The researcher, Scairer (2012), reported on the antimicrobial value of nitric oxide.
How is Nitric Oxide formed?
Let’s begin by looking at how nitric oxide is formed. For our discussion, what is essential to know is that it is formed both inside the body or by the body itself and outside the body. Almost every cell in our bodies can produce it. There are also two basic types of reactions that produce it.
i. Meat proteins contain an amino acid called L-Arginine. The body has the ability to access its nitrogen and combines it with an oxygen atom to create nitric oxide. Beginning in the 1990s scientists started to understand that certain bacteria also have the ability to convert L-arginine into L-citrulline and nitric oxide which cures meat. The exact mechanism is still under investigation but this remarkable discovery accomplishes what has become like the search for the holy grail namely the curing of meat without the use of nitrate or nitrite.
ii. The second major way that nitric oxide is created is the conversion of nitrate to nitrite and the nitrite to nitric oxide. The source of nitrate can be salts such as sodium or potassium nitrate or it occurs in large volumes in certain plants which we regularly consume. Bacteria break the nitrate down to nitrite and nitrite is changed into nitric oxide through mainly chemical reactions. In conventional curing operations, either nitrate or nitrite salts are used to create nitric oxide which cures meat.
This means that bacteria are involved in the reactions involving nitrate and L-Arginine. Interestingly enough, this seems to be the reason why this remarkable discovery remained unidentified for so many years. The conversion of L-Arginine only takes place when no nitrate is present. If nitrate is present the bacteria use the nitrogen found in nitrate and not L-arginine. That L-Arginine plays a role in salt-only, long-term curing processes has been suspected for many years and in the 1990s it was identified that the reaction was mediated through bacteria. What seemed to have happened was that the scientific community continued to relegate this to the realm of long-term cured hams and bacon. It is only in recent years that commercial quick-curing factories using bacterial fermentation became a reality in large high throughput commercial curing plants using bacterial fermentation and no nitrates or nitrites. In fact, so successful have these developments in meat fermentation been that meat curing is achieved in approximately the same time as is done with sodium nitrite.
That sets the first part of the stage for our discussion about meat curing. My own life is a good example of how only knowing the facts as I presented above about meat curing does not mean that you can use the techniques. The reality is that these methods can only be effectively applied within the framework of a complete curing system and developing such a system is far more complex than one imagines. I have, for example, known that bacteria are able to use L-Arginine to create nitric oxide for a full five years before I started to unravel the context and requirements of what it will take to use this to cure meat in a commercial curing operation. Colour stability and a safe microenvironment must be created. The formation of biofilm must be managed. The speed of the reaction must be increased. So I can go on and on and the point is simply this, it is a wonderfully complex endeavour.
Let’s return to the consideration of the two curing paths that we just looked at. In the course of this chapter, I will make repeated references to these two reactions. The story of bacon is, in a nutshell, the story of ways to produce nitric oxide in the fastest possible time to cure meat.
It has been an obsession of many curers and scientists to find another way to cure meat. In other words, not to use the nitrate-nitrite-nitric oxide path to curing due to questions that emerged about the safety of nitrate and nitrite. The use of bacteria to cure the meat achieves this! However, right at the outset, I want to caution that nitrate, nitrite and nitric oxide are like the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit in that where you find one, you find them all due to the high reactivity of these nitrogen species (Reactive Nitrogen Species) as we refer to them. Creating nitric oxide with bacteria from L-Arginine may seem like solving the problematic use of nitrate and nitrites in meat curing but if the two cousins of nitric oxide (nitrate and nitrite) will in any event both appear in meat cured with bacteria only, is it really addressing the problem?
A far more fundamental question exists namely if the hysteria against nitrate and nitrite is warranted! Is the use of nitrite or nitrate really problematic? Are these really entities of concern when we consider human health? In recent years evidence started to emerge that the exact opposite is true namely that if we do not ingest sufficient nitrate and nitrite, this has far more detrimental health effects on humans than having them in our food.
Want to know more?
A closer look at the nitrate-nitrite-nitric oxide sequence in our bodies:
The researcher, Weitzberg (2010) reportes that “several lines of research . . . indicate that the nitrate-nitrite-nitric oxide pathway is involved in regulation of blood flow, cell metabolism, and signaling, as well as in tissue protection during hypoxia (meaning, a lower-than-normal concentration of oxygen in arterial blood).” This is the exact curing reaction when we begin with slatpetre (NO3–) or with nitrite NO2– as is the predominant current system of curing in high throughput curing operations. When we use sodium nitrite to cure the meat, the process still results in the formation of nitric oxide (NO). The curing reaction is therefore a “natural reaction” which takes place in our bodies and is essential to life.
Can we remove nitrogen (nitrate or nitrite) from our diets?
We are all aware of the importance of oxygen to our everyday lives. Without it, life as we know it is not possible. A second element as important to life as oxygen is nitrogen. Where does nitrogen come from and why is it important to life? Let’s take a step back and consider nitrogen for a moment before we return to nitrate and nitrite in food and the chemistry of curing.
The Importance of Nitrogen
I have written extensively about how reactive nitrogen species are formed from atmospheric nitrogen and I will leave the subject to be discussed later.
Sufficient to point out that nitrogen is one of the most essential plant foods and is taken up in the structure of plants. From the plants, they provide sustenance to animals when they eat the grass. The ability of animals to absorb nitrogen is a key element in what makes food nutritious. From very early it has been shown by various scientists that animals fed with food containing no nitrogen get sick and even die whereas animals fed with food high in nitrogen thrive. This is important since, in evaluating the use of nitrogen in meat curing (through nitric oxide), the first thing we must realise is that without nitrogen, there is no nutrition. We need nitrogen like we need water or oxygen to live.
Want to know more?
The role of nitrogen in plants:
Nitrogen is part of the green pigment of plants, responsible for photosynthesis, called chlorophyll. It further is responsible for a plant’s rapid growth, increasing seed and fruit production, and improving the quality of leaf and forage crops. (Plant Nutrients and Lilies) This is important as we will later see how nitrate, nitrite and nitric oxide not only cures meat and ensures the overall health of our bodies, but how the same reaction is key to the nutrition of plants. The curing reaction is by no ways something foreign. It is vitally important to all aspects of animal and plant life and humans form part of this group of animals.
Nitrogen as plant food:
Potassium (K) and nitrogen (N) together with phosphorous (P) are considered the primary nutrients of plants. These are normally lacking in the soil because plants use them for growth and thus deplete it. As we will see, nature replenishes nitrogen, but modern farming created the demand to add extra nitrogen to the soil. Potassium (K), nitrogen (N) and phosphorous (P) are all part of the macronutrients. The secondary nutrients are calcium (Ca), magnesium (MG), and sulphur (S). These nutrients are normally abundant in the soil. When lime is applied to acidic soil, large amounts of calcium and magnesium are added. Decomposing organic matter normally yields enough sulphur. Potassium (K) is absorbed in bigger volumes than any other mineral element except nitrogen and in some cases, calcium. It assists in the building of proteins, photosynthesis, and fruit quality and it reduces diseases. (Plant Nutrients and Lilies) The abundance of potassium in plants can be seen from where we first identified it namely from potash or plant ashes soaked in water in a pot. Potassium is derived from this practice predating the industrial revolution.
All proteins, the building blocks of muscles contain nitrogen. Our bodies use nitric oxide to stay healthy in many different ways. To such an extent that without nitric oxide in our bodies, life will not be possible. The question is now if the body produces enough nitric oxide on its own and the answer is no. We need to supplement what the body can produce through our diet. Some of the foods where we get nitrate or nitrite in our diets are:
-> Vegetables
By far the biggest source of nitrates is leafy green vegetables. The way that the nitrates end up as nitric oxide in our bodies is the nitrate-nitrite-nitric oxide sequence. These vegetables also contain nitrites and these turn into nitric oxide through the steps of nitrite-> various-chemical-reactions ->nitric oxide.
-> Water
Borehole water often has nitrate and nitrite from animal and human waste and fertilisers in surrounding areas. The sequence of reactions that change the nitrates in water into nitric oxide is the same as above namely nitrate-> nitrite-> nitric oxide.
-> Cured Meat
Nitrate salts are found naturally around the world. Potassium nitrate for example we know as saltpetre. Nitrite salts are manufactured salts containing sodium and nitrite. Saltpetre (potassium or sodium nitrate) is used in meat curing to this day. If we consume cured meat we ingest nitrates or nitrites and it ends up changing into nitric oxide in our bodies either through the reaction nitrate-nitrite-nitric oxide or nitrite-nitric oxide. Cured meat is, however by far the smallest and most insignificant source of nitrates and nitrites.
What is important to focus on here is the path from nitrate to nitric oxide. Let me illustrate it in greater detail using saltpetre as an example. Saltpetre can be represented as one nitrogen atom and three oxygen atoms and to make it easy, I will write it as NOOO to focus on the number of oxygen atoms. The astute observer will see that I leave the metal part of saltpetre out and I represent only the nitrate part. Nitrate joins forces with metals like sodium, calcium, or potassium to form sodium nitrate, potassium nitrate (which is known as saltpetre) or calcium nitrate. In terms of curing meat, only sodium plays a further role and we will look at that later, but for now, it’s helpful to ignore the first part of the pair and focus only on the nitrate part.
When nitrate connects to one of the metals it forms a very stable salt which does not easily lose an oxygen atom. We said we represent nitrate in this chapter as NOOO, but you remember that the actual representation is NO3–. The stable molecule now loses an oxygen atom through bacteria that use the extra oxygen atom in its metabolism. So, NOOO loses an oxygen atom through the action of bacteria and nitrite is formed which we represent as NOO (actually, NO2–). In contrast to nitrate, nitrite is an unstable molecule and is easily changed to one of the other Reactive Nitrogen Species (RNS) such as nitric oxide. If NOO loses an oxygen atom, NO or nitric oxide is formed. This reaction happens chemically and not through bacteria and it involves nitrate first changing into other forms before it ends up as nitric oxide.
Ancient curing methods start with nitrate, which is changed to nitrite and eventually to nitric oxide. This is the way that it was done before sodium nitrite became available around the world after World War I and many artisan curers still prefer to start with nitrate when they cure meat. The reason for this is that the bacteria also contribute to the development of flavours in the meat which one loses if one starts directly with nitrite in the form of sodium nitrite which does not require bacteria to change into nitric oxide to cure the meat. It became the norm following World War II to skip the step of changing nitrate to nitrite which is time-consuming and may result in inconsistent curing by beginning the reaction sequence by using sodium nitrite and not nitrate.
Whether you talk about the reaction nitrate-nitrite-nitric oxide or nitrite-nitric oxide, these scenario has at their heart the loss of one oxygen atom in every step. The opposite is also possible mainly that oxygen atoms can be added. At times, nitric oxide can gain an atom to form NOO or nitrite and NOO to form NOOO or nitrate. Remember that we said that where you find one, you are likely to find the others. So, where you have either nitrate, nitrite or nitric oxide, you are likely to find the others also.
Want to know more:
Ionic compounds:
It is easy to see that the 3 following the O which represents oxygen indicates that one nitrogen atom binds to three oxygen atoms in the nitrate molecule, but what does the minus sign indicate? The nitrogen and three oxygen atoms form a unit or a package. The nett charge of this package is, however, negative, which is what the minus sign indicates. We call this not a molecule, but a very special molecule called an ion (where there is only one atom) or an ionic compound as in the case of nitrate with nitrogen and oxygen atoms in the molecule. A compound is supply two or more elements grouped together. An ion is what we call a unit like this (which can be an atom or a molecule) but it has a net electrical charge which is either + (positive) or – (negative). Ionic compounds are held together by these ionic bonds or electrostatic forces, as we refer to them. The ion by itself has a charge as either + or – but when it connects with another ion of opposite charge, the molecule is neutral overall. It has a component which is positively charged (called an anion – a positively charged ion) and a negatively charged component (called a cation – a negatively charged ion). An example of an ionic compound from everyday life is table salt with one positively charged sodium ion (Na+) and one negatively charged chloride ion (Cl−) called sodium chloride or table salt. We call it a salt because one component is alkali and the other is acidic.
The combination of nitrogen and oxygen yields several salts of importance for example saltpetre. Like table salt is the colloquial term for sodium chloride, so the colloquial term for potassium nitrate is saltpetre. The nitrate component or ion, NO3– reacts with metal ions such as sodium, magnesium, potassium, or calcium. The metal components occur in solution (mixed into water) as a strong acid in the form of (HNO3) with a strong base (KOH) which reacts to form a crystal [P+].[NO3–] or PNO3. Traditionally, saltpetre refers to potassium nitrate.
Another metal it often combines with is sodium to form sodium nitrate. Sodium or natrum (German) is represented by the letters “Na” for sodium and again, the nitrate component which is NO3– combines to give sodium nitrate written as [Na+].[NO3–] to form NaNO3.
The final example is the metal calcium, abbreviated Ca which represents calcium, but calcium combines with two sets of nitrates (NO3–) x 2 written as (NO3)2 and the complete name is therefore Ca(NO3)2. In our discussions here we ignore the metal part of the molecule being in our examples above potassium (K), sodium (Na) and Calcium (Ca). For easy of reference, when we talk about nitrate, we only refer to the NO3–component but often, there would be either K or Na or Ca attached to the nitrate but because it plays no role in the rest of the chemical reaction, we will conveniently ignore these metal components.
Summarise different metals that combine with nitrate:
NOOO (nitrate) + K (potassium) = KNO3 (Potassium Nitrate)
NOO (nitrite) + Ca (Calcium) = Ca(NO2) 2 (Calcium Nitrite)
This is another equally likely reaction which involved the gaining of oxygen atoms and not losing it (reduction). An example of an oxidation reaction is the reaction with L-Arginine which we looked at briefly and the oxidation of ammonia (NO3)/ ammonium (NH4+), both of which creates nitric oxide and are mediated through bacteria. We will tell the story of the formation of nitric oxide from ammonia in a subsequent chapter.
We summarise the two reactions as follows:
-> Reduction (losing oxygen atoms)
One way to create nitric oxide is by removing oxygen atoms. We remove one of the three oxygen atoms from nitrate (NOOO), and we get nitrite (NOO). In the name, the “a” is replaced with an “i” and, nitrite has one less oxygen atom than nitrate. If we remove one more oxygen atom from nitrite (NOO) we get nitric oxide (NO) which is the primary curing molecule.
So, let’s review the simple but important chemistry. Don’t worry about trying to remember these. We will refer to them so many times that you will easily remember them when we are done.
NOOO or (NO3–) = Nitrate or Saltpetre
NOO or (NO2–) = Nitrite
NO = Nitric Oxide
When nitrate loses one oxygen atom, it changes to nitrite and nitrite that loses one oxygen atom changes to nitric oxide.
NOOO (nitrate) – O = NOO (nitrite)
NOO (Nitrite) – O = NO (nitric oxide)
We have seen that to form nitric oxide from nitrate salts, you lose two oxygen atoms. Chemists say that the number of oxygen atoms is reduced. The word “reduced” will be important as we will say that the nitrate or nitrite is reduced, we mean that it lost an oxygen atom.
The same salts that nitrate forms with metal are formed by the more reactive nitrite.
NOO (nitrite) + K (potassium) = KNO2 (potassium nitrite)
NOO (nitrite) + Ca (Calcium) = Ca(NO2) 2 (Calcium Nitrite)
-> Oxidation (Gaining Oxygen Atoms)
Earlier, we have seen that nitric oxide is created by our bodies through certain processes in our cells. Instead of taking an oxygen atom away, it created nitric oxide by starting with a nitrogen atom and then it adds an oxygen atom to the nitrogen atom, and it forms nitric oxide. This process is called oxidation (adding an oxygen atom).
Ammonia is oxidized through bacteria which adds an oxygen atom to nitrogen and creates nitric oxide. More about this later when we drill down into sal ammoniac. Another way this happens is when ammonia is burned in the presence of oxygen. In this case, it is also oxidized to either nitrogen gas (N2) or nitric oxide (NO). It must be noted that the oxidation of ammonium salts usually produces nitrogen gas.
The Ever-Presence of Nitrogen
Let’s return to considering how gas, nitrogen, enters our world and becomes part of the nutrition of plants and animals. Otto et al (2010) estimate that with 1.4 billion lightning flashes each year, an estimated 8.6 billion tonnes of chemicals of one form or other are generated from the general formulation of NOx. Don’t get scared with the introduction of the x. It tells us we have a variable from which the exact number differs. You are already familiar with three of the forms this can take. Look at Nitric Oxide (NO), nitrite (NO2-), and nitrate (NO3–) and see if you can spot the function of the x which in this case is either an implied 1, an overtly stated 2 or 3. Can you tell me why the 1 is implied and for what form of nitrogen and oxide?
This estimate by Otto et al (2010) is staggering. It dwarfs what the curing industry can produce. It comprehensively obliterates the notion that nitrogen or nitric oxide or even nitrite for that matter are evil chemical species, which is produced by humans, and added to meat which will, so it is reported, do harm to the human body.
Otto, et al (010) and many others show conclusively that the presence of nitrate and nitric oxide is pervasive on planet earth. Nitrite is far less prevalent than nitrate. Nitrite is highly reactive and does not stay in this state very long (similar to nitric oxide). It forms a salt such as sodium nitrate which is more stable and is naturally found in some vegetables and meat, but still, nitrites often occur in vegetables. Most current sodium nitrites in dietary sources are made by humans. Nitric Oxide is also “fleeting” being a gas which quickly reacts to become another species.
Want to know more:
“Nitrogen is an essential element for all forms of life and is the structural component of amino acids from which animal and human tissues, enzymes, and many hormones are made. For plant growth, available (fixed) nitrogen is usually the limiting nutrient in natural systems. Nitrogen chemistry and overall cycling in the global environment are quite complex due to the number of oxidation states. Nitrogen itself has five valence electrons and can be found at oxidation states between −3 and +5. Thus, numerous species can form from chemical, biochemical, geochemical, and biogeochemical processes.” (Hanrahan, 2005) Below I list the oxidation state of different nitrogen species (and important chemical data).
Global nitrogen species and selected chemical data by: Hanrahan, 2005.
If you’re interested to learn more, google oxidation states. For those with a lively interest in this, I give the oxidation state of key nitrogen species.
The special Oxidation States of Nitrogen
Ox. state
Species
+5
NO3
Nitrate ion, oxidizing agent in acidic solution.
+4
NO2
Nitrogen dioxide is a brown gas usually produced by the reaction of concentrated nitric acid with many metals. It dimerizes to form N2O4.
+3
NO2
An oxidizing agent usually produces NO(g) or a reducing agent to form the nitrate ion.
+2
NO
Nitrogen oxide is also called nitric oxide. A colourless gas is produced by the reaction of metals with dilute nitric acid which then reacts with O2 in the air to form the brown NO2 gas.
+1
N2O
Dinitrogen oxide is also called nitrous oxide or laughing gas.
0
N2
Commonly found in air and very unreactive because of the very strong triple bond.
-1
NH2OH
NH2OH Hydroxylamine, a weak base, can act as either an oxidizing agent or a reducing agent.
-2
N2H4
Hydrazine, a colourless liquid, is a weak base. Used as rocket fuel. It is disproportionate to N2 and NH3.
-3
NH3
In basic solutions and as NH4 agent in aqueous solutions. When ammonia is burned in the presence of oxygen it is oxidized to either N2 or NO. The oxidation of ammonium produces nitrogen gas. salts usually.
Demonstrating Oxidation and Reduction
Let’s illustrate this with a helpful diagram which illustrates both oxidation and reduction of nitrate found in beetroot.
Nitrate–nitrite–nitric oxide pathway. Adapted from Niayakiru et al., 2020 by Milton-Laskibar (2021).
In the illustration above, beetroot contains nitrate (NOOO). Nitrate loses an oxygen atom and nitrite (NOO) is created. This is done through bacteria. It loses another oxygen atom and nitric oxide (NO) is created. These are examples of reduction reactions or losing-an-oxygen-atom reactions. In our current survey, nitric oxide (NO) can now react with a heam protein to cure the meat.
Nitric oxide (NO) can gain an oxygen atom to create nitrite (NOO) and nitrite can gain an oxygen atom to create nitrate (NOOO). There is another mechanism whereby nitric oxide (NO) gains two oxygen atoms at once and nitrate (NOOO) is created directly, skipping the formation of nitrite (NOO) completely. These are all examples of oxidation reactions or gaining-an-oxygen-atom reactions.
I add another graph to explain the various ways that oxidation and reduction take place of nitrate, nitrite and nitric oxide.
Changing Perceptions
Meat curing is no longer the only industry to recognise the importance of nitric oxide. It turns out the molecule vilified for hundreds of years as purportedly being bad for us, possesses some remarkable qualities which recently became the intense subject of scientific investigation. Without it, life is not possible and the reason why few people know about it is that it has only been discovered as late as the 1980s and 1990s.
Want to know more:
Nitric oxide turns out to be an extremely important molecule.
The Biologically Essential Molecule, Nitric Oxide; Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) and Reactive Nitrogen Species (RNS)
Years ago, before the importance of nitric oxide was appreciated, consumers looked upon the fact that nitrite (which is very reactive and much more poisonous than nitrate) is used in food with great scepticism. They failed to understand that in nature N (nitrogen) easily and often becomes NO (nitric oxide), NOO (nitrite) or NOOO (nitrate or saltpetre). Also, NOOO (nitrate or saltpetre) often and easily becomes NOO (nitrite) and NO (nitric oxide). Where you find NO, chances are that you will also find NOO and NOOO. Likewise, where you find NOO, you will find NO and NOOO. This is a normal part of the functioning of the human body.
The fact that nitrite is poisonous must be qualified by the statement that nitrite is poisonous under certain conditions. What exactly those conditions are will become a major focus of our study, but simply to say that because something is poisonous under specific conditions, that it is dangerous to include it in food is itself a false assertion.
During this work, I will introduce a very important comparison namely between Oxygen and Nitrogen. Oxygen is like nitrogen in that under certain conditions it is toxic and can lead to death. In fact, it can be stated that ANY cell with a nucleus, as a normal process of the metabolism of the cell, generates both reactive species of oxygen and nitrogen. (Griendling, 2016)
We understand that even oxygen has unintended negative consequences such as ageing us and causing the ultimate demise of the body despite the fact that we recognise it as foundational to life on earth. The same two-edged sword experience is what we encounter in the discipline of curing and it is extremely important to understand it and responsibly ensure that no negative environment exists that may cause the nitrogen species to be harmful to humans in any shape or form.
The facts so far are crystal clear. Nitric Oxide (NO), the curing molecule, as its cousins of nitrate or saltpetre (NOOO) and nitrite (NOO) are essential to human and animal life and the functioning of our bodies. Nitrogen is probably no more or less dangerous than oxygen.
It’s Present in our Bodies!
Green et al, (1982) gave us these interesting results of nitrate and nitrite found in our urine, saliva, plasma, gastric juices and milk which points to the fact that these compounds are ever-present in the body. It is part and parcel of human physiology!
When discussing nitric oxide which we have seen as an essential part of our biology, or whether we are talking about nitrate or even nitrite, the first thing to grasp is that these molecules are naturally part of the human body and, as you can see from the table above, they are found in our saliva and our gastric juices. There are other places they are also found on the human body, but we will get to that later. A blanket statement such as that nitrite is bad for us we can unequivocally call an incorrect statement!
Conclusion
The curing molecule is Nitric Oxide. There are different ways to produce nitric oxide. One is to start with the more stable nitrogen salt, saltpetre or nitrate (NOOO). Bacteria use nitrate or saltpetre in respiration in the absence of air and nitrite is created (NOO). Nitrite comes into contact with chemical elements which facilitates the loss of another oxygen atom which brings nitric oxide about which reacts with the protein. It is this reaction that presents itself to us as creating a pinkish/ reddish colour. Nitric Oxide, an extremely important and versatile molecule is created in the human body through a chemical reaction with the amino acid, L-Arginine. This same reaction is also mediated through bacteria added directly to the meat and fermentation becomes a very productive method to cure meat without the use of sodium nitrate or nitrate. So, nitric oxide comes to us through that which our bodies produce naturally or through our diet when we ingest either nitric oxide, nitrates or nitrites.
The story of bacon is set in the late 1800s and early 1900s when most of the important developments in bacon took place. The plotline takes place in the 2000s with each character referring to a real person and actual events. The theme is a kind of “steampunk” where modern mannerisms, speech, clothes and practices are superimposed on a historical setting. Modern people interact with old historical figures with all the historical and cultural bias that goes with this.
Bacon is more than a culinary delight! The universe chose this humble dish to be my teacher. It took many years to prepare me so that I could receive its lessons. First I had to be disillusioned. From my earliest consciousness, I was totally engrossed in my experience of life. I was taught the human mental pictures of language, religion, family, nationalism, geography, sport, school, music, history, mathematics, poetry, woodwork, war and love. At first, I believed everything. Love was unconditional, deceit was foreign, and life was simple. I must have been six or seven when I started noticing cracks in aspects of my belief system. That the worldview I was being taught was at times at odds with real life.
I wanted to figure it out and started testing using simple experiments. The first step was always to understand the system. Initially, I completely immersed myself in it. I studied the systems from within and not as an objective onlooker. I then design experiments based on the internal logic of the system. If a and b, naturally should follow c. I would change a or b or sometimes both while observing for changes in c.
The Most Elemental
In my 20s as I discovered the work of Michael E Porter and under his influence I sharpened my investigative strategy. I sought to identify the most fundamental elements which determine the essential characteristic of anything whether it is physical or abstract. The next question was this – are the fundamental elements fixed? Do they exist objectively and independently and if not, what are the things that influence their particular set of characteristics? Almost always I found such characteristics to be conditional.
This testing of anything and everything of great value and interest to me became my single-minded quest to the exclusion of any other pursuit in life. I started to appreciate the unfathomable value of old traditions. The benefit of others, infinitely more able to analyse than myself with often years of experience which I did not have. Their voices came with clarity, filtered by the sands of time into a purity that I enjoyed in my current existence that is very noisy and distracted by everything that the modern world offers.
Mental constructs which were discredited through experimentation reappeared in different perspectives as I changed my angle of looking at them. For example, I started to value the formative influence that the Christian tradition had in my life by instilling the value of disciplines like archaeology and the interpretation of ancient texts. Within the Christian framework, I wrested with the distance between us and the ancients who wrote the bible. Using the same techniques I was able to very carefully discover a body of ancient knowledge that holds the key to much of the puzzle of meat curing. I am indebted to my Christian teachers for schooling me in these. On a side note, spirituality and my connection with the mysterious “unknown” grew and I later embraced it as a valuable part of my human experience and a rich way to connect to others.
The Fog of Antiquity
The time before writing existed has a fog that obscures it from us. I discovered that the fog of millions of years contains small particles of light and reflections and just as we can know the make-up of distant stars by analysing its light, so we can decipher the knowledge of the ancients by studying the particles of the fog of antiquity. I learned that knowledge is not only acquired by sight, smell, hearing and touch but by our entire being. An example of this is my quest to know the food traditions of ancient civilisations. In Africa, I want to know the food people ate. The transmission of recipes from mother to daughter is like reciting poems or songs and carries clues about ancient times not written down anywhere. Even where I have no ancient writing to fall back on or recipes handed down I discovered that by visiting the old settlements, now uninhabited, with only ruins remaining, sitting amongst these or walking through them – the ancients would speak to me till I can see the flames of the fires where woman are preparing supper and I smell the aroma of the ancient dishes.
It was not until my 38th birthday that powers greater than me determined that the crystal that would refrac the light of the reality of everything to me would be bacon. The new world of discovery started to open up, leading me into lands I could not imagine existed. All this through my pursuit of bacon which is so mundane that nobody has bothered to write the comprehensive story of its development. It became my teacher of the marvels of the natural world.
Meat Curing’s Ancient Origins
I love the unpretentious beginnings of meat curing which is the bedrock of bacon and ham. Its secrets were initially guarded by women before artisan guilds took over as custodians of its principles and practices. The curing of meat became intimately linked with the earliest desire of humans to explore far away from their habitation. When the horse was domesticated and long-distance travel became a thing as was already the case with long sea voyages, the curing of meat was essential to ensure nutrition thus enabling the fulfilment of a basic human desire for exploration and discovery. It made international trade possible as fleets and caravans of animals and people trading their commodities around the globe relied on its power to deliver nutrition. Other more unfortunate human characteristics were likewise enabled by meat curing – the desire to dominate. Cured meat would become the staple of armies for the building of empires.
It facilitated another basic human instinct of immortality, our final destination and our relationship with the departed. Here we get the first glimpse that bacon curing is not the application of an external preservative to food or colourant to meat. The curing of bacon and hams is not something done to the meat. It is unlocking secret powers inside the meat with the aid of salts or waters or what was naturally excreted from the human and animal bodies which would then facilitate the change in the essential nature of the meat. This change in the character of the meat made it last longer, taste delicious and caused the meat to “come to life again” by changing from a dull brown to a bright pinkish/ reddish colour. The ancients found that most of the excrements of the human and animal body namely sweat and urine were powerful agents to elicit this enigmatic change in meat.
Like the power of nature which allows huge and heavy ships, laden with many tonnes of produce, people and ammunition to stay afloat by natural forces that early humans did not fully understand; yet, they mastered its application – in the same way, the ancients could appreciate the fact that the curing of meat was something natural, intimately associated with the normal, healthy functioning of the human and animal body. In this sense, it was completely different from cooking a soup where different bits of ingredients are added or the baking of bread where heat cause the parts of the bread to clump together, rise and dry out to form a new, appetising whole.
The earliest cognitive and conscious humans recognised this. Since it could bring meat back to life, could this not prevent our deceased relatives and other loved ones from decaying? Bacon and hams, the curing of meat became the bedrock which allowed mummification to develop as stories from around the world were told by travellers of corpses in distant desert lands that do not undergo decay if they are exposed to particular salts, so powerful that thousands of years later we still have these naturally mummified bodies with us. They knew what salts caused this because women used the same salts in preserving meat. They started experimenting with the salts and applied them to the deceased with astonishing success, being able, not to bring the dead to life again, but to prevent decay!
The next progression naturally followed from the previous. If it could bring old meat back to life and safeguard the deceased from decay, surely this life-giving transformation must work for the living also. So, they incorporated it into the much-prized elixir of immortality. The quest to find a cocktail that would allow us to live forever and if we could not live forever, would have the ability to stay off the outwards ravages of old age at least for a time. They not only experimented with the salts responsible for curing. They applied the same bodily experiments of sweat, urine and saliva to the skin and bathed in it as is done to this day in India where cow urine is considered holy by some. They found that it kept the skin young and prevented acne in teens.
They observed that it indeed possessed life-giving power not just for the dead, but the living also. The same elements which stimulate meat curing can heal wounds and a host of other human ailments such as the relief of chest pain. Some were able to work out that by combining curing salts with saliva, for example, its potency is enhanced many times over.
Spices had the same effect on meat especially noticed by people living in the Mediterranean and the nations around the Black sea. To this day stories persist that these people can cure meat without the salts commonly associated with curing.
Meat Curing – A Life-Giving Principle?
The ancients knew that certain salts were not the only curing agents. The millions of years separating us from them means that this knowledge was lost except in a few isolated communities where certain aspects of the trade persist in salt-only long-term curing, spice curing in Italy and Spain and drying techniques in Turkey. These are however fragmented bits of knowledge viewed as oddities and nothing more. The wonder, the life-giving aspect revealed in meat curing has for the most part been lost.
Everything related to cured meat has, however not always been positive and some linked it with disease. Humans who do not understand that the answer to the fundamental question of the most basic realities of life is not fixed, started to make absolute pronouncements on matters which are relative, depending on multiple factors. Imminent scientists from the modern world report that people who consume cured meat tend to suffer from certain ailments. They made the fatal error of concluding that cured meat is unhealthy, causing cancer. In making this assertion, they chose to ignore the fundamental importance of the curing reaction to human and mammalian existence and the complex factors which make many foods turn against our bodies. They chose simple statements that obscure truth over the wonder of complexity.
In recent years through rigorous scientific investigation, the essential role of the curing reaction in meat has been elucidated. It was discovered that the curing reaction is essential to the functioning of the body of all animals, including humans. The body has the inherent ability to create the curing reaction in response to a host of diseases and invasive enemy microorganisms and viruses. More than a defence mechanism only, the curing reaction in the body generates chemical species involved in functions such as the signalling between different parts of the body.
Most recently we discovered that microorganisms, bacteria, in particular, can create the curing reaction in meat in a way that mimics the reactions created by what came to be known as curing salts, closely linked with how our bodies create the curing reaction without the aid of salts. In other words, certain bacteria, feeding on parts inherent in meat solicits the curing reaction in the same way as curing salts, plants, spices, waters and human bodily fluids such as urine, sweat and saliva do. The basic mechanism is the same as how the body creates these reactions “by itself!” This has been a remarkable discovery and ultimately answers the question if meat curing is possible without curing salts and for that matter, without spices or plant material or human or animal bodily fluids. The answer to this question is an overwhelming “yes!”
Can Something of Infinite Benefit be Harmful?
Let’s return to the question related to a possible link between cured meat and disease and ask the important question about the health effects of cured meat as follows. Is it possible that what has been known since antiquity as having great health benefits to humans, could have detrimental effects also? This of course relates to curing salts in particular. Can millions of years of human experience be wrong about cured meat? We already eluded to the answer. The resolution of the question is in the understanding of the interconnectedness of everything. That any classification of cured meat as cancer-causing is wrong in that it incorrectly presents the conclusion as an objective statement of truth which stands independent of any other fact while it is in reality at best only a conditionally true statement. Assigning cured meat with the designation of cancer-causing these scientists reveal a lack of understanding of the interconnectedness of life and a strawman position is presented about the modern curing industry. This is a very serious error as it portrays the false use of science.
Life taught me that even a false narrative is an opportunity to learn and grow and where I at first was annoyed by this wrong view I came to appreciate it. It intensified my own search for the conditions that make cured meat either good or bad. It forced me to look deeper than I would have done and to expose the fact that under certain conditions cured meat can be dangerous just as milk or water or oxygen can be harmful to the human body under certain conditions. More than anything, these false notions trusted me in the realm of nutrition. Bacon became the doorway that taught me about the relationship between humanity and our food.
My Teacher is Bacon!
Bacon became my teacher. Worlds opened up that have been lost to time, obscured in the fog of antiquity. Meat curing’s scope of influence is breathtaking. It aided almost every great human endeavour. The loss of this knowledge is tragic and I set out to tell its story from the perspective of my discovery of its secrets.
On my many travels around the globe, I wrote letters to my kids and colleagues recounting what I am learning. I present much of the work by publishing these letters, interspersed with chapters where I advance the storyline and explain essential detail. Like bacon, I also speak from a very specific environment that impacts the presentation of the facts. The southernmost tip of the great African continent became the backdrop of my discoveries and from here I set out on a global quest to learn how to make the best bacon on earth.
In the end, bacon not only taught me about health, nutrition and science but about my relationship with the entire human race and with my family. As Bacon taught me about life, the lessons reached into the most basic realities of my existence. Its story became my own story of love and life, tragedy and triumph, deceit and manipulation by others, respect and honour, great and enduring friendships and comradery.
What follows is the story of Bacon & the Art of Living!
The Life and Times of George Samworth Sen. - Foundation of Greatness!
Eben van Tonder
3 September 2021
Introduction
One of the iconic food producers in England is without question, the legendary Samworth Brothers. As an amateur food historian, my interest in the company is obvious. They owe their existence to the visionary work of several generations, beginning with George Samworth Sen, father of George Samworth born in 1868 who was the father of the Samworth Brothers George and Frank. Much has been written about George Samworth (born in 1868), but what do we know about his dad who was himself a pig buyer in Birmingham? As will be seen in this article, the legacy of this extraordinary family started with whom I will refer to for sake of clarity as George Samworth (I) and his son, born in 1868, George Samworth (II).
In 1896, his son George (II) would set up his own business as a pig dealer in Birmingham. Their existence spanned a time in England when the English pig breeds were established, the industrialisation of the meat processing trade took place and when the English producers had to weather the storm of the intense onslaught of foreign firms trying to wrestle slices of the lucrative English meat market from their hands. In the immortal words of Charles Dickens, “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness,” and in the life of George Samworth Senor and Junior, it was in a real sense their spring of hope.
Despite the lack of information on the life of George (I), I pressed on to glean insight into the times he lived and the man he was.
First I ask the question if it is possible to know what the discussions would have been around the dinner table of a pig trader in Birmingham towards the last half of the 1800s.
A. Dinner Table Conversations with George Samworth (I)
History provides ample information to know with a great degree of certainty the discussions they would have had around the dinner table in their Birmingham home.
Birmingham Above Knockcroghery
Birmingham, at this time, was and remained a key hub for the hog trade, linking the central and northern counties with the all-important southern counties well into the 1900s. The south with its dairy industries took the lead in hog production but this does not mean that the north and centre of England were not important and the key hub in this epic drama was Birmingham!
An example of its importance in the first half of the 1900s can be seen in a comparison that was made between Birmingham and the Irish village of Knockcroghery in the county of Roscommon almost right in the centre of Ireland. In a 1939 publication (Díosbóireachtaí Párlaiminte) the author mentions that if pork producers from this Irish town would bring their pigs to the Birmingham market, they would leave with £2000 more in their pocket than if they sold it in their home town the next day.
Joseph Harris, writing his epic work on pork husbandry in 1885 writes about the Birmingham pig market and says “Birmingham has long been one of the greatest pig markets in the kingdom, and the pig breeding of the district has been not a little affected and improved by the winter fat-stock show which has for some years been held here at Bingley Hall, with great success.” This places George Samworth Senior in a city, as important to the hog trade as Calne and Gillingham.
Getting into the Mind of a Hog-Man in the late 1800s
Besides confirmation of the importance of Birmingham, Harris’s writing gives us a glimpse into the mind of a hog man in the late 1800s and by extension, into the mind of George Samworth. This was his world and these are the times when he was growing up and when he started his career. In the dinner conversation with George and his family, these are exactly the kind of things that would be discussed.
Hot topics at this time were the development of the Berkshire and Tamworth breeds and here Birmingham played a key role. Harris writes, “The town of Birmingham unites Staffordshire and Warwickshire. The old Warwickshire breed was a white or partly-coloured animal of the old-fashioned farm-yard type and has never been improved into a special breed. The Staffordshire breed was the “Tam worth.” At present, the Tamworth is rapidly going out of favor with farmers, from the want of aptitude to fatten, and are being replaced by useful pigs, the result of miscellaneous crosses of no special character. The best is the middle-sized white pigs, a cross of the Cumberland-York with local white breeds, often called the Cheshire. The northern cross improves the constitution, and gives hair of the right quality, hard, but not too much or too coarse.” (Harris, 1885)
“At Bingley Hall, the class of Berkshire breeding-pigs under six months old generally brings from twenty to twenty-five pens. At present, however, the Berkshires in the Birmingham district are chiefly in the hands of amateur farmers, tenant farmers not having taken very kindly to them.” (Harris, 1885)
“But the breed must be spreading rapidly if the ready sale of the young pigs at the Birmingham show be taken as evidence.” (Harris, 1885)
“Mr Joseph Smith, of Henley-in-Arden, one of the most successful exhibitors of Berkshires, keeps three or four sows, and sells all their young; and others find the demand for young pigs constant throughout the year.” (Harris, 1885)
“Mr Thomas Wright, of Quirry House, Great Barr, (who did so much toward founding the Bingley Hall show) considers the cross of the Berkshire with the Tam worth produces the most profitable bacon pigs in the kingdom, the Berkshire blood giving an extraordinary tendency to feed, and securing the early maturity in which alone the Tamworth breed is deficient. The cross of the Berkshire boar with large white sows has been found to produce most satisfactory results to plain farmers. My own notion with regard to all agricultural stock is, that we should abandon crosses and stick to our pure breeds, adapting them to our particular wants by careful selection.” (Harris, 1885)
“The Tamworth breed is a red, or red-and-black pig, hardy, prolific, and the best specimens well-shaped, but slow in maturing. It seems a near relation to the old Berkshire; but modern Berks breeders carefully exclude all red-marked pigs from their breeding-sheds. Reddish hairs at the tips of the ears of Essex would be permitted and admired. Mr Alderman Baldwin, of Birmingham, is a noted breeder of this hardy, useful pig, which, however, does not seem to have any success as a prize winner. At the Royal Agricultural Show at Warwick, 1859, the Yorkshire and Berkshire breeds divided all the honors.” (Harris, 1885)
Improving the breeds was the talk of the town and George Samworth found himself in the middle of these developments.
Improved Oxfordshire
Birmingham, with its close proximity to Oxfordshire, would have been up to date with developments from this productive part of the country. The information is fascinating as it gives us the mechanism of introducing foreign genetics into the English hog gene pool.
An Essex Boar (Harris, 1885)
Harris writes about the Improved Oxfordshire the following: “These black pigs,” says Mr Sidney, “although they are scarcely numerous enough to enable them to claim the title of a breed, are interesting, because representing a successful attempt to unite the best qualities of the Berkshire and improved Essex. The old Oxfordshire breed was very like the old Berkshire. The first great improvement is traced to two Neapolitan boars imported by the late Duke of Marlborough when Marquis of Blandford, and presented by him to Mr Druce, senior, of Eynsham, and the late Mr Smallbones, in 1837. These Neapolitans were used with Berkshire sows, some of which were the result of Chinese crosses. Two families of jet black pigs were formed by Mr Smallbones and Mr Druce. On the death of Mr Smallbones, Mr Samuel Druce, jun., purchased the best of his stock, and had from his father, and also from Mr Fisher Hobbs, improved Essex boars. The produce was a decided “bit,” and very successful at local, Royal, and Smithfield Club shows. The improved Oxfords are of fair size, and all black, with a fair quantity of hair, very prolific, and good mothers and sucklers.” (Harris, 1885)
“Mr Samuel Druce writes me: ‘I have recently raised one of Mr Crisp’s black Suffolk boars. In fact, wherever opportunity offers, I obtain good fresh blood of a suitable black breed, with the view of obtaining more lean meat than the Essex, better feeding qualities than the pure Berkshires, and plenty of constitution. I have never been troubled with any diseases among my pigs. Without change of boars of a different tribe, if of the same breed, constitution cannot be preserved. Where breeding in and – in from a limited stock is persisted in, constitution is lost, the produce of each sow becomes small in size and few in number. ‘The Oxford dairy farms have a first-rate market for pork in the University. Porkers at thirteen to sixteen weeks are wanted to weigh 60 lbs. to 90 lbs.; bacon pigs at nine to ten months, 220 lbs. to 280 lbs., but at that age, the improved Oxfords are easily brought to 400 lbs.” (Harris, 1885)
Essex Sow (Harris, 1885)
These were some of the things important to hog-men in Birmingham when George Samworth (I) was cutting his teeth in pig dealings. It is clear that there were a lot of technical developments taking place at this time. It is strange to think that pig breeding was at one point the “Silicon Valley-style” cutting-edge technology that grabbed the attention of young people but such were the times when George Samworth started his career. He certainly had the mind to understand it and the skill to put his knowledge to use.
The Pig Buyer
It is true that companies and people who excel in bacon and ham production have an intimate knowledge of pork farming and nutrition. The different disciplines go hand in hand. Over the years I have become familiar with most positions held related to the pork trade by, at some point, doing every conceivable job in the processing plant. I spend many days on pork farms as we integrated the requirements from the processing plant with what is delivered to the abattoir by the farmer. The one position which I never gave a second thought to and that suddenly became the focus of my interest after started doing work on the life of George Samworth is the role and life of the pig buyer.
The key function is fairly obvious – they bought pigs as intermediaries between the farmer and the factory. We get a glimpse of the role of the pig buyers from Ruth Guiry (2016). She is writing about life in another key hog town, Limerick in Ireland, but the function and role of the pig buyer could not have been much different in Birmingham. She writes that “the number of pigs produced by ‘small man’s industry’ in the city’s lanes could not meet the constant demands of the bacon factories, so a constant supply of good quality pigs from elsewhere was necessary to ensure the continual working and profitability of the bacon factories. The pig buyers … therefore played a central role in the success of the bacon industry, linking the farmers who produced the pigs with the factories that processed them. While many buyers were independent, others were employed directly by the bacon factories to source pigs at fairs..” (Guiry, 2016)
The pig trader was a skilled person. Guiry gives the following insight on the skill of the pig buyer which dovetails beautifully with the preceding section where we tried to glean insight into the dinner conversations in the Samworth household. She writes that “these pig buyers were known to be skilled, knowledgeable men who were able to quickly and accurately estimate the value of an animal …. They ensured a high quality of animal for the bacon factories, checking that a pig wasn’t too fat or too lean, that its limbs were of the right proportion and the health of the animal adequate.” (Guiry, 2016)
She mentions that the pig buyer often had to travel through the country in the course of their work. The “pig buying” happened at the station, at shows and also in the country. She describes the comradery among the pig buyers. Again, her focus is on the pig buyers in Limerick, but it is easy to see how it could be transferred to the buyers in Birmingham. She writes, “The Gores, they were from Waterford, now I know some of the Cork people, in rugby, and there’s one of them there, but Noel Murphy people were in Cork Rugby, they were pig buyers as well from Cork…well involved, they would all book into the same place …. these nights away … before the fairs, were sort of rousing affairs, you get all the pig buyers from … in the one boarding house … the crack was good like.” (Guiry, 2016)
The pig buyers often had their own lorries to transport the pigs to the abattoirs. Pig buying was a lucrative business with many pig buyers owning large properties so that they could keep some of the pigs in their back yard or somewhere else on their property. One of their other duties became the calibration of the scales. Falconer (1916) reports that it became customary for the pig buyers in Birmingham to calibrate the scales every morning. They would place half a cwt* or cwt* on the platform and then they adjusted the index till it showed a cwt* or half a cwt*.
The legendary Phil Armour from Chicago generated the funds required to start his packing plant through retail stores he started after selling equipment at the Californian gold rush. Sir David de Villiers Graaf of South Africa secured the funding for his meat enterprise through clever legal footwork after the Cape government forced him out of his shop to build the Cape Town Railway station. George Samworth (I), I suspect, did this through pig buying! Far from being a peripheral function, I now understand that the role of the pig buyer was key to the success of the meat processing trade and there was a lot of money in this line of work.
The story is usually taken up with the life of George Samworth (II), born in 1868. (1) Having looked at what certainly would have occupied the thinking of George Samworth (I), we delve into the annals of history to see if there are any tangible footprints left about him. Beaver & Lawrence (2005) begins the account of the life of his son, George Samworth (II) in riveting style. They write that he left school at age eleven and, “after trying a number of jobs in agriculture, found employment with a consortium of Birmingham pig dealers.” This means that he finally got employment with the same group that George (I), his father was associated with. I set out to see if I could find any information on his dad. A tantalising bit of information comes to us courtesy of the Birmingham Daily Post, 3 December 1892.
B. In the Shoes of George Samworth (I)
A Great Heritage from George Samworth (I)
The newspaper article reports that George Samworth, Sen. pig dealer, New Canal Street was summoned for selling ten pigs at the cattle siding at the London and North-Western Railway in Fazeley Street in violation of the markets clauses of the Consolidation Act.
It is here that we find a unique insight into the character of this remarkable man! Mr Bell (from the Town Clerk’s office) prosecuted and Mr O’Connor defended. Mr Bell said that inspector Wiltshire went to the Fazeley street siding on the 27th of October, and from what he heard went to the defendant and asked him if he had sold any pigs there. He said he did not, but the inspector subsequently saw a man named Laxton, of Coventry, who would be called, and who would state that the defendant sold him the two pigs remarking that he was fairly caught. Mr Bell then read the 90th of the Consolidation Act of 1883, under which the summons was taken out, however, because it was a fact that dealers carried on business in the cattle siding, which was an improper place, whilst the Corporation had provided a pig market at an expense of some £34 000.
– “Mr Brame: Is this part of the new pig market that the pig dealers themselves have provided?”
– “Mr Bell: Oh, no.”
– “Arthur Wiltshire, an inspector, gave evidence bearing out Mr Bell’s opening statement and said that defendant remarked “They tell me you have fairly caught me, but I will not let you do it any more. I am not going to sell any more pigs on the sidings.” The new market was open at the time“.
– “Mr Carter: It is not customary to allow pigs to be sold in the sidings?”
“Witness: No.”
– “Mr Laxton also gave evidence“.
– “O’Connor: Was the old market crowned?“
“Witness: No.”
– “What was it moved for? Because they wanted it for vegetables.”
– “Mr O’Connor said that there was no intention on the part of the defendant to commit an offence, and he would ask the Bench to bear in mind that the new pig market had only been opened on the day on which the offence was committed, and the Act required, and the Act required that the market should be opened before the offence could be committed.”
In the 1891 England & Wales Census, George is listed as a pig dealer, 41 at the time. His oldest son George was 22. We know that George (II) was born in 1868 which would have made him 22 at the time of the census, thus confirming we are dealing with the right family. The census report that his wife was Mary Samworth and that they had 10 children and one servant. The kids were George (22), Charles (19), Ernest (14), Louisa (12), Sara (10), Helen (8), Emily (7), Edith (5), William (3) and Sydney (8 months).
From this, we have a few important clues besides the fact that we are talking about the right person, the father of the man who would become the father of the Samworth Brothers, George and Frank. The fact that he had a servant is the first clue that he was successful in his trade and a man of means. The 1891 senses list the occupation of George Samworth, son of George Samworth also as a pig dealer which all confirm that we are on the right track.
The Back Story – Courtesy of Kieron McMahon**
Let’s leave the details of the court case aside for a moment and reflect on the fact that George Samworth was a pig dealer, had a servant and lived in a comfortable dwelling in Birmingham. More information came to light which confirms this and gives us remarkable insight into the man, his character and abilities and the environment where George Samworth, his son and father of the Samworth Brothers grew up in. It comes to us in the form of the back story to the events described in the newspaper article above, courtesy of Kieron McMahon, a world-class blogger from England and his site, Midlands Pubs, Birmingham.
Old Pig Market, Bordesley St & Allison St, courtesy of Google Earth.
Stone in Bordesley Street, laid by Joseph Horton, Esq. on 16 February 1892.
On the corner of Bordesley Street and Allison Street, Birmingham is a three-gabled brick building that was erected in 1891/2. It is the old pig market. Joseph Horton Esq. was the man responsible for identifying a suitable pig market. Two sites were identified, one on Montague Street and the other on Albert Street. The pig dealers preferred the latter. Due to problems obtaining the properties, the Bordesley & Allison site was seen as a good compromise by the pig dealers. The Corporation did not see it their way and so started what became known as the Pig Market Dispute.
Pig buying in Birmingham was monopolised at this time in the hands of a few men who were known as the Birmingham Pig Salesmen’s Association. One of them was George Samworth who was one of the men spearheading the development of the Bordesley & Allison site. It was a private enterprise. The other men who took the lead in the construction with George Samworth were Daniel John Foster, Joseph Doolan, Patrick Long, Joseph Gosling and John Jones. The design of the building was done by Owen & Ward.
The Corporation preferred the Montague Street site which the pig traders never liked. They nevertheless pressed on with their development and the two sites were effectively constructed at the same time. The Bordesley & Allison site was completed first in what was a race to see who would finish their construction first and was opened in 1892.
The Corporation responded with legal action against George Samworth, Daniel John Foster, Joseph Doolan, Patrick Long, Joseph Gosling and John Jones to stop pig trading at the site, claiming that it “infringed the manorial rights and statutory rights of the Corporation who collected tolls on the sales of livestock.“( McMahon) The Pig Market Dispute went on for some time. Essentially, there could not be two pig markets in Birmingham and sales at this site ceased in the late 1890s.
Fazley street where George sold the pigs which landed him in a spot of trouble is 0.3 miles away from the Bordesley & Allison site from where they were already selling pigs.
From the trial of George Samworth (I), one sentence in particular with the accompanied exchange between Mr Bell, appearing for the Corporation and Mr Brame now takes on new meaning! Let’s look at it again. It reads that “it was a fact that dealers carried on business in the cattle siding, which was an improper place, whilst the Corporation had provided a pig market at an expense of some £34 000.” Mr Brame then asked, “Is this part of the new pig market that the pig dealers themselves have provided?” to which Mr Bell replied, “Oh, no.”
Here we have a clear reference to the two pig markets which existed and it seems as if the one which the Corporation provided was in operation by October 1892. George clearly did not see himself confined to either of the two locations to ply his trade.
World-Class Schooling for Young George Samworth
The technical requirement to be a good pig buyer gives us insight into the mental aptitude and alertness of George Samworth (I), grandfather of George and Frank Samworth. It was simply a requirement of the job to be very sharp with uncanny attention to detail! Their dad, George Samworth (II) grew up in this environment.
His dad, George Samworth (I) was a formidable man and a leader in his trade. Reflecting on the incident of the sale of the ten pigs on 27 October 1892 and the leadership he took in the creation of the pig market in Bordesley Street which was completed in the same year, sometime before October, shows clearly him to be an exceptional leader and driven for success which he, no doubt, passed on to his son who worked with him. George Samworth (I) undoubtedly saw in this event, the arrest over selling 10 pigs at the wrong location, his dad’s drive for success. He was willing to trade from a different site than the two recognised sites which existed in Birmingham for pig trading at the time. It gives us a glimpse into the Samworth household and answers the question as to the topics that would have been discussed around the dinner table, especially in the middle 1890s. His son George may have left school at age 11 but what an education he received!
Conclusion
Four things stand out that George Samworth (I) no doubt passed on to his son along with the art of pig buying. These are skill, business acumen, a fierce drive to succeed and leadership! Do I hear the words of David Samworth of People, Quality, Profits?” There is, however, another remarkable observation to be made. George Samworth (II), the son of George Samworth (I), father of the Samworth Brothers did not sit back and enjoy the spoils handed to him by his dad. He took everything his dad taught him and he used these to excel even further when he started his own Pig Buying company in 1896.
This trait would become characteristic of the Samworth Brothers and that of future generations. From the first time I started learning about this family, it is something very peculiar that struck me. The ability that each son had to carve out his own unique success, built upon the success of his dad. As if there is a built-in drive to do better than the previous generation! It is remarkable and something we see right here from the founder of the company himself! His ability to transcend the achievements of his dad.
George Samworth (II) was perfectly prepared for greatness! Both nature and nurture played an indispensable part in preparing the young pig trader to take everything his dad gave him and set future generations of Samworth brothers and children up to create a legend! An utterly unique feature of the story that continues to run through the veins of his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren is the absolute focus to build upon what has been handed down to them and do better than what previous generations achieved.
From the time of the birth of George Samworth in 1868, he was being prepared for greatness through hard work, dedication, sacrifice and a legendary father who led and taught by example!
(c) Eben van Tonder
* CWT Definition
CWT refers to a centum or cental weight, meaning hundredweight.
“A hundredweight (CWT) is a unit of measurement used to define the quantities of certain commodities being bought and sold. It is used in some commodities trading contracts. Pricing by hundredweight also is a standard option for shipping packages that take up less than an entire truckload. Usage of hundredweight more generally has declined in favor of contract specifications in pounds or kilograms.
The value of a hundredweight differs in its American and British usages. In the United States, a hundredweight is a unit of mass equal to 100 pounds. In the United Kingdom, a hundredweight is a unit of mass equal to 112 pounds.” (investopedia)
** Kieron McMahon
I mention Kieron in particular because the information that he unearthed is not readily available. People deem it somehow “less important” when in actual fact, I came to appreciate the fact that such information is of the greatest importance. The entire sage of the “Pig Market Dispute” in Birmingham is relegated to dark, obscure archives and inscriptions on cornerstones scattered around the city and if someone does not take the time and make the effort to dig these stories up, they will be lost to us forever.
In my research on bacon and meat curing, I deal with this all the time. I want to state it clearly: there is no information available about the pig buyers association in Birmingham, about the Pig Market Dispute or the location of the pig trading site from any of the major English newspapers of the time that I have access to or any of the usual repositories of archive information I regularly consult. I have spent today going through countless old, out of print English journals related to agriculture, trade and industry, many of them from Birmingham and could find no reference to George Samworth, pig buyers or anything that could fill out the information required to change George Samworth into a flesh and blood person. At least, nothing remotely comparable to what Kieron unearthed! His site was relegated to pages 5 or 6 in one of my google searches.
Pubs and pork buying is not something that will be top of the list of school-leavers career choices these days. What we must appreciate is that these were the cutting edge technologies of the time and as far as pubs are concerned, key centres for the exchange of information. Was Lloyd of London, the start of the worldwide insurance industry not formed in just such a pub or coffee shop in London?! Meat curing and preservation was exactly the “global warming” issue of the 1800s. There was a real possibility that the world would run out of food. It was not possible for countries like England to have achieved the enormous advances in feeding their population nutritious food if men like George Samworth and others did not achieve the small victories they did. Nor would that have gone far if there were no reading rooms and pubs around where information could be disseminated and shared. It is the exact premise of my work at the Earthworm Express where I seek to tell small stories of enormous importance to understand our world. In my book on the history of meat curing, Bacon & the Art of Living, I devoted a chapter to celebrating the pub culture of the British and after what I’ve seen from Kieron and his team, I will be doing a major review of not just this chapter but I now want to weave it more deliberately into my entire work!
Today we have other challenges, but one thing I know for certain is that it will likewise take young dynamic visionaries who are able to exploit the latest technology and innovation who will save our planet from catastrophe. Men like George Samworth and the thousands of others I feature in my blog.
We live in a universe where we are in an endless quest for partnerships. In life, business – on every level. Molecules want to connect. That is what they are there for! All of life wants relationships to create and be more effective. Life affirms relationships! The British pubs, coffee shops and reading rooms was the catalyst where these relationships were formed. Like water to chemical reactions, they were the ether that drove these processes of the past! These thoughts elevate the work of Kiron to another universe!
I, therefore, want to give kudos to Kieron McMahon. He is not some pub-mad nutcase who simply write a blog about what he is passionate about – he is a key historian who, against the tide of academia, is able to pick up on what is really important and write about it. Kieron is absolutely spot on in his focus on pubs! Without people like him, these stories will be lost forever and I salute him for this! In years to come people will understand it, value it and talk about it. Why? Because he took the time to research it and to write his work down!
The Irish Pig Buyers seems to have been a breed of people in their own class. Why Ireland excelled in Pig Buyers is something for further investigation. Here is a delightful article from the Limerick Leader, 26 April 1986, entitled, Rise and Fall of Parish Pig Buyers.
1. “George Samworth was born in Birmingham in 1868, the eldest of a family of thirteen children. At the age of eleven, he left school and, after trying a number of jobs in agriculture, found employment with a consortium of Birmingham pig dealers. They were engaged in buying pigs from farmers in the surrounding countryside and re-selling them, still alive to pork butchers’ shops in the Birmingham area. His working week amounted to some 65 hours and his starting wage about ten shillings (50p) a week. George did well in his and gained a thorough knowledge in the trade of pig dealing.” (Beaver & Lawrence, 2005)
“Beaver and Lawrence do an excellent job of describing the life of the young George in such brilliant terms that I will do it a disservice to not quote them verbatim. They write, “For an intelligent young man, entry into the pig dealing trade was easy: no special premises or equipment were required and, as all business was done on a ready cash basis, very little capital was involved. On buying expeditions, he travelled in the guard’s van with this bicycle and on arrival at his destination area, cycled from farm to farm examining, bargaining for and buying pigs from individual farmers. these were sold to local pork butchers in the Birmingham area, of which there were then over 100 trading in the city alone.” (Beaver & Lawrence, 2005)
He had two sons, George and Frank and four daughters, Evelyn, Mable, Doris and Hilda. George Senior started his own firm in 1896 and his two sons, Geoge and Frank both joined his firm, Frank doing so at age 14. Four years before he started his own firm, in 1892, an article appeared about a pig dealer from New Canal Street, Birmingham, who was summoned for selling ten pigs at the cattle siding of the London and North-Western Railway in Fazeley Street in violation of the markets clauses of the Consolidations Act.
Join Earthworm Express on Facebook.
If I got something wrong that you want to correct or if you have information to contribute, please contact me on:
Ancient plant Curing of Meats
Eben van Tonder
15 February 2022
Introduction
I have been studying the history of meat curing and ham/ bacon processing for well over 15 years. Over the years I looked at the use of saltpetre and the older curing salt from antiquity, sal ammoniac. I considered long term salt curing. I searched the world for natural nitrite and sal ammoniac deposits and scratched around in remote parts of the globe for signs of an ancient meat curing culture.
You see, the food we eat is not always the thing that make the headlines or what historians love writing about. Yet, the precise nature of recipes and the uninterrupted mother to children transmission of culinary history, the way that the food we grew up with sticks and transmits our culture and becomes as important to us as our language makes food and recipes one of our best glimpses into the past, even to a time when writing did not exist or was not universally known.
I started to suspect that nitrate curing of meat from plant matter played just as important role in establishing meat curing as nitrate and ammonia salts. The subject was so vast and so many clues came to me from so many angles over so many years that I was uncertain where to start the story. The task was daunting!
In Lagos, I met Doğan Genç and Ayhan Yilmaz from Turkey on a business trip from the ancient city of Bursa, on behalf of their refrigeration company, Kaplanar. Unknown to them, the one morning they spent with me in a small boardroom at Spar Head Office in Nigeria would be the event that gave me the courage to dive into the subject. They introduced me to an ancient Turkish dish, Pastrma or Salt Cured Beef. It has a rich and relevant history. It became the point where I take a deep breath and launch into the subject of the ancient origins of the plant curing of meat! Let’s begin the story by looking at the history of Pastrima and immediately branching out to the general geographical and important region of the Black Sea and another famous method of curing meat, namely with horse sweat!
“The nomad Turks of Central Asia has developed many methods to preserve their surplus food. Some of these methods and the foodstuff discovered based on these methods have survived until the current times. “Pastırma” the salt-cured, air-dried beef is one of these foodstuffs that is inherited from the Central Asian Turks.” (TFC)
Cingil (2019) reports that the Turks used an area’s suitability for drying meat as a criterion for settlement. They would hang meat in a tree and observe how long it takes to dry or if it decays. If it remains in good condition for a long time, they will settle there. It is reported that Emir Timur selected Samarkand using this method.
“The Turkic tribes, who lived in the steps of Central Asia, before 11th Century A.D., have salted and air-dried their leftover meats to preserve it. Due to their nomadic nature, the dried meat was stored in leather bags and consumed, as necessary.” Weber Baldamus, in his world history book, mentions an unusual method of treating meat, based on the information obtained from Amiadus of Antioch” or Amiadus of Antakya who lived between 273-375. He writes, “Hun Turks eat dried meat and the meat that they crushed between the horse’s saddle and calf, along with fresh game animals, together with various herbs.” (Cingil, 2019) According to Cingil (2019), this is also the earliest reference to pastirma.
Jean, sire de Joinville, the great chronicler of medieval France who wrote in the 1200s, mentions “steak tartare” as “a Mongol culinary technique of placing the steak between the saddle and the saddle blanket, and eaten raw once all the blood has been beaten out.” (Turnbull, 2003) This is a famous Western reference and one that people love to use to show that de Joinville probably got the report wrong, but after a thorough investigation of the matter I believe the critics got it wrong and not de Joinville.
TFC is one of the authors who dispute the factualness of these claims. He contends that “the Huns actually stored the meats in the pockets found on the saddles. Therefore, the meat never touched the body of the horse.” He refers to the old sources of the Huns as per the Hungarian National Museum. (TFC) I see no contradiction between these sources. The meat could have been stored in the saddlebags as per the Hungarian National Museum and some riders may have chosen to place them between the saddle cloth and the saddle as described by both Jea, sire de Joinville and Amiadus. The next reference comes to us in the 1600s.
Władysław Łoś, responded to a question about placing the meat between the saddle cloth and the saddle in an online forum by pointing out that the story was again popularised in the 17th century, “by a certain Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan, a French military engineer in service of Poland, author of the book “Description des contrés du Royaume de Pologne” (“Description of the countries of the Polish Kingdom”). He repeated the Joinvilles story but this time his reference is to contemporaneous Tatar horsemen in the service of the Polish military.” He points out that the Tatars in question were not Mongols, but a Turkish tribe.
That this experience repeated itself in other parts of the world during different times is clear from history. Using the sweat of horses to cure meat, intentionally or unintentionally was practised by the Boers in South Africa. I refer to this in my article, Saltpeter, Horse Sweat, and Biltong where I explore the chemistry of sweat and the reaction with the meat and refer to the word we use on South African farms to this day in reference to the white sweat of horses as “saltpetre,” the enigmatic salt of antiquity used to cure meat and as a key ingredient in gunpowder. Saltpetre is potassium nitrate, today used in long term curing.
Ancient Meat Preservation
When one talks about ancient culinary processes, it is important to understand that the human view of bodily excretions in antiquity was vastly different from the current views. Anything generated by the body, including animals, was viewed as very special and endowed with powers, useful for humans. I refer to my article, How did Ancient Humans Preserve Food? Levine (1999), in her work on the origins of horse domestication, presented “some results from an ongoing ethnoarchaeological study of equine pastoralism on the Eurasian steppe. The data have arisen principally in the course of five interviews, conducted between 1989 and 1992, with people involved with horse husbandry in Mongolia and northern Kazakhstan in the recent past or present.”
She writes that “The horse is used extensively in Kazakh folk medicine (Toktabaev 1992). Horse fat, excrement, bone, hair, liver, kidney, and stomach are used in the treatment of many ailments. . . Back problems were treated by wrapping the sufferer in a fresh horse skin.” Importantly for our study, she says that horse sweat had a very specific medicinal value. “Horse sweat is said to cure gastric diseases, ulcers, typhoid fever, plague, fever, and cancer of the gullet.” The medicinal usages probably followed the discovery of its effect on the meat and the subsequent ingestion of it. Levine, writing on the general usefulness of the horse makes the same point about sweat again when she writes, “The horse can move rapidly and easily long distances over hard ground, providing its owners with both mobility (riding, packing, traction) and nourishment (milk, meat, fat). Other products, such as bone, hoof, hair, hide, excrement, and even sweat, are also valued, for example, as fuel, raw materials for the fabrication of tools, utensils, musical instruments, and other objects, and for medicinal purposes.”
The point is that using sweat to cure meat is not farfetched. I had a suspicion for a long time that urine and sweat had both been used in antiquity in meat preservation and from food, it entered medicinal use and gained religious value. The only way that meat can be cured is through access to nitrate or nitrite. It required nitrogen. Reduction takes place through bacteria from nitrates to nitrites and chemically from nitrites to nitric oxide which is the species responsible for linking up with the hem moiety on the meat protein and which then produces the cured colour of cured meat. The controlling mechanism of the entire process is one of reduction.
The only other way it can happen is through the oxidation of l-arginine by nitric oxide synthase. This requires time and the right conditions as far as temperature is concerned and metabolic water as we see in long term dry ageing of hams and bacon. Where reduction is easily managed, isolating, and harvesting oxidation enzymes are prohibitively expensive. The only way it can be done economically is through time and using what is already in the muscle. There should be no doubt in anybody’s mind that the basic curing reaction of accessing one nitrogen atom and one oxygen atom to form NO is the basis of curing. Without it, curing is not possible and what you have at best is salted meat.
Medical, Culinary, Religious and Military Value of Nitrogen
My initial focus was on nitrate salts found in desert areas and in certain caves. I discovered the two curing salts of choice for ancient people as ammonium nitrate (sal ammoniac) (The Sal Ammoniac Project) and the various nitrate salts. Later, humans mastered the art of producing saltpetre as it became important in the ancient worlds arms race with its key role in gunpowder.
Ray, talking about the arrival of saltpetre production technology in India, says that “the manufacture of nitre was. . . most probably introduced into India after the adoption of gunpowder as an implement of war.” (Ray, P. C., 1902: 99 – 100) According to Frey, the watershed time for India between the age of the blade and the age of the gun came in the early sixteenth century.
The area of the world where we are focussing on Turkey to the south of the Black Sea and across the Caucuses mountains into modern-day Russia and Mongolia yields ample historical record of the importance of these salts. Frey states that “it is likely that Mongols who introduced the making of fireworks to India in the mid-thirteenth century. We know almost nothing about saltpetre production during this early period, but technical expertise apparently diffused with the adoption of rocketry and eventually artillery by Indian rulers in the fourteenth century. The break-up of the Delhi Sultanate, the rise of regional states, and the growing presence of Turkish mercenaries in India may be linked to the establishment of regular saltpetre production and the adoption and use of gunpowder weapons.” (Frey, J. W.; 2009: 512)
It speaks to the sophistication of Mongal and Turkish technology related to nitrate production. In Arabic, saltpetre (nitrate salt) was referred to as Chinese snow, for, according to Needham, it was recognised and used in China long before anywhere else. “The oldest extant Arabic mention is in the Kitiib al-Jiimi’ fi al-Adwiya al-Mufrilda (Book of the Assembly of Medical Simples) finished by Abti Muhammad al-Mllaqi Ibn al-Baitarg about 1240 AD. Others follow shortly after. (Needham, J.. 1980: 193, 194)
As my investigations into the ancient origins of meat curing continued, I discovered the link between sea travel and nitrite curing. Sea travel is a great example of an activity that necessitated storing food for a long time. In keeping with the ancient practice of storing meat in water, they most probably used seawater. Dr Francois Mellett, a renowned South African meat scientist, shared a theory with me related to the curing of meat stored in seawater. He writes, “I have a theory that curing started even earlier by early seafarers: when a protein is placed in seawater, the surface amino acids are de-aminated to form nitrite for a period of 4 to 6 weeks. Nitrite is then converted to nitrate over the next 4 weeks. Finally, ammonia and ammonia are formed from nitrate. It is possible that they preserved meat in seawater barrels and that the whole process of curing was discovered accidentally.” I applied Mellett’s logic to coastal communities when I discovered the importance of meat storage in seawater by ancient coastal settlements and small groups migrating along the coastal regions of the world.
Of course, I saw horse domestication as another event, which, like seafaring, would necessitate the long term storage of meat.
Linking Meat Curing with Horse Domestication
I have known that curing would be intimately associated with the domestication of horses for a long time. I started to research the people who lived in the region where horses were domesticated. I looked at the Scythians (Research Notes on the Scythians). Horse domestication I dealt with in The Turfan Depression links with the Black Sea Region.
East of the Dnieper River within the Don and Volga basins, on the Western Front of what later would be occupied by the Scythians, between 4600 and 4200 years ago, a dominant genetic horse population appeared which replaced the wild horses that roamed Eurasia for millennia.
No sooner did I discover this, and I found myself delving through old records about the Caucasus, or Caucasia, a region spanning Europe and Asia to understand the nature of their nitrate (saltpetre) deposits. Why? Because it is linked with the origins of the art of meat curing which I suspect happened in this region and to the north of it which again is linked to Turfan, the area I first suspected as the site where meat curing became an art, but the lack of solid evidence of a long meat curing tradition from old records from the Turfan area made me suspect that they only used it at a major source for Saltpeter and Sal Ammoniac, the primary two curing salts from antiquity. These were traded along the silk road that ran into Europe. The creation of a meat curing tradition happened somewhere else.
Why the link between the Caucasus and meat curing? Because my suspicion is that meat curing was transformed into an art (practices on large scale according to set principles and procedures) in an area where the horse was domesticated because no other event would have given rise more to the need for this than the domestication of the horse (other than sea voyages). As the exploration of vast distances and military exploits became possible, following horse domestication, the need would have existed to carry food along on these campaigns and since we know the Scythians were more than likely involved in the domestication of the horse (or the ancestors of what became the Scythian people), we know that animal protein (dairy and meat) was a major part of their diet.
> The Caucasus
I begin my investigation at the southern edge of the area where horse domestication took place.
Archaeological and geological records from the Caucasus are very sparse, to say the least, but it is the one region, adjacent to the site of horse domestication natural nitrate deposits occur. From there my interest in it. Well, my interest is in the entire Don and Volga basins regions (mostly, present-day Russia) between 2000 BCE and 2200 BCE. I begin in the south and will work my way north.
So, what am I looking for in the Caucasus mountains? Saltpetre and any other clue to develop the ancient picture for me.
I came across this fascinating book by McCulloch, John Ramsy. (1845) M’Culloch’s Universal Gazetteer: A Dictionary, Geographical, Statistical, and Historical, of the Various Countries, Places, and Principal Natural Objects in the World.
> Minerals
About minerals found in the Caucus mountains, McCulloch writes, “Iron, Copper, Saltpetre, sulfur, and lead are found, the last in tolerable large quantities. Salt is almost wholly wanting.” So, a little bit of saltpetre, which explains importing it from Turfan. No salt – very interesting! It was plentiful in the Don and Volga basins. . . more on this later!
> Vegetation
I add a section of what I will be looking for in the Don and Volga basins region namely vegetables. About this McCulloch writes: “In amount and variety of vegetation the Caucasian regions seem to be unrivalled. Chardin, writing in 1692, says, ‘Mount Caucasus, till ye come to the very top of it is extremely fruitful,’ and Spencer in 1838 says, ‘However high the ascent, we see luxuriant vegetation mingling even with the snow of centuries.’ Nearly every tree, shrub, fruit, grain, and flower found from the limit of the temperature zone to the pole is native to or may be raised in the Caucuses. The Northern bases consist of arable land of excellent quality, meadows of the finest grass and dwarf wood in great abundance.” He continues to describe the quality of the soul in the regions to the south, east and west in equal lofty terms.
> Fruits, Vegetables, Grains
He continues, “Among the standard fruits are found the date palm, the jujube, quince, cherry, olive, wild apricot and willow leaved pear. Pomegranates, figs, and mulberries grow wild in all the warmer valleys and vines twine around the standard trees to a very great elevation up the mountains. . . . In addition to the vine, the other climbing plants are innumerable, which, mixing with the standards, the bramble fruits (raspberries, blackberries &c,) and other dwarf woods form a density of vegetation which is impossible to penetrate, unless a passage be hewn with the hatchet. Rye, barley, oats, wheat, millet are abundantly raised, even as high as 7500 ft. above the sea, and besides these grains, the warmer plains and valleys produce flowers of every scent and dye, cotton, rice, flax, hemp, tobacco, and indigo, with every variety of cucumber and melon.”
McCulloch quotes several texts to prove that the list just given is only a small sample of what is available from these regions, in particular from Georgia.
The list given is extremely important because it feeds into something I’ve picked up from the geological record of the territory occupied by the Scythians, especially the region where horse domestication took place in other research. A picture is forming that may alter our traditional view of the trajectory of the art of meat curing dramatically but patience is called for. Lots of investigation must be done across vast regions before I can venture to put the final picture together. If what I suspect happened is true, it will be truly revolutionary, but let the data form the picture.
The one sentence that caught my eye will follow. It’s under his treatment of the animals which are as innumerable as the plants. The detail is not as important as the list of plants and I understand that his lists of plants go back probably to the earliest, to the 1600s. It does not give us a list of what was there in 2000 BCE, but we will get there. The picture is, however, that most mentioned here were indigenous to the area and grew wild.
> Cattle
The first important comment relates to cattle. He writes, “This is also home of wild cattle; the large species (the Aurochs) being found in the forests; while of the domesticated kinds, the varieties are numerous and serviceable.” I wish I could have seen the aurochs!
> Horses
This is the actual point I want to make here following on the identification of the exact location where horse domestication took place through DNA research. He writes the following of the horse which we know has been domesticated in the region directly adjacent and to the north!”The horses of the Caucasus have been famous from very high antiquity, the Bechtag mountains having been formerly called Hippicon (ἱππικόν) from the number of these animals which were grazed upon its side (Ptolemy, v., 9). They are not less numerous in the present day and are among the very finest varieties of the species.”
These horses were indeed famed throughout the ancient world, and it stands to reason that he is describing none other the descendants of the earliest domesticated horses, referring to their excellence based on the superior qualities they had for the horseman. In other words, domesticated horses but further refined through selective breeding.
I find it absolutely fascinating that what DNA research in 2021established could have been accurately predicted based on a careful reading of these old texts. That the region had superior technology related to horse husbandry and breeding cannot be disputed and I am sure that the process which started domestication did not stop. They continued their selective breeding, no doubt! The technology that brought the events about in the 2000s BCE kept producing superior animals and it is fascinating that the traditions continued from 2000 BCE into the 1800s A.D.. It is therefore not far-fetched at all to expect meat curing to be still practised at a superior level in regions where it originated. Of course, I can imagine events that could wipe such traditions out, but as a very broad general rule of thumb, I can see how a deeper understanding of curing in a region would point to an older tradition.
> The Nations of the Caucuses
There is probably no other part of the world, except Africa, S. of the Sahara, where so many nations and languages are collected within so small a space as in the Caucasus. Guldenstadt gives a list of seven different nations, besides Tartars, who speak languages radically different, and who are again subdivided into almost innumerable tribes, among whom the varieties of dialect are nearly infinite. The principal nations he thus enumerates
1. Georgians;
2. Basians;
3. Abchasians;
4. Tcherkessians;
5. Oketiens;
6. Kistiens;
7. Lesghians;
8. Tartars.
(Reise, i., 458 – 495.)
Of these the most numerous and important are the Georgians and Circassians or Tcherkessians; but the Abchasians and Okesians, called by Pallas and Klaproth Abassians and Osetians, are also powerful tribes. In habits and manners, a strong resemblance is observed among them all; they are usually wandering hunters and warriors, for which occupations their country is peculiarly fitted, and only in inferior degree shepherds or agriculturists. A partial exception must, however, be made to this general character in favour of the Georgians, who reside in towns, and have long possessed a fixed form of government and internal polity; but for the rest, they appear to possess the erratic disposition, reckless courage, boundless hospitality, and much of the predatory habits which mark the Arab and other half barbarous people. (See CIRCASSIA, GEORGIA, &c.) It is well known that Blumenbach looked here for the origin of his first and most intellectual race of men (the Caucasian); but for this, as already stated (anté 177). there is not a particle of evidence historical or philological. The Caucasians though surrounded by the means of improvement, and occupy a country more favourably situated than that of Switzerland, have made no progress either in arts or arms; and continue to this day the same unlettered barbarians as in the day of Herodotus. (Clio, 203.) They have fine physical forms, but their mental endowments are of the most inferior description.”
Next, he describes the nations living in these regions and their technology related to warfare.
Meat Preservation with Fruits and Vegetables
I found that all the nations around the Black Sea have long and ancient meat curing traditions. Georgie, Azerbaijan, Moldovia, Romania, Bulgaria, and of course, Turkey. In fact, we began with Doğan Genç and Ayhan Yilmaz from Kaplanar visiting Lagos and alerting me to the existence of Pastirma. Unknowing to them, it would provide the crucial link I long suspected that ancients not only cured their meat with the sweat of horses and nitrate and sal ammonia salts from desert regions but more importantly with plants!
It is, therefore, from Turkey that the rest of the story comes. The traditions of curing meat with plant matter are generally from Central Asia. The dish that unlocked the plant-based curing techniques for me is partirma.
TFC writes that “the oldest meat preservation method is to salt and air-dry the meat in the sun. Different cultures of the world have different meat preservation methods. The method used to make “pastırma” is invented by the Central Asian Turks, and it is the forerunner of today’s “pastırma”, a term which literally means ‘being pressed’ in Turkish.” (TFC)
“Looking into the old scripts, such as “Divan-ü Lügat-it Türk”, the first Turkish- Arabic dictionary written by Mahmoud al-Kashgari, the word “pastırma” was not used. Instead “basturmak” was used, which means to place something under a very heavy object. In the Turkish language used by the Central Asian Turks, there were other words such as “kedhirilmek” or “kakaç” used which means dried meat, and the word “kak” was used for everything dried.” (TFC)
“Based on the information from “Divan-ü Lügat-it Türk,” during autumn, meat would be mixed with some spices, dried and stored until spring. During spring the animals would lose weight and their meat becomes flavorless. Therefore, those who have stored up some “pastırma” would have access to good tasty meat.” (TFC)
Anatolia, also known as Asia Minor, is a large peninsula in Western Asia and the westernmost protrusion of the Asian continent. It constitutes a major part of modern-day Turkey. “Arrival of “pastırma” in Anatolia was especially well received in the city of Kayseri. The 17th-century Turkish traveller Evliya Çelebi, praised “pastırma” of Kayseri in his Book of Travels, and Kayseri “pastırma” is still regarded as the finest of all. Although there are several other cities that are known to make “pastırma,” Kayseri is the only one that is associated with this delicacy. Due to the fact that it is an important trade that passes from generation to generation, the climate of Kayseri and the high amounts of nitrate found in the city water also plays a very important role in this matter.” (TFC)
“Good quality “pastırma” is a delicacy with a wonderful flavor. Although “pastırma” can also be made with mutton or goat’s meat, beef is preferred. During the Ottoman period, although they almost always consumed lamb in their dishes, when making “pastırma” beef was the meat of choice.” (TFC)
Making of Pastırma
“Cattle, mainly from the eastern province of Kars, are brought to Kayseri, where they are slaughtered, and the meat made into “pastırma” at factories found on the northwest of the city. The different cuts of meat produce different types of “pastırma.” There are 19 to 26 varieties depending on the size of the animal. Extra fine qualities are those made from tenderloin and loin; fine qualities are made from cuts like the shank, leg, tranche and shoulder; and low quality from the leg, brisket, flank, neck and similar cuts. The many tons of “pastırma” produced in Kayseri are almost all sold for domestic consumption all over Turkey.” (TFC)
“The ideal season for making “pastırma” in autumn. The season starts by mid-September and continues until the end of autumn. This weather presents qualities such as; sunny and clear skies, low humidity and mild wind that are ideal conditions for drying and maturing. The “pastırma” making process consists of 5 stages that are; procurement of the animals, preparation of the meat, processing of meat, coating and packaging.” (TFC)
“The making of “pastırma” lasts for about a month. The freshly slaughtered meat rests at room temperature for 4-8 hours before being cut into pieces suitable for making “pastırma.” The meat is slashed and salted on one side, stacked, and left for 24 hours to rest. The same process is done to the other side. After the second 24 hour period, meat slabs are rinsed with plenty of water to remove the excess salt, and left to dry outdoors for a period varying between 3 to 10 days, depending on the weather. After some further processing, the meat is hung up to dry again, this time in the shade and spaced out so that they do not touch one another. After 3 to 6 days, they are covered with a paste known as “çemen” paste. “Çemen” is composed of fenugreek seed flour, garlic and powdered red chilli pepper and water to form a paste. This paste covering the slabs of “pastırma” plays an important role in the flavour, and protects the meat from drying and spoiling by cutting its contact with air. The excess “çemen” is removed, leaving a thin layer, and left to dry again. Finally “pastırma” is ready for consumption.” (TFC)
“When buying “pastırma”, make sure that it has a bright red hue, and cut very thinly with a cleaver. “Pastırma” can be consumed freshly on its own, or cooked with eggs, tomatoes, inside the white bean stew or “börek” (the savoury pastry). In the Anatolian region of Turkey it is also added to bulghur rice pilaf and sometimes in stuffed grape leaves.” (TFC)
“In conclusion “pastırma” is an important culinary legacy from the Turkish forefathers and a delicious delicacy that adds a depth of flavour to any type of food it’s combined with.” (TFC)
An insightful video on how to make Pastirma.
Conclusion
Pastrma became my entry point into the ancient art of curing met with plant matter replete with nitrates. Over the months to come I will delve into the wonderful technical and scientific considerations which are brought up by the subject. In our time, fermentation of brine produced from plant matter with starter culture bacteria to affect the conversion of nitrates to nitrites and the chemical and enzymatic creation of Nitric Oxide which is responsible for meat curing became a trend as a way to sidestep the legislative requirement to declare the direct use of sodium nitrate or nitrite in meat cures. What I discovered is that this is nothing new. It stands in an ancient tradition of recognised curing systems. In our technical evaluation of the method, we will discover the vast accumulation of health benefits that accrue to products cured in this way. I am escited to begin this facinating yourney with you!
It is mentioned in the documents that it was among the unique products of the Ottoman Palace Cuisine (matbah-ı amire) in the 1500s and that it was among the favourite foods of the cuisine with the name “Pastama-ı Kayseriyye”.
Again, in the Seciye Registers of the Ottoman Period Ankara Province (1591-1592), it was complained that the pastrami sent every year did not come from Kayseri.
The famous traveler Evliyâ Çelebi, after describing the white bread, lavash pastry and layered pastry when he came to Kayseri when he came to Kayseri, in his Travels, said, “There is no cumin bacon and musk-cented broth, which are known as Lahim-i kadid (fat meat). He always goes to Istanbul as a gift”.
In 1880, British Lieutenant Ferdinand Bennet was describing the Kayseri Sanjak of Ankara province, the food habits of the region; Bulgur pilaf with meat, yoghurt, pita… He reported that more vegetables and fruits are eaten in summer, pastrami is consumed in winter, and 360,000 okkas of pastrami is exported from Kayseri to Istanbul in the same year.
The French traveler Vital Cuinet, who visited Anadalu in 1888-1890, described the commercial life of Kayseri and recorded that bacon, wool, carpets, animal skins, almonds and various fruits were exported from the city.
The first information about the production of pastrami is found in a Construction Book in 1869 and in Fahriye Hanım’s work titled “Housewife” written in 1894, and detailed information about Kayseri Pastrami is given.
German Ewald Banse, in his work on the observation and geography of Anatolia in 1919, wrote that “Germir Pastrami” is very famous while talking about Kayseri.
The first books on bacon and sausage production analysis in Turkey are in Ottoman Turkish; These are the books called “The Copy of Kayseri Pasdırmaları” (manufacturing style) and “Inspection of Pastrami and Sucuks of the Allelum (in general)”.
In the Ottoman period Kayseri Sanjak Yearbook, dated 1881-1891, it is stated that “Kayseri pastrami has gained a lot of fame.”
In one of his articles, the writer Mustafa Gümüşkaynak from Kayseri;
“Kayseri has neither cotton nor olives, nor tobacco, nor any natural product. Nature has made it convenient to make only pastrami in this city. When the season comes, the pastrami piri comes and sits on the summit of Erciyes. Pastrami piri is strong like nature. It makes winter summer, and summer turns into winter. Pir enchants Kayseri. Once enchanted, a bright summer comes to Kayseri. The fat drips from the bacon. This is called “Bacon Summer”. Then it rains, and this is called “Bacon Rain”. This precipitation destroys the dust. Dusty bacon loses all its value.”
Kayseri is the homeland of fenugreek pastrami since the depths of history. The effect of its climate, nitrate water and traditional master-apprentice chain is great in this.
The weather is clear and sunny, low humidity and slightly windy in the autumn, when there is intense pastrami production in Kayseri. This environment allows the bacon to dry without getting wet, in the most correct and natural way.
As it can be seen, for years, “pastirma” is a very important part of Kayseri culture, about which poems, folk songs and epics have been written.
Of course, there will be bacon production in other cities. But these never change the fact that “pastirma is from Kayseri”. Just like Antep baklava, Maraş ice cream…
In short… -Pastirma and Ravioli both belong to Kayseri, they are from Kayseri! It belongs to the people of Kayseri! Just as; -Like Sausage and Water Pastry!
Follow us on Facebook
References
A website by the Turkish Cultural Foundation (TCF); Published under the section, Turkish Cuisine. Work reference “Her Yönüyle Pastırma”, Prof. Dr. O. Cenap Tekinşen, Doç Dr. Yusuf Doğruer, Selçuk Üniversitesi Basımevi, Konya 2000; Mustafa Çetinkaya / Skylife Magazine.
Frey, J. W.. 2009. The Indian Saltpeter Trade, the Military Revolution, and the Rise of Britain as a Global Superpower; from The Historian, Vol. 71, No. 3 (FALL 2009), pp. 507-554; Published by: Wiley Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/24454667 Accessed: 23-09-2017 12:56 UTC
Levine, M. A.. (1999) Botai and the Origins of Horse Domestication. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 18, 29–78 (1999) Article ID jaar.1998.0332, available online at http:/ /www.idealibrary.com
Needham, J.. 1959. Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 3, Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and the Earth. Cambridge University Press.
Needham, J.. 1980. Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 5, Chemical and Chemical Technology; Part IV: SPAGYRICAL DISCOVERY AND INVENTION: APPARATUS, THEORIES AND GIFTS Cambridge University Press.
Ray, P. C., 1902, A History of Hindu Chemistry from the earliest time to the middle of the sixteenth century A.D.. Williams and Norgate.
Turnbull, S. (2003) Mongol Warriors, 1200 – 1350. Osprey Publishing
Władysław Łoś, studied Medieval Art & History at Warsaw University Poland (1985)
Westphalia is a region in Germany from where the most iconic hams in the history of ham making came. A key feature of the ham is that it is cold smoked. I give the complete list of Westphalian ham and bacon recipes available to me below. I suggest you read through all of them carefully and develop your own particular recipe. The two key features of the ham and bacon are that it must be cold smoked and I would use the Emperor of Russia’s Brine recipe, but it all depends on your own preference.
The 1872 publication edited by Ellet, E. F and published by H. Bill, Norwich, Conn. boast “five thousand practical receipts and maxims from the best English, French, German, and American sources.” I quote the following from his work, The New Cyclopedia of Domestic Economy and Practical Housekeeping
867. — HOW TO MAKE HAM SUPERIOR TO WESTPHALIA. (Udo.)
As soon as the pig is cold enough to be cut up, take the two hams, and cut out the round bone, so as to have the ham not too thick: rub them with common salt, and leave them in a large pan for three days; when the salt has drawn out all the blood, throw the brine away, and proceed as follows: for two hams of about eighteen pounds each, take one pound of moist sugar, one pound of common salt, and two ounces of saltpetre, mix them together, and rub the hams well with it, then put them into a vessel large enough to contain them in the liquor, always keeping the salt over them; after they have been in this state three days, throw over them a bottle of good vinegar. One month is requisite to cure them; during which period they must be often turned in the brine; when you take them out, drain them well, powder them with some coarse flour, and hang them in a dry place. The same brine will serve again, except that you must not put so much salt on the next hams that you pickle. If the hams are smaller, put only three-quarters of a pound of salt, but the salt will not do any harm if you do not let them remain too long in the brine; if you can get them smoked, they are then not so subject to be infested by vermin; no insect whatever can bear the bitterness of the soot; the smoke of wood is preferable to the smoke of coal. Be particular that the hams are hung as far as possible from the fire, otherwise the fat will melt, and they will become dry and hard and rank.
The following are recipes collected from around the world by
913. – WESTPHALIA HAMS
Prepare the hams in the usual manner by rubbing them with common salt and draining them; take one ounce of saltpetre, half a pound of coarse sugar, and the same quantity of salt; rub it well into the ham, and in three days pour a pint of vinegar over it. A fine foreign flavor may also be given to hams by pouring old strong beer over them, and burning juniper wood while they are drying: molasses, juniper berries, and highly flavored herbs, such as basil, sage, bay leaves, and thyme, mingled together and the hams well rubbed with it, using only a sufficient quantity of salt to assist in the cure, will afford an agreeable variety.
918. – WILTSHIRE BACON
Sprinkle each flitch with salt; and let the blood drain off for twenty – four hours. Then mix one pound and a half of coarse sugar, the same quantity of fine salt, six ounces of saltpetre, and four pounds of coarse salt; rub this well on the bacon, turning and wetting it in every part daily for a month; then hang it to dry, and afterwards smoke it ten days.
925. – A PICKLE
That will keep for years, for hams, tongues, or beef, if boiled and skimmed between each parcel of them. To two gallons of spring water put two pounds of coarse sugar, two pounds of coarse, and two and a half pounds of common salt, and half a pound of saltpetre, in a deep earthen glazed pan that will hold four gallons, and with a cover that will fit close. Keep the beef or hams as long as they will bear before you put them into the pickle; and sprinkle them with coarse sugar in a pan, from which they must drain. Rub the hams, & c., well with the pickle; and pack them in close, putting as much as the pan will hold, so that the pickle may cover them. The pickle is not to be boiled at first. A small ham may lie fourteen days; a large one three weeks; a tongue twelve days; and beef in proportion to its size. They will eat well out of the pickle without drying. When they are to be dried, let each piece be drained over the pan; and when it will drop no longer, take a clean sponge and dry it thoroughly. Six or eight hours will smoke them; and there should be only a little sawdust and wet straw burnt to do this; but if put into a baker’s chimney, sew them in a coarse cloth, and hang them a week. Add two pounds of common salt, and two pints of water, every time you boil the liquor.
Have a Westphalian recipe?
If you have a Westphalian recipe, please share it with me for inclusion here.
The story of bacon is set in the late 1800s and early 1900s when most of the important developments in bacon took place. The plotline takes place in the 2000s with each character referring to a real person and actual events. The theme is a kind of “steampunk” where modern mannerisms, speech, clothes and practices are superimposed on a historical setting. Modern people interact with old historical figures with all the historical and cultural bias that goes with this.
The Jewish Master Curer and the Prince of Ireland
1 April 1920
Dear children,
Since the Boer War ended Minette and I returned to New Zealand often. For a time, we even considered moving there. It would seem though, that our lives and times are tied to Africa. I did not mind this. The thought of being continents removed from you is too much to even contemplate. On the other hand, it is Africa I fell in love with from my youth when I crossed the interior of South Africa many times riding transport. The ancient cultures and technology of the mysterious peoples, closely connected to the land in a way which Europe has lost, mesmerised me as I could see in their comings and goings a way of life completely appealing to me. In the end, Africa did not push me away as it does so many Europeans – she welcomed me and introduced me to her innermost secrets. I don’t think this had anything to do with being born here – she initiated it when I responded with awe and thankfulness, and in doing so she continued to reveal more, drawing me ever closer. This is an experience I will write about when I’m done with the great work of Bacon & the Art of Living.
You know that from the time when you can remember, my great passion has been to understand bacon curing. It was the purpose of my trip to Denmark and England where I was introduced to much of the story of bacon. The most ancient development was dry-cured bacon. The bacon curing system existed for hundreds of years and included only dry ingredients and later dry ingredients with wet brine added. The principal objective was to dry the bacon quickly using copious amounts of salt to remove moisture before bacteria could and the breakdown of the flesh could overtake the curing process. (Dry Cured Bacon)
Mild Cured Bacon was probably the first major progression from this where the power of the old brine was used to speed up curing allowing for a “milder cure.” The invention was by the chemist William Oake from Northern Ireland sometime before 1837. (Mild Cured Bacon) The Harris family in Calne gave us Sweet Cured bacon in the 1840s which did not use the old brine but hot smoking was the key feature that sped curing sufficiently up that less salt was needed resulting in a piece of less dry and far less salty bacon. Sweeter! The result was Sweet Cured Harris Bacon. Pale Dried Bacon likewise came from the Harris family in Calne under John Harris in the 1890s. It was dried with no smoking and rendered pale and dry bacon that could keep a long time. Wiltshire Curing or Tank Cured Bacon was used by the Wiltshire curers in the closing years of the 1800s or early 1900s, which was identical in almost every way to the mild cured technique of William Oake from Ireland. (Harris Bacon – From Pale Dried to Tank Curing).
Auto Curing was invented by William Harwood Oake, the son of William Oake from Limerick in Ireland who invented mild curing. William Harwood Oake in all likelihood was one of the people who brought mild curing to England when he opened a curing operation with two partners in Gillingham, Dorset. Tank curing was probably independently incorporated into the Harris operation when they got the technology from Denmark. The basics of Auto Curing were, however, not developed by Oake him but by an English team of researchers in America under Robert Davison. American Auto cured system was developed by Davison in 1843 and Oake’s Auto Cure system was a progression of this system. (Oake Woods & Co., Ltd., Rapid – and Auto Cured Bacon)
Within the grand story of bacon, there are two other developments that fit into the time before Harris invented Pale Dried bacon in the 1890s namely the alternative methods for producing mild cured bacon by the Irish firm of Henry Denny and the system of the Dutch master curer, Aron Vecht. It’s best to deal with these two progressions together because Vecht’s method was essentially the same as what Henry Denny patented with a slight temperature adjustment in shipping. While Denny’s work was focused on Ireland and Denmark, Vecht took the system to the southern English colonies.
I learned about Vecht in New Zealand. It was these islands that he covered from north to south on horseback. When a New Zealander, Dr James Anderson asked me if I know him, I did not. It was Jim who told me not only about Vecht, the Dutch Master Curer, the travelling Jew and adventurer who fought in the Anglo Boer war on the side of the Boers against the English, who claim to have invented his own form of mild cured bacon, essentially copying the method of Henry Denny and adapted bacon transport conditions on cargo ships operating between New Zealand, Australia and England to suit bacon better. It was in studying his curing method that I discovered the true genius of Henry Denny, the prince of Irish bacon curers who established one of the largest curing operations on earth and did the last remaining work on bacon curing before Vecht incorporated bacon transport to frozen conditions as opposed to chilling the meat. It would only be the direct addition of nitrites to curing brines that would overtake these developments, but even then, Vecht’s work on refrigeration would stand.
Aron Vecht: His Life
Aron Vecht was born in a small village in Holland and educated in trade and Jewish orthodoxy. The Jewish Herald, Victoria described him as “one of the earliest pioneers of Zionism.” Physically he had an impressive posture. He is described as a “commanding figure, long, black beard, and [his] lustrous eyes gave him a close resemblance in appearance to the great Zionist leader, Theodor Herzl.” (Jewish Herald) He is tall, and well built with an excellent carriage, with a pair of blazing, big eyes, tinged with the melancholic brown. People described him as the most excellent travel companion. I imagine him to be very persuasive and charismatic. A born leader!
He soon moved from Holland to England. In London, he made a living buying and selling bacon. The curiosity of an orthodox Jew who consulted the Code of Jewish Law or the Shulchan Aruch frequently, being the bacon trade was explained by him “that he never saw nor handled the produce.” (Jewish Herald) A claim is made that Vecht married a member of the wealthy Van den Bergh clan in London. Records from the Cape Archive indicates that he married Bernadine Vecht (nee Coopman). Dr Anderson explained that she was part of the Van den Berg clan; she was the daughter of Jacob Coopman and Catharina van den Bergh. Vecht’s first venture is into journalism and he launches the now-defunct Jewish Standard newspaper, to combat the Jewish Chronicle. In London, he met a young and aspiring Jewish writer, Israel Zangwill who makes his debut writing for this newspaper with a weekly humorous column, “Morour and Charouseth.”
After the failure of the newspaper, Vecht developed a desire to travel. This led to a lifetime of wondering which earned him the nickname, “The Wandering Jew.” The Jewish Herald reports that “this wandering Jew’s first trip sent him to Australia. He went not single-handed, but with a large family. They travelled in a slow boat; their stock of Kosher provisions gave out but that was a mere incident. To keep up his family spirits, Wanderer-in-chief got the ship’s printer to print a most remarkable imaginary menu for a Purim dinner, whilst bread and coffee were the only elements of the actual repast on the festival. In the same sportive mood, he won all the ‘sweepstakes’ on the daily runs, the whits prize, as well as a prize for the best fancy dress at a ball given during tho voyage.” (Jewish Herald)
At some point, he moves his family to Argentina. Here he started a frozen kosher meat export business, approved by European rabbis. (Lebrecht, 2019) He eventually sets his head office up in Buenos Aires. He frequently returns to England and moves across Europe.
Vecht arrived in New Zealand in early 1893 (his ship may have docked in Australia on the way). Vecht’s family joined him later in New Zealand — they are listed as passengers on the Ruahine that left London in July 1893. There is a story that he explored the island’s top to bottom on horseback. This account seems to be a fabrication and dr James pointed out that a free railway pass was issued to him by the New Zealand government. Vecht, with his experience in refrigeration, sets up New Zealand’s first bacon-curing plant, charging one shilling for each carcass he treats. (Lebrecht, 2019) From New Zealand, he went to Australia (October 1894) and from there to South Africa (1900). (Correspondence with Dr. James Anderson)
In South Africa, he participated in an interesting scheme namely De Beers Cold Storage. It is alleged by some that he participated in the Anglo Boer War but after an extensive search at the Anglo Boer War Museum in Bloemfontein, I could find no record of this. The contrary seems to be true, namely that his time was initially spent in and around Cape Town till he was sent on a business trip through the country by Cecil John Rhodes. His skill in refrigeration caught the attention of Cecil John Rhodes who, at the time, was regarded as the wealthiest man in Britain. Rhodes asked him to assist in matters pertaining to refrigeration for his De Beers Cold Storage Co. which Rhodes set up in opposition to the refrigeration chambers of David De Villiers Graaff. The instruction from Rhodes to set such a company up came in 1889. From the records available to me it seems that the request from Rhodes came to him towards the end of the war since the Jewish herald reports that his contract with Rhodes included “a clause providing that he should do no manner of work on Jewish Sabbaths or festivals. Doing an expert in refrigeration, he got the British Secretary of the Colonies, and the Secretary for Foreign Affairs/ and the War Office, to conspire together against the military regulations and issue a pass to him to pass through the British lines during the Boer war — a thing permitted no other foreigner. Strangest of all, he cut all the strands of red tape of all these offices in one day, and that a short one, too, for it was a Friday in the winter of 1902. . .” (Jewish Herald) Records at the Cape Archive indicates a number of interesting facts about his stay in the Cape.
Due to business interests in the Cape, the death notices of both Vecht and his wife Bernadine was filed at the Cape to set in motion the winding up of their respective estates. Bernadine passed away on 21 July 1926 close to Antwerp at age 69. At least two of their children remained in South Africa for a time. Florance was appointed in the Cape as executor of her mother’s estate on 5 January 1927. Vecht’s oldest daughter, Rosa Vecht, married Jacob Politi in Wynberg in Cape Town on 3 February 1903. Jacobs occupation was listed as a manager for De Beers Cold Storage and he resided in Wellington where I assume he also worked. Rosa was listed as living in the upmarket suburb of Constantia, Cape Town, very close to Wynberg presumably with the rest of the Vecht family.
This bit of information leads to some interesting observations. Instead of the picture of a Boer supporter who partook in the Anglo Boer War, the picture that is emerging is one of a very well off family who resided in Constancia, Cape Town. If Vecht arrived in Cape Town in 1900, it did not give him much time to get involved in the Wellington operations of De Beers Cold Storage, sufficiently so for him to get to know Jacob Politi who at some point was introduced to Vecht’s daughter, Rosa. The image we have of Vecht is a sophisticated businessman, in the style of Rhodes and Dawid De Villiers Graaff who would later buy De Beers Cold Storage from Rhodes. Between Rhodes, Vecht and De Villiers Graaff, it would seem if Rhodes was the one who got the deepest involve in direct conflict during the siege of Kimberley and not Vecht as has been reported. Rhodes remained in Kimberley almost for the full duration of the siege and his De Beers was active in the manufacturing of articles for the war.
We will later see that the British commodity trader Trengrouse and Co., who is an interesting link between Vecht’s business and Phil Armour from Chicago’s packing plant, was also located in the Boland town of Wellington with a South African Canning company, Langeberg Foods. Langeberg Foods supplied canned fruits to Trengrouse and Co..
The relationship between De Beers Cold Storage and Langeberg Foods is something for further investigation since Langeberg had a requirement for cold storage facilities right at the time when refrigeration was introduced into South Africa. It is interesting that in this one location we find Vecht, Rhodes, Langeberg, De Beers Cold Storage and Trengrouse and Co. Could it have been Trengrouse who introduced Vecht to Rhodes? Could they have told Vecht about the opportunities which were emerging with the creation of De Beers Cold Storage? At the moment these are no more than tantalising possibilities but it definitely warrants further investigation.
The reported support that Vecht had for the Boer course, was in reality probably no more than sympathy, in the same way as Dawid de Villiers Graaff had sympathy for the Boer course, but never actively supported them in any way. After all, De Villiers Graaf’s company won the contract to supply the British army with meat during the war. If Vecht actively supported the Boers in any way, having lived in Constantia, it would probably have landed him in jail and would most certainly have been the end of his collaboration with Rhodes. Rhodes later sold De Beers Cold Storage to De Villiers Graaff, proving that supporting the English was financially a good decision as was the case with many wealthy Afrikaner business people at this time. I think that comparing Vecht’s emotional sympathy with the Boer course with that of De Villiers Graaff’s is a fair comparison. In any event, I seriously doubt if in Vecht’s case it was anything more than that.
Dr Anderson writes that “although residing in South Africa, in 1903 he represented Australia at the 6th Zionist congress in Basle, Switzerland. Shortly after this he moved with his family to Holland and then to Argentina for fifteen months (dates unclear) before finally settling in Belgium. (Infuriatingly, the Belgian immigration archives record the arrival of the Vecht family, but without a date – probably 1907 or early 1908). (Correspondence with Dr James Anderson)
Vecht’s children were not all born on one continent. “His eldest daughter was born in Holland (in Vecht’s hometown of Elburg); the next six children were all born in London, UK; his two youngest sons were born in Melbourne and Sydney, respectively. (Dr James Anderson) His children were Rosa (Roosje), Moses (Mozes), Florance, Jacob Emile, Constance, Nora, Deena, Victor and Phillip. Eventually part of the family returned to Antwerp. Here he underwent gall-bladder surgery. He passed away from complications following the surgery on 8 November 1908 at the age of 54. (Cape Archives) (Lebrecht, 2019)
Aron Vecht: His Business
Aron Vecht was involved in a number of business ventures, mainly related to refrigeration and meat. We know, for example, that sometime before 1889 he was in business with Samuel Hamburger, Ellias Levi, Aron Vecht, and Carolina Wolff in the Dutch town of Ede. “A New Zealand report claims that in Holland ‘he and his brother had successfully introduced the mess-pork industry in 1879’ (Dr James Anderson)
Vecht probably used several trademarks which were associated with his products. Dr James Anderson points out that one was “Morepork,” traded under Vecht & Stokvis. Vecht took out patents in 1894 in New Zealand related to the singeing of pigs and the preservation of meat. His method of preservation was called the “Vecht Mild Cure Process.” He masterfully tied the patent to his own bacon brand. One such brand was York Castle. The patents were presumably owned by his business in New Zealand which he had with William Stokes called the Christ Church Meat Company, Ltd. (1)
MESSRS. STEWART and MORTON, at NOWRA, on account of THOMAS MARRIOTT, Esq., Liquidator of the Shoalhaven Co-operative Bacon Curing Company, Limited in Liquidation).
BACON CURING FACTORY at Bomaderry, N.S.W., and other Assets of the above Company, consisting of the following:
4 acs 1 road 18 perches, being lots 9 and 10 of Section 33, on Deposited Plan No. 2880, in the Town of Bomaderry, Parish of Bunberra,county of Camden, TORRENS TITLE million to reservations in Crown Grant), withFactory premises and fixed plant and machinerythereon, as per schedule No. 1
Movable Plant, Office Furniture, Horses, Wag-gone, Carts, and Harness, as per Schedule No. 2.
License to use exclusively in NSW. process for curing Bacon known as “Vecht Mild Cure Process.”
“York Castle” Trade Mark for Bacon.
Items 1 and 3 are under mortgage, on which there is a Band of £2050, with Interest at a 5 per cent, per annum, from 2nd June 1900, owing, and will be sold subject thereto.
Item 3 Is held under certain Deeds and Documents, which, together with the Mortgagee over Items 1 and 3, may be inspected at the Offices of Messrs. Perkins. Stevenson, and Co., of 122 Pitt-street, Sydney, Solicitors.
The Vecht Mild Cure Process was tied to the Christ Church Meat Company and Vecht and Stokes individually as is clear from the further provision in the notice that “any Assignment of Item 3 is subject to consent of ARON VECHT, WILLIAM STOKES, and the CHRIST CHURCH CHURCH MEAT COMPANY, Limited.”
Lists of the Plant, etc may be inspected, at the Office of THOMAS MARIOTT, Esq. and the Auctioneers, at Nowra, and at the Offices of Messrs. PERKINS, STEVENSON, and CO., Solicitors, Sydney.
So far then there is no direct link between the “York Castle” trademark for bacon and the Vecht Mild Cure Process even though the fact that they are joined in one notice raises the possibility that they were indeed somehow connected. The connection becomes clear when we examine events related to a trademark dispute after the passing of Vecht but related to Stokvis. William Stokvis of Brussels instituted legal action against Barnes Bacon Company Ltd. (Mr WJ Gale being the managing director at this time). The lawsuit related to the use of a secret curing formulation for bacon and hams in 1936. The plaintiff alleged the unlawful use of the trademark and he claimed that this secret method was alleged to be used for bacon made under this trade name when in reality, so he alleged, it was not always used. Two tradenames were involved in the agreement being “York Castle” and “More Pork. The lawsuit is reported in The Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia),16 Jun 1936.
From a lawsuit related to the York Castle trademark in New South Wales, Australia, and despite it taking place sometime after Vecht’s passing, we get possible further insight into how he managed his intellectual property. The trademark and his secret method of curing went hand-in-hand. Only the Vecht Mild Cure Process could be used to produce the York Castle brand of bacon. Vecht would receive monetary compensation for every pig so cured in a territory. (2)
Dr Anderson wrote to me that Vecht used the “York Castle” trademark in NSW and the “Yorick” trademark in Victoria. He also sent me a copy of the Victoria Government Gazette from October 1900 where the trademark is published.
Victoria Government Gazette, October 1900, p 19.
I found the following Yorick poster from A Legal History of Lithography, Dr Amanda Scardamaglia. It shows that the brand was used before Vecht registered it in 1900. It could have been an older brand that he took over. It is a notable example of old bacon branding. Interestingly the bacon is advertised as “special mild”. It appeared before Vecht arrived in Australia in ’94. What the “English system” would be a reference to is a matter of great interest. It sets the background for Vecht’s presence in the Victorian market.
Yorick Bacon and Hams (circa 1881-1890) Printed by Troedel & Co, Lithographers & Printers, State Library Victoria
Let’s return for a moment to the publication in the Victorian Government Gazette in 1900. Dr Anderson made the interesting comment that “Vecht used the ‘York Castle’ trademark in NSW and the ‘Yorick’ trademark in Victoria.” The Victoria Government Gazette was published in October 1900 where the trademark appeared. Dr Anderson commented that “the date is interesting because the following month it was reported in New Zealand that Vecht was on his way to South Africa. Perhaps the Victorian government was slow to publish?” (Private correspondence with Dr Anderson) The timing was of great interest to me. What was happening in South Africa at this time that could have possibly created such an emergency or necessity for him to leave behind all the prospects and possibilities in New Zealand and Australia and move him to go to South Africa?
The backstory becomes very interesting. Cecil John Rhodes, the prime minister of the Cape from 1890 to 1896 had made refrigeration a primary focus. There were two main areas of direct interest to him. The one was the export of fruit. The first consignment of fourteen cases of peaches was loaded onto the Drummond Castle on Wednesday, 13 January 1892 for export to England. It arrived in London on 31 January. Rhodes appointed a select parliamentary committee on fruit culture and fruit exports in that same year. Merriman was the minister of Agriculture in Rhodes’ Government. He happened to be in London on 31 January when the peaches arrived aboard the Drummond Castle. Percy Molteno shared his recollections of this event in the Cape Times: “I remember mentioning to Mr Merriman that a shipment had arrived and invited him to accompany me to see the cases opened. This he readily did. With great delight, we saw case upon case opened up in splendid condition. The public sale of this fruit created a great sensation in the fruit world.” (De Beer, 2003)
Rhodes, after being forced to resign as Prime Minister in 1896 after the unsuccessful Jameson Raid set his sights squarely on the development of the fruit industry. He purchased twenty-nine farms in the Franschhoek, Tulbagh and Wellington districts. These were mainly wine farms, and he converted them to fruit farms. They, collectively, become known as the “Rhodes Fruit Farms” with Harry Pickstone as managing director. They plant approximately two hundred thousand trees on these farms. (De Beer, 2003)
With Rhodes backing the industry to this extent, not only did cold storage facilities become a major drive but steamship companies raced to increase their cold storage capacity. Shortly after the end of the Anglo Boer War, “Table Bay became the first harbour in the world to boast a cold storage terminal specially designed for fruit.” (De Beer, 2003)
The second point of application of cold storage was in relation to meat. The Anglo Boer war was the first time where frozen meat was used to provide an army with meat. David de Villiers Graaff’s company was ideally positioned to capitalise on this and his huge investments in the area of cold storage paid off handsomely when his company secured the contract to supply the English forces in South Africa with meat. This saga overshadows the creation of cold storage works related to the fruit export trade both in terms of its financial scope and the personal investment of Rhodes in the projects. Vecht must have been involved in the fruit project also through De Beers Cold Storage works in Wellington where the fruit was packed and canned as we have seen from the marriage of his oldest daughter to a manager of De Beers Cold Storage in Wellington, but that his prime focus was probably related to the meat contracts becomes clear.
De Villiers-Graaf installs the first refrigeration equipment in the new head office of his company, Combrinck & Co. in Strand Street in Cape Town in 1892. I have been inside these refrigerated rooms many times in my life. His focus was initially only restricted to meat, but soon they expanded to include butter and cheese in the product offering.
In March 1896 his firm Combrinck & Co. orders ice containers from a firm in New York. They order the first ammonia compressors from Glasgow. By 1897 his firm had eight ice and freezing facilities with six in the Cape Colony, one in Aliwal-Noord and one in Kimberley. One was in Beaufort-Wes, one in Piketbergweg (Gouda) and two more in Cape Town. One is in Port Elizabeth and one in Johannesburg.
The name on the building below was later changed to the Imperial Cold Storage & Supply Company but was the first refrigerated chambers erected by the Graaff brothers.
His agents in Australia is identified as Willoughby C. Devlin van Dunn & Co. in Queen’s Place, Sydney. A suggestion that Graaff appoints a marine engineer now becomes of the greatest importance to our current discussion. In response to this suggestion, Graaff replies that he decided to appoint a properly trained refrigeration engineer from abroad since such expertise was lacking at this time in the Cape Colony. It is possibly this exact same thought, not from De Villiers Graaff, but from Rhodes which led to the seemingly abrupt move from Aron Vecht to the Cape of Good Hope in 1900. (Dommisse, 2011)
Rhodes gave instructions in 1889 that his Diamond company, De Beers must construct cold storage facilities in Kimberley and Cape Town. This happens when he tries to persuade the Schreiner government in the Cape to construct additional freezing space and they refused. He saw the cooling chambers of De Villiers Graaff as a monopoly. He remarked, “This close monopoly must not be allowed to go on.” Initially, De Villiers-Graaff was willing to work with Rhodes and Stephenson tried to convince Rhodes that such an arrangement would work well. (Dommisse, 2011)
In the end, Rhodes could not work with De Villiers-Graaff and gave instructions for the establishment of De Beers Cold Storage. Rhodes was known not to be shy to spend on the right equipment and saw to it that his cold rooms boast with the latest cooling equipment. Construction is completed in February 1900. I am fascinated to learn what Vecht’s contribution was to this building project. It remains an ongoing project! The Cape premises is hugely successful as was the Kimberly operation and four months after the opening of the Cape facility, the management recommends the packing facilities to be expanded from 160 000 cubic feet to 220 000. (Dommisse, 2011)
De Villiers-Graaff transformed his company, Combrinck & Co into the South African Supply and Cold Storage Company which is listed in London. De Beers Cold Storage tried to compete with the Graaff brothers, but the South African Supply and Cold Storage Company was so well entrenched in the supply and distribution of frozen products that De Beers Cold Storage stood no chance. A major stumbling point was that De Beers completely underestimated the importance of owning the refrigerated carriages to transport the meat. It was this exact point which I speculate De Villiers-Graaff learned from Phil Armour, and it would not surprise me if Vecht had any direct dealings with the Armour company, that they would have educated him on the importance of this exact point. De Villiers-Graaff returned from his only recorded visit to Chicago and copied Armour by constructing his own refrigerated railway carts for the transport of frozen products. He also ensured a close relationship with the railways.
De Beers Cold Storage had none of these and meat reported arrived at its destination in a rotten state. The desperation of the situation mimics the report from the Jewish Herald about the unprecedented travel authorisation given to Vecht in 1902 to travel through the country when it reported that Vecht “got the British Secretary of the Colonies, and the Secretary for Foreign Affairs/ and the War Office, to conspire together against the military regulations and issue a pass to him to pass through the British lines during the Boer war — a thing permitted no other foreigner. Strangest of all, he cut all the strands of red tape of all these offices in one day.”
Prospectus of the South African Supply and Cold Storage Company, Ltd.
During the late 1901 and early 1902, Rhodes were frantic in his efforts to win the British army contract to supply meat and to prove that his company was able to deliver. Rhodes never saw De Beers Cold Storage receive the lucrative meat contracts from the British army. He passes away in a small cottage in Kalk Bay on 26 Maart 1902. This is also a location that I often visited over the years and stood next to the bed in which he passed away many times. The meat contracts he wanted to win so desperately and for which Vecht was presumably dispatched throughout the country in 1902 were awarded to De Beers Cold Storage and come into effect on 1 April 1902. The peace treaty of Vereeniging was signed on 31 Mei bringing the devastating war to an end. (Dommisse, 2011)
The loss of the British meat contracts forces the Graaff brothers to reevaluate their strategy. The years 1898 to 1901 becomes the last years that when the South African Supply and Cold Storage Company had the lucrative Britse meat contracts. Trading in imported frozen meat escalated in this time from 1 965 000 pounds to just below 43 000 000 pounds from Australia. The Graaf’s created a new company, the South African & Australasian Supply and Cold Storage on 27 February 1902, only eight days after Rhodes registered the Imperial Cold Storage & Supply Company Limited in Pretoria to take over all cold storage works and the trading of meat from De Beers Consolidated Mines. Following the war, even the South African & Australian Supply and Cold Storage would cease trading and the Graaff’s would take large shareholding up in the Imperial Cold Storage & Supply Company. These events create a beautiful backdrop for the context of the work of Vecht in South Africa from the time he arrives in South Africa till his departure.
Dr Anderson wrote to me that Vecht seems to have moved around a lot during 1900/1901 before going to South Africa. This would probably mitigate against the picture of him “rushing” to South Africa, but once here, events in South Africa clearly shows that he had his work cut out for him.
Aron Vecht: The Incorporation of Temperature into Cured Transport
When refrigeration was introduced into international trade, its impact on meat quality was unknown. People opted for the less harsh conditions of chilling temperatures and tried to avoid freezing the meat. A drawback of mild cured bacon is that it did not last on long sea voyages under chilled conditions. The English market has, by the time Aron Vecht arrived on the scene, became used to mild cured bacon as opposed to heavy salted which was the kind of meat produced under the Rapid Cure process of Robert Davison. An attempt was made to use the sea voyage for the curing to take place and to pack the pork on ice. Famously the Harris brothers of Calne was involved in exactly this scheme. The Waikato Argus who reported on this in 1901 said that the lowering of the temperature below 32o Fahrenheit (0o C) has ‘invariably faded the flash into a pale, unpleasant colour and alienated the affections of the British matron.” What I think they meant was that lowering it to 0o C was ineffective in securing a good product that would arrive in London. At chilling schilling temperatures, when the meat has not been heated through hot smoking, the curing colour, resulting from the effect of nitric oxide on the meat proteins, giving it a bright pinkish/ reddish appearance would be reversed. If, however, the meat is frozen, such reversal would not take place. The meat would then be smoked when it arrived at its destination and the colour would be “fixed” through the unfolding of the proteins.
The Waikato Argus reported on this progression by Vecht as follows: “Now, however, by what may be called a triumph of transit and cure, a most promising and important trade has begun between New Zealand and England. By employing the Vecht curing process, a New Zealand firm is shipping pigs from that distant colony, placing them in refrigerators with a temperature of 20 deg Fahrenheit (-6 deg C), and curing them here on the banks of the Thames with apparently perfect success.
It was not well understood at the time and it was incorrectly believed that the method of sterilisation of the meat which was part of the Vecht process was responsible for preventing the cured colour from fading. What is true is not that it would have prevented the cured colour from fading, but that it would have stopped bacterial and enzymatic action which spoiled the meat and degraded the meat quality and this would undoubtedly also have affected the meat colour, even though it was by no means the only reason why the colour faded.
The article reported on this as follows. “This success is obtained by first treating the carcase*, before they leave New Zealand, by the Vecht curing process, which allays the action of the cold, and so sterilises the flesh as to prevent the changes which have hitherto interfered with the successful curing at Home of what is grown abroad.” (3)
The Waikato Argus which we quoted above related to the use of temperature and the curing of meat made also provides us with another very valuable bit of information related to the trading of bacon cured with the Vecht method. It reported that “Messrs Trengrouse and Co., who are colonial shippers on a huge scale and the British agents of Armours, of Chicago, are encouraging this new process, and prophesy for it a vast influence on the bacon trade.” (3) The mention of the agents of the legendary firm of Phil Armour is of extreme interest as is the link between Armour’s company and the propagation of Vecht’s method of curing. Armour was the pioneer of freezer technology for the distribution of meat in America and owned probably the largest curing works in Chicago in the world. Vecht was an expert in the refrigeration of meat in particular. Phil Armour was carefully plotting his way to introduce sodium nitrite directly as a curing brine but not wanting to be left out of the huge and lucrative international bacon trade, must have seen Vecht as a brilliant ally to secure bacon for his own trade while avoiding the expensive curing systems such as Auto Cure which Armour knew would be replaced by the direct addition of nitrite to curing brines.
Aron Vecht: His Curing Method
In New Zealand, Dr James Anderson elucidated the secret method of curing of Aron Vecht as follows. He told me that “his mild-cure method of preserving pork involved first roasting and cooling the carcass which was then injected with an antiseptic fluid invented and patented by him (Vecht). It involved hanging the carcass for 13 seconds in a furnace, bathing it in cold water and removing the two outer skin layers. ‘This removes the sweat glands of the pig … and the layer of fat next to the skin having been melted in the furnace saturates the thin paper-like inner skin, and when suddenly cooled hermetically seals the pig.’ The carcass is then split in two and the spine removed, allowing the serum to escape and finally treated with salt at such a temperature as to render the chloride constituent inoperative, thus retaining the albumen which is lost in the ordinary salting method. A newspaper article appeared in New Zealand on 18 September 1893 which reports an interview done by Aron Vecht where he describes his curing method first hand. (4)
In his description, he uses a phrase that stands out. He describes the process in similar terms as what Dr Anderson related to me. He mentions nothing of a vacuum vessel as in the Rapid Cure system of Robert Davison or the Auto Cure equipment of William Henry Oake. He simply states that his saltpetre based, patented brine is “pressure injected into the carcass, which becomes wholly impregnated, and the curing is complete.” (4)
I have often thought about what made Aron Vecht’s patented system unique and different from his compatriots. The singeing of the pork was undoubtedly something he got from the curing method of Henry Denny in Ireland. I will deal with this subsequently and you will see what I mean. Vecht gave the clue in the interview he did with a reporter in New Zealand. (4) He said that after slaughtering, the animal is allowed to cool down. His method of curing allowed for “year-round” application. His system cannot be confused with that of William Henry Oake or Robert Davison. That his patented blend of antiseptics would not have an impact on the meat colour is certain. Only one molecule can cure meat which is nitric oxide, derived in all quick curing systems from sodium nitrate which is turned into sodium nitrite. From the same interview (4) we know that his was saltpetre based (nitrate). At first, I suspected that Vecht probably incorporated the old brine into his process which, by this time was almost universally used in Australia. After I discovered the 1911 process description which fits his in every other way, I realised that he probably did not use old brine as was the cornerstone of William Oakes original mild cure system. I discuss the complete system below with particular reference to the brine he used. If he cooled the carcass down through refrigeration after slaughter, he most definitely did so after the brine was injected “under pressure.”
The fact that the carcasses were transported in refrigerated conditions meant that curing would not have progressed much further en-route to England. Once there, when they were hot smoked before sale, the curing reaction would undoubtedly have continued. Heating the carcass to around 50o C and keeping it at that temperature for as long as 60 minutes is a method that I use myself when there is not enough time to “rest” the cured meat before smoking. The heat allows the brine to be spread through the meat and the smoke materially contribute to nitric oxide formation which results in cured meat.
Messrs Trengrouse and Co
I told you that the one interesting aspect about Vecht was his method of curing. I referred you to the Waikato Argus which did an article on his life from where we got the all-important information on the temperature during the shipment of the meat. The same article mentions that Vecht’s products were sold through the firm of Messrs Trengrouse and Co.. They are described as colonial shippers on a huge scale and the British agents of the Armour Packing Company from Chicago, who are encouraging his new process. This brings us to the next fascinating aspect of this remarkable man’s life namely his link to the legendary provisions and general commission merchants of Messrs Trengrouse and Co.
The firm was officially called Trengrouse, H & Co., and was described as “Provision Agents and General Commission Merchants” Their address was 51, 55, Tooley Street, London, S.E. The firm was established in 1875 by Henry Trengrouse and his brother, who retired in 1908. They had agents in Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, Cardiff, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Dunedin, (N.Z.), Monte Video, Buenos Ayres and they specialised in butter, cheese, bacon, eggs and canned goods. They claim to have pioneered the trade in New Zealand and Australia in dairy products. Most importantly for our purposes is that they were the agents for Armour & Co. from Chicago and by 1914 they have been Armour’s agents for upwards of thirty years. (1914 Who’s Who in Business) This means that Phil Armour probably set them up himself and dealt directly with them. Phil passed away at the turn of the century.
The grandfather Henery Trengrouse after whom he was named was a legendary figure in his own right. He devoted his life to the invention of a number of methods to improve safety aboard ships after he witnessed the sinking of a ship with a tragic loss of life close to his hometown when he was a young man. (5) Adventure and perseverance ran in the family and, I am sure, accounted for their success in no small way!
Messrs Trengrouse and Co in South Africa
Years ago, when I wrote to you about David Graaff’s Armour – A Tale of Two Legends, I speculated that Philip Armours agents must have visited Cape Town. The basis of my speculation was the global reach of Armour’s network and the fact that Phil himself made his money starting out in the Californian Goldfields and I could not imagine that he sat idly by with the discovery of gold and diamonds on the Rand and Kimberley respectively in South Africa. Further, the link between De Villiers-Graaff visiting Chicago in 1892 where Armour pioneered refrigerated meat transport and refrigeration for the meat trade in general through cold storage works, coupled with De Villiers Graaf’s own focus on this from that time onwards is just too much to be coincidental. I have gone to great lengths over many years to find the details of the agents for Armour but with no luck whatsoever. Not even a hint!
Until Dr James Anderson informed me about Aron Vecht, I was unable to discover the name of the agents for Philip Armour. Introducing me to Vecht, led me to the discovery of the agents of Armour being Messrs Trengrouse and Co who did not do business with Combrinck & Co. (Later the Imperial Cold Storage and Supply Co. of De Villiers Graaff) as I suspected but with Langeberg Foods on canning, presumably from the Boland town of Wellington in the Cape Colony.
I know Langeberg Foods very well and will take this up with them directly as well as securing the book where the reference is made -> Langeberg: 50 Years of Canning Achievement, 1940-1990 – Page 27, D. J. Van Zyl, 1990
Developments in Ireland – 1866: The Patent of Henry Denny
Let’s first get some background on Denny. Ireland in the first half of the 1800s was a fertile field for innovation. An excellent example is found in the person of Henry Denny. Part of his remarkable legacy is a firm that once was the largest bacon producer in Europe, Henry Denny & Sons. Henry was born in Waterford, Ireland in 1790.
Denny started out as a provisioner merchant in Waterford. The first reference to him as a bacon merchant comes to us from 1846. In 1854 he started using ice in bacon curing which allowed him to cure meat all year round like his colleagues in Calne. The bacon he cured was also referred to as mild cured bacon and a patent was granted in 1857 on his process. I failed to discover the exact nature of his patented process till Aron Vecht introduced me to it. Like the process invented by C & T Harris, which they called Sweet Cured Bacon, Henry’s process used much less salt. The priority for inventing the first mild cured system, however, goes to William Oake from Ulster whom we know invented this at around the time when Denny had his merchant business or shortly after this and well before Denny entered the pork processing trade. Denny undoubtedly achieved mild cured bacon in a way different from William Oake.
Henry’s curing system is described in one source I consulted (Geocaching) which seems to be a copy from another work that is unfortunately not referenced and all my attempts to locate the original publication has been in vain. The author describes it as follows: “Until the early 19th century, pork was cured by soaking large chunks of the meat in barrels of brine for weeks. Shelf life was poor, as often as the inside of the chunks did not cure properly, and meat rotted from the inside out. Henry Denny and his youngest son Edward Denny introduced a number of new innovations – he used long flat pieces of meat instead of chunks; and they dispensed with brine in favour of a dry or ‘hard’ cure, sandwiching the meat in layers of dry salt. This produced well cured bacon with a good shelf life and revolutionised Ireland’s meat industry. Irish bacon and hams were soon exported to Britain, Paris, the Americas and India.“
Reference is made to the fact that Denny invented several curing techniques and if the description given is correct, it would be one of several inventions. Taken at face value I doubt the superiority of his system over Oake’s invention. It also comes so late in terms of dates that I seriously doubt if this could be the patent that was awarded in 1957. By this time meat injection was already well established which solved the shortcomings of William Oakes invention in his mild cured system of simply filling the curing tanks with brine to diffuse into the meat “naturally.” If this was in fact the patent that was granted in 1857, it would represent a serious step backwards.
A great contribution to my understanding of Denny’s system is the fact that he acquired a meat curing company in Denmark in 1894. The reference is Lets-Look-Again who also seems to quote an uncredited source. They make a statement that this purchase “introduced Irish meat curing techniques to Denmark.” I have over the years come across several authors who made the same claim that the Irish meat curing system was introduced to Denmark in the late 1800s after an Irish firm acquired a Danish processing company. They never gave the name of the Irish firm in question. The end of the 1800s is, however, the wrong time for the introduction of William Oake’s system to Denmark. By this time it was already well established in Denmark and the likely transfer of the technology to C & T Harris took place from Denmark either at this time (closing years of the 1800s) or in the opening few years of the 1900s. For this reason, I never used the reference but I was always curious who the Irish firm was, wrongly credited for the transfer of the original mild cure technology to Denmark. If, as I now suspect, the Irish firm referred to was that of Henry Denny, the question comes up as to exactly what the invention was that he took to Denmark!
Denny could very well have been the inventor of the pork rasher. Geocaching quotes an unnamed source that “the rasher (a piece of bacon to be cooked quickly or rashed) was reportedly invented in 1820 by Henry Denny, a Waterford butcher who patented several bacon curing techniques still used to this day.” It must be mentioned that Denny’s career only started in 1820 but that was not as a butcher. It was as a merchant and he entered the pork processing business only in 1854. There could still be credibility to the claim which I base on the widespread nature of the story in Ireland. Maybe he was a young man with unusual interest and creativity in selling pork at his trading business. The claim may however be apocryphal.
This now brings us to the link between Aron Vecht and Henry Denny which lead me to discover the real invention of Henry Denny and his mild curing process. One aspect of pork curing that I overlooked for years was the importance of singeing. Singeing pork was nothing new. Removing the hair off the carcass and retaining the “rind” was done with straws for centuries. The old method is beautifully illustrated by Тихомир Давчев in their set of photos featured below.
Henry Denny automated this process. He re-looked at the process in light of the latest industrialised equipment available. One publication from 1866 describes it as follows. “Each pig is hoisted by the hind leg, it is hooked on to a lever, which suspends the animal head downwards, and its throat is slit with a sharp knife; the blood caught in a receiver flows into an external tank, from whence it is carted away. The leg is then fixed to a hook, which slides on a round iron bar placed overhead on an incline. A push of the hand sends the dead pig with railway speed to the singeing furnace, a distance of 30 to 50 feet. Here it is taken by a crane, placed on a tramway, and run into the furnace, where the flame impinges on it, and in a moment all the hair is removed. The carcass is re-hooked by the leg, passes into another room, where it is disembowelled, the entrails being transferred to an underground region or be dealt with. The head is next removed, and then the backbone is cut out, thus dividing the carcass into two flitches, which pass, suspended on the round bars and without handling, into the cooling room, where it hangs until the meat is firm.” (Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, Vol. LXXIV July to December 1866)
Molander (1985)
His fame was in the first place due to his invention of the automated process of pork singeing. He may have, of course, also called his process “mild cured” as with the aid of refrigeration he would have obtained the same result as did William Oake who actually invented the original mild cured process. It is what I suspect Aron Vecht did and his claim that the key feature of his process is his secret antiseptic brine formulation. Since no brine formulation could secure the cooked/ cured look of bacon, I suspect that it was an attempt by him to divert attention from the fact that he essentially copied a patented process that was owned by Henry Denny. The real brilliance of Vecht was in the adjustment of cold storage temperatures from chilled to below freezing point.
Was this disingenuous for him to also have called it “mild cured”? I think not. It illustrates the inherent problem in using the result of the process (i.e. milder bacon) as the name of your product. If the result is the same but a different process was used to arrive at it, how would the consumer know (or care)! From a trademark perspective, it makes it tricky since the words seem to be difficult to protect as it would be the general way people would refer to the bacon, not heavily salted. It is like trying to trademark the phrase “well cooked.”
The one point, which as it stands right now, I believe, is that Denny invented the automated process of singeing the carcass. The publication I site above is the earliest mention of automating the process that I could find and I am now convinced that Vecht got his method from Denny. Auto Curing requires the use of pressure cylinders (autoclaves or retorts) which make the auto cure bacon’s production even more expensive than mild cured bacon. It is the only process that was really patentable because neither sweet cure nor mild cure nor Vecht’s process, neither Denny’s singe process is so unique that it cannot be copied by someone with even mediocre technical skills and is not really patentable. The existence of Aron Vecht and his process proves this.
In this regard it is similar to the refrigeration patent which Harris took out – may I add. Anybody could, and I am sure would make small changes to the system to show it to be unique and to overcome the trademark issue. This was not the case with Auto Cure which relied on unique equipment. To this day, people buy bacon and the exact process is, as it were, lost in the final product. Trade marks speak to consistent quality, but in the final analysis, bacon has always been and still is today a commodity that most people buy on price (given a relatively wide range of acceptable product quality)
I have personally been faced with this exact issue over the years. One invents a new process, but the protection of the process only lasts as long as your staff remains with you. The moment they move away, the process is gone! Till this day meat plants are notoriously shrouded in secrecy. From British producers to the largest bacon producer in South Africa (close and good friends) refuse me access to any of their plants because they are scared will see something I am not supposed to. Phil Armour was famous for trying to break the secrecy which existed even amongst this own plant managers.
I wonder if this does not also explain why Vecht did this, not in Holland or in the USA or England, but in faraway New Zealand! Processors all claim that they invented processes! Whichever process one talks about!
Have a look at the article below, Effect of Singeing on the Texture and Histological Appearance of Pig Skin. (6) It beautifully describes the process, and it ascribes the tradition to be Danish. The reason I will still give priority to the invention of Denny is that Denny created bacon curing plants in Denmark. I believe that the technology was invented by Denny, transferred to Denmark where it was used on a large scale and subsequently made its way to the Harris operation in Calne and other Wiltshire curers (including Oake Woods – son of William Oake who invented Mild Curing).
There are many traditions that mild curing for example was invented by the Danes, but after 10 years of research, I know that this is incorrect. As I already discussed, I can imagine that through his process Denny also arrived at a “milder cured bacon” but he was by no means the first to have done so. The invention is Irish and was kept a secret till disgruntled Irish curers (on strike) were lured to Denmark under a Danish continual learning scheme where they were paid handsomely to train the Danes in Mild Curing.
1911 Description of what Denny and Vecht’s Process Looked Like
There is a further rear description from the Journal of the Royal Society of the Arts, 1911 describing mild cured bacon production without the use of curing baths or old brine. It has all the elements of the Denny/ Vecht system.
It, interestingly, says that it was not too long ago when curing methods were closely guarded secrets, handed down from one generation to the next orally. By 1911 this was not the case any longer and the account which follows is in this new tradition.
The animal is stunned and bled after which the carcass is placed in a tank with 70 – 85 deg C (160 to 185 deg F) water where the carcass is scalded and the hair removed.
The carcass is then pushed into the singeing furnace. It specifies that where Wiltshire bacon is produced, singeing is always used.
Sculping table to the singeing furnace. This furnace was invented by Denny and copied by Vecht.
The carcass is left in the furnace for 25 seconds. The subcutaneous fat which would be soft is changed to hard fat after the carcass has been removed and is cooled down in a cold water bath.
The carcass is hung on dressing bars where it’s cleaned and disembowelled. Singed and unsinged carcasses are from this point onwards treated in the same way.
They are cleaned with cold water and scraped clean. The intestinal offal is removed and handled separately. Kidney fat is still in the carcass at this point.
The carcass is now split and the backbone or vertebral column removed. Secondary offal is removed being the head, feet and kidney fat. It is the removal of the vertebral column which liberates the two sides. The sides were then hung until they sufficiently cooled down, to around 38o F or 3o C.
Scoring – remove the backbone and separate the sides.
The process following is described as follows. “When the temperature is riched, transfer the carcass to the curing cellar. Here the blade bone is drawn out.” Curing according to their method did not involve the re-use of the old brine. Instead, a fresh pickle is pumped into each side at a pressure of 40 lbs. to the square inch. “The pickle is pumped through a pickle needle with a number of perforations arranged in a spiral manner through which the pickle is discharged. The sides are now laid one by one on the floor of the curing cellar which is maintained at a temperature of 42o F or 5o C. The atmosphere must be humid and moist. Each side is covered over by an equal mixture of salt, saltpetre and curing preservative on top of which is placed a heavy layer of salt.” (Journal of the Royal Society, 1911) No mention is made of a liquid pickle.
Curing cellar in an Irish Bacon factory.
“Under these conditions the curing proceeds and the salt, as it melts, take the place of the meat juices.” (Journal of the Royal Society, 1911) In their view, the salt and the rest of the cure “replaced” the meat juices which were drawn out. They worked out that under refrigerated conditions, less salt can be used. The process laster 14 days. A statement is made that the bacon can then be sold as “mild cured bacon”. Alternatively, the bacon could be washed, dried, smoked and sold as smoked bacon.
An interesting comment is made that the bacon would not keep very long in the mild-cured condition. For the bacon to last long, it had to be kept in the salt. Farm cured bacon is typically kept in the salt for 28 days.
Bacon pumping in Denmark. In Denmark, only Wiltshire sides of bacon are produced, and the bacon is all pumped before being placed in the curing bed and covered with salt and saltpetre.
A fascinating and insightful section follows where the curing process is discussed in some detail. “The exact process which goes on in the production of bacon is not merely the displacement of the meat juices by a solution of salt and curing material. There is also the presence of micro-organisms which are always to be found where flesh of any kind exists. These putrefactive organisms assist in the curing process by breaking down some of the tissue of the meat, notwithstanding the presence of salt, which has no antiseptic effect on some of them. This is how the bacon flavour arises as distinguished from fresh or pickled pork. The flavour is largely due to decomposition.” (Journal of the Royal Society, 1911) That there has been a serious progression of scientific thought by this time, is clear. The use of the word micro-organisms is instructive, but surprisingly, they were at this point in Britain completely ignorant of the work in Germany related to the chemical reactions as the basis for curing – at least the bacon curing community was.
Sides of Wiltshire bacon in a curing cellar. In the curing of Wiltshire bacon, the sides are uniformly stacked as in this picture.
What we have here is clearly the Denny/ Vecht curing system and not tank curing which was invented by William Oake and later became part of the Wiltshire brine system. Another observation is in order related to the use of the Wiltshire cut in New Zealand. The largest bacon producer in New Zealand, Hellers, to this day use the Wiltshire cut in its deboning hall. In all probability, this was introduced by Vecht and was part of his curing system as is described in the Journal of 1911.
International Bacon War: Quest for Supremacy
I thought it important to deal with Vecht, Trengrouse and Denny in one letter since it speaks to the state of international competitiveness of the newly emerging superpower of the United States relative to the diminishing influence of England. We must not lose sight of the fact that Vecht’s process was a short-lived attempt by the Dutch (Vecht) and the Americans (Armour) to wrestle away control of the international bacon market from the British.
Over the years I have always wondered why Phil Armour did not try and assert his influence on the lucrative bacon trade not just through exports to Britain (which they did on a large scale), but in the international bacon trade. I never came across them in almost 10 years of research apart from sending bacon from the USA to England. This all changed with the mail from Dr Anderson and looking into the life and career of Vecht.
I speculate that their agents found an ideal ally in the Dutch curer, Aron Vecht. Vecht combined several known (and patented) curing processes, created his own version of mild cure, ostensibly predicated upon the use of refrigeration and an invention by the Irish firm of Henry Denny which automated the singeing process of the carcass. I suspect his allegiance with Armour either led him to become an expert in the newly developing art of refrigeration or he was already interested in this before he came into contact with the Armour Meatpacking company in Chicago. His curing process would have suited Armour in that it was far less capital intensive than Dorset based firm of Oake-Wood’s autocue and despite not being as fast in curing as was accomplished with the autocue equipment, it was a progression on the mild curing process of the inventor of the original process, William Oake, father of the Oake who was a partner in Oake-Woods.
The link with a unique bacon brand is a stroke of genius and something, I am sure, that was carefully deliberated. Before this time, bacon was differentiated by the particular method of curing. As I explained at the start, these would have been dry-cured, sweet cured, mild cured, pale dried or auto cured. There is evidence of Harris going after people using the name “pale dried bacon” but the advent of refrigeration, effectively levelled the playing field as many options became available to produce bacon with far less salt than was traditionally done under the dry-cured system.
Another very important point about Armour must be made. A few years ago, I came across a reference to a secret trial in the use of sodium nitrite done at a packing plant in Chicago. The year was 1905. This was done before its use was legal in any country on earth. I speculated that it was carried out by Phil Armour as very few people would have had the audacity to have tried it. I reported on this experiment in an article and shortly after this all references to it were removed from the publications I cited and I could not get hold of the source documents. I know the author of the article where this reference appeared. He is a prominent person in a leading role in European meat curing circles and I understand why this reference was removed.
This is pure speculation on my part, but it has a tone of credibility. I think that Armour or Armour with the key meatpackers in Chicago of Gustav Swift, and Edward Morris jointly performed the trial. I wrote extensively about this in The Direct Addition of Nitrites to Curing Brines – The Spoils of War. The experiment would have been spectacularly successful and I believe was done on the back of experiments done in German agricultural research centres for years before 1905.
With them having known about the work on nitrites, I believe the process of Vecht suited Armour well as a kind of a “placeholder” without engaging a firm like Oake-Woods and locking them into the Auto Curing system which was the leading system internationally at the time as far as it being patentable and indeed, it was the most widely used international patented system of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
There is an “air” of the thinking of Armour, Swift and Morris in the preamble to a meat science group formed by them, also in the early 1900s where their mission was stated as being “to reduce steers to beef and hogs to pork in the quickest, most economical and the most serviceable manner.” The process they had in mind here was nitrite curing.
It was a key turning point in the history of curing and the Americans spectacularly took the lead when, following the first world war, Griffith, the American Chicago-based company became the evangelists of the direct addition of nitrite to curing brines, a riveting saga which I uncovered and wrote extensively about in the article which I just now sited. So, anticipating what is to come in the direct addition of nitrites to curing brines, there would have been no point in investing in any of the “indirect curing processes” of the English, Danes or the Dutch. There is evidence that the Chicago meatpackers were preparing for this curing revolution for a number of years and the Griffith Laboratories was an important participant who had to be ready to handle the PR of what was to come. They have undoubtedly taken careful note of public perception related to nitrites and had to be careful how they introduce the matter to the public. Besides this, they had to ensure that using nitrites directly in meat curing was legalised. All this were carefully orchestrated and it completely explains why they never fully committed to curing systems that dominated through the rest of the world prior to 1905. Supporting the Vecht system would have been a perfect “placeholder.”
Was the use of the curing technique of Vecht as deliberate as I present it here? I suspect it but have no direct evidence to that effect. Is it a likely scenario, taking the full spectrum of information from that time into account? I believe so! At least it warrants keeping the possibility in mind as we progress our efforts to understand the grand story of the development of bacon!
In Conclusion
The discovery of the life and legacy of Aron Vecht brings together many loose strands in years of research and I am thrilled to share them with you! The real genius of the Irish bacon curer Denny; glimpses of the first attempts of Philip Armours company (he has passed away by this time) to dominate the international bacon production business or flirtations with the thought; the experimentation with refrigeration temperatures for bacon on long voyages; identifying the international agents of Phil Armour; identifying the brain behind Cecil John Rhodes (De Beers) attempt to enter the meat refrigeration business in competition with De Villiers-Graaff; highlighting to me the importance of the singeing of pork in the grand saga of the history of bacon curing; demonstrating how an orthodox Jew could be a master bacon curer; the tantalizing information that Vecht fought in the Anglo Boer war, opening up a new frontier of investigation and validating my own inclusion of this war as background to my book on bacon curing! Finally, the value of international cooperation through the work of Dr Anderson. Without his communication alerting me to the life of Vecht these giant strides in the investigation on numerous fronts would not have taken place. Bacon & the Art of Living is an international collaboration and full credit goes to every single person, who, like Dr Anderson contributed over many years to this work.
I am thrilled that you continue to live so close to the meat trade which I have dedicated my life to and the history of which I am discovering more about every single day!
Lots of love,
your dad.
(c) eben van tonder
Notes
Note 1: Liquidation Sale Notice
The notice of the liquidation reads as follows:
MESSRS. STEWART and MORTON, at NOWRA, on account of THOMAS MARRIOTT, Esq., Liquidator of the Shoalhaven Co-operative Bacon Curing Company, Limited in Liquidation).
BACON CURING FACTORY at Bomaderry, N.S.W., and other Assets of the above Company, consisting of the following:
4 acs 1 road 18 perches, being lots 9 and 10 of Section 33, on Deposited Plan No. 2880, in the Town of Bomaderry, Parish of Bunberra,county of Camden, TORRENS TITLE million to reservations in Crown Grant), withFactory premises and fixed plant and machinerythereon, as per schedule No. 1
Movable Plant, Office Furniture, Horses, Wag-gone, Carts, and Harness, as per Schedule No. 2.
License to use exclusively in NSW. process for curing Bacon known as “Vecht Mild Cure Process.”
“York Castle” Trade Mark for Bacon.
Items 1 and 3 are under mortgage, on which there is a Band of £2050, with Interest at a 5 per cent, per annum, from 2nd June 1900, owing, and will be sold subject thereto.
Item 3 Is held under certain Deeds and Documents, which, together with the Mortgagee over Items 1 and 3, may be inspected at the Offices of Messrs. Perkins. Stevenson, and Co., of 122 Pitt-street, Sydney, Solicitors.
Any Assignment of Item 3 is subject to consent of ARON VECHT, WILLIAM STOKES, and the CHRIST CHURCH CHURCH MEAT COMPANY, Limited. Lists of the Plant, etc may be inspected, at the Office of THOMAS MARIOTT, Esq. and the Auctioneers, at Nowra, and at the Offices of Messrs. PERKINS, STEVENSON, and CO., Solicitors, Sydney.
The York Castle Trademark is of huge interest. William Stokvis of Brussels instituted legal action against Barnes Bacon Company Ltd. (Mr WJ Gale being the managing director at this time). The lawsuit related to the use of a secret curing formulation for bacon and hams in 1936. The plaintiff alleged the unlawful use of the trademark and he claimed that this secret method was alleged to be used for bacon made under this trade name when in reality, so he alleged, it was not always used.
The judge said in the judgement that York Castel bacon has been sold for years throughout New South Wales and that the secret mild cured formulation was attached to it. An agreement was entered on 20 March 1922 in which Stokvis gave Barnes Bacon Company Ltd. the right to use the secret curing formulation and the trademark for 10 years in exchange for monetary compensation for every pig so cured in New South Wales. In addition, Stokvis agreed in June 1922 to pay James Macgregor (an expert in mixing the cure and supervising the curing) half of the royalties received from Australia and New Zealand. Two tradenames were involved in the agreement being “York Castle” and “More Pork.”
In June 1922, JM Watt became the owner of the trademark limited to New South Wales and in January 1926, its scope was extended internationally. Watt dies in 1926 and the partnership created in 1928 ceased in 1928. In 1929 Stokvis became the owner of the trademark. He subsequently renewed the trademark till 1949.
It was established that pork was cured for a period by Barnes Bacon Company Ltd using a curing method, different from the secret mild curing method, yet, the secret curing method was attached to the trade names. Key witnesses were Messrs. WJ Gale, A Robertson, WJ Read, and Colin C Gale. The judge regarded the witness of all except Colin C Gale as unreliable.
So far it’s all of little interest or direct bearing of our historical consideration of various curing methods. One of the legal counsels referred to a previous case between Orange Crush (Australia) and Cartell (41 C.L.R. 282) where the high court found, by majority decision, that the pickle had lost its identity in the final product. The judge did not accept the point as being applicable in this case, but it is of supreme importance for our current consideration.
It has been my contention for many years that unless a specific piece of equipment, fully protected under patent laws is attached to a certain curing or other processes; or, unless a trademark is linked to a process and the agreement between the licensor and the licensee specifically links the method of curing and the trademark, if the outcome is equal, any process loses its identity in the final product and a process or formulation without a trademark so linked to it or the use of patent-protected equipment, curing methods or any meat processing methods are essentially unprotectable.
It is interesting that the judge accepted the argument of WJ Gale that “a different cure is only a matter of the first pickle that is put into bacon.” Judgement was in favour of the plaintiff.
The Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia) · 16 Jun 1936, Tue · Page 6
Note 3: From the The Waikato Argus, Friday, November 22, 1901.
The issue of temperatures takes front and central role in the saga. The following newspaper article deals with this.
“Frozen pigs are arriving in England from New Zealand, to be ‘borne cured’ for the British breakfast table (say the Daily Mail). This explanation is that the world is short of pigs, and as people still insist on eating pork the shippers and curers are straining every nerve to reach the remotest parts where the pig is sold. This is why England is buying bacon from Siberia, Russia, Denmark, Holland, Canada, the United States, Australia, and a score more of our colonial friends and foreign rivals. Hitherto this foreign bacon has always arrived in England already cured, and since it is ‘mildly cured ’ to suit the British palate, a very large portion of the bacon sold to the householder is slightly tainted. To prevent this numerous attempts have been made to put the dead pig into ice and turn him into bacon on arrival in England. But the lowering of the temperature below 32deg Fahrenheit (0 deg C) has ‘invariably faded the flash into a pale, unpleasant colour and alienated the affections of the British matron. Now, however, by what may be called a triumph of transit and cure, a most promising and important trade has begun between New Zealand and England. By employing the Vecht curing process, a New Zealand firm is shipping pigs from that distant colony, placing them in refrigerators with a temperature of 20 deg Fahrenheit (-6 deg C), and curing them here on the banks of the Thames with apparently perfect success. This success is obtained by first treating the carcase*, before they leave New Zealand, by the Vecht curing process, which allays the action of the cold, and so sterilises the flesh as to prevent the changes which has hitherto interfered with the successful curing at Home of what is grown abroad. Messrs Trengrouse and Co., who are colonial shippers on a huge scale and the British agents of Armours, of Chicago, are encouraging this new process, and prophesy for it a vast influence on the bacon trade.”
Note 5: Interesting link to the Grandfather of Henry Trengouse
In my quest to trace the history of bacon curing I wondered many times over 10 years why I cannot find any information about the Armour packing plant in Chicago trading in bacon. It was one of the largest meatpacking plants on earth. I discovered through investigating the life of Aron Vecht, the orthodox Jewish meat curer and inventor of his own curing system, the agent for Armour was the English firm of Henry Trengrouse and they were huge traders in bacon on Armours behalf.
The grandfather of Henry Trengrouse who owned the firm with his brother, Richard, turns out to be a particularly interesting man. He was also Henry Trengrouse. It strikes me that much of his spirit lived on in his grandson. I quote this section from the book Cornish Characters and Strange Events by S. Baring-Gould:
HENRY TRENGROUSE, INVENTOR
Helston is a quaint old town, once of far more importance than at present. It possessed an old castle, that has now disappeared. It was one of the six stannary towns, and prior to 1832 returned two members to Parliament. It still glories in its “Furry Day,” when the whole town goes mad, dancing, in spite of Methodism. It has on some of its old house-gables pixy seats, and it had a grammar school that has had notable masters, as Derwent Coleridge, and notable scholars, as Henry Trengrouse. It is the key and capital to that wonderful district, rich in geological and botanic and antiquarian interest, the Lizard.
The great natural curiosity of Helston is Loe Pool, formed by the Comber, a small river, penned back by Loe Bar, a pebble-and-sand ridge thrown up by the sea. The sheet of water lying between wooded hills abounds in trout, and white swans float dreamily over the still water. The banks are rich with fern, and yellow, white, and pink mesembryanthemum. Formerly the pool rose till it overflowed the lower parts of the town; now a culvert has been driven through the rocks to let off the water as soon as it has attained a certain height.
Henry Trengrouse was born at Helston, 18th March 1772, the son of Nicholas Trengrouse (1739-1814), and of Mary, his wife, who was a Williams.
The family had been long among the freeholders of Helston, and possessed as well a small estate, Priske, in the parish of Mullion; but the family name is taken from Tref-an-grouse, the House by the Cross, in the same parish.
Henry was educated in Helston Grammar School, and became, by trade, a cabinet-maker.On 29th December, 1807, when he was aged thirty-five, a rumour spread through the little town that a large frigate, H.M.S. Anson, had been driven ashore on Loe Bar, about three miles distant. Mr Trengrouse and many others hastened to the coast and reached the bar.
The Anson, forty-four guns, under the command of Captain Lydiard, had left Falmouth on Christmas Eve for her station off Brest as a look-out ship for the Channel Fleet.
A gale from the W.S.W. sprang up, and after being buffeted about till the 28th, with the wind increasing, the captain determined to run to port. The first land they made was the Land’s End, which they mistook for the Lizard, and only discovered their mistake when the cry of “Breakers ahead!” was heard from the man on the lookout. They were now embayed, and in face of the terrible storm, it was impossible to work off, so both cables were let go. The Anson rode to these till the early morning of the 29th, when they parted, and the captain, in order to save as many lives as possible, decided to beach her on the sand off Loe Pool. A tremendous sea was running, and as she took the beach only sixty yards from the bar, she was dashed broadside on, and happily for the poor fellows on board, heeled landwards. Seas mountains high rolled over her, sweeping everything before them. Then her masts went by the board, her mainmast forming a floating raft from the ship almost to the shore, and over this scrambled through the maddened waves most of those who were saved.
It was a terrible sight to witness for the hundreds of spectators who had by this time collected on the beach, but it was almost impossible for them to render any assistance.
At last, when all hands seemed to have left the ship, two stout-hearted Methodist local preachers—Mr. Tobias Roberts, of Helston, and Mr. Foxwell, of Mullion—made an attempt to reach her, so as to see if anyone remained on board. They succeeded and were soon followed by others, who found several people, including two women and as many children. The women and some of the men were safely conveyed ashore, but the children were drowned. There were altogether upwards of a hundred drowned, including the captain, who stood by the frigate to the last. The exact number was never known, as many of the soldiers deserted on reaching the shore.
The survivors salved a good deal from the wreck, amongst which were watches, jewellery, and many articles of considerable value. They were placed all together in a bedroom of the old inn at Porthleven, with a soldier with drawn sword on guard. One of the beams that bent under such an unusual weight may be seen bowed to this day. A local militia sergeant was soon afterwards sent to Helston in charge of a wagon-load of these valuable goods, and when halfway to his destination was accosted by a Jew, who offered him £50 in exchange for his load. “Here is my answer,” said the sergeant, presenting a loaded pistol at his head, and the fellow hurriedly took his departure.
Much indignation was raised at the time by the way in which the victims of the disaster were buried. They were bundled in heaps into large pits dug in the cliff above, without any burial service being performed over them. It was customary everywhere at that time for all bodies washed ashore to be interred by the finder at the nearest convenient spot. But as a result of the indecent methods of burial of the Anson victims, an Act of Parliament was framed by Mr Davies Gilbert, and passed on 18th June 1808, providing “suitable interment in churchyards and parochial burying-grounds” for all bodies cast up by the sea.
The Anson was a sixty-four gun frigate cut down to a forty-four and had seen much service. Among many fights, she figured in Lord Rodney’s action on 12th April 1782, formed part of the fleet which repulsed the French squadron in an attempt to land in Ireland in 1796, helped in the seizure of the French West Indies in 1803, and in 1807 took part in the capture of Curaçao from the Dutch. It was not long after her return from this latter place that she left Falmouth for the cruise on which she met her fate.
In 1902 the hull of the Anson, after having been submerged for ninety-five years, came to light again. She was found by Captain Anderson of the West of England Salvage Company, whose attention had been directed to the wreck by a Porthleven fisherman. Unfortunately at the time, the weather was so stormy that Captain Anderson could not proceed with any efforts of salvage, and with the exception of one visit of inspection the interesting relic was left untouched. But in April 1903, with a bright sky and a light breeze from the northeast, he proceeded to the spot and inspected the remains. The hull of the vessel was not intact, and several guns were lying alongside. One of these, about 10 ft. 6 in. long, Captain Anderson secured and hoisted on to the deck of the Green Castle by means of a winch, and afterwards conveyed it to Penzance. It was much encrusted. Amongst the mass of débris also raised were several cannon-balls.
But to return to Henry Trengrouse, who had stood on the beach watching the wreck, the rescue of some and the perishing of others.
Drenched with rain and spray, and sick at heart, Henry Trengrouse returned to his home and was confined to his bed for nearly a week, having contracted a severe cold. The terrible scene had made an indelible impression on his mind, and he could not, even if he had wished it, drive the thought away. Night and day he mused on the means whereby some assistance could be given to the shipwrecked, some communication be established between the vessel and the shore.
He was a great friend of Samuel Drew, whose life was devoted to metaphysics, and it was perhaps the contrast in the two minds that made them friends—one an idealist, the other practical.
Trengrouse had a small competence, besides his trade, and he devoted every penny that he could spare to experiments, first in the construction of a lifeboat, but without satisfactory results.
The King’s birthday was celebrated at Helston with fireworks on the green; and as Henry Trengrouse looked up at the streak of fire rushing into the darkness above and scattering a shower of stars, it occurred to him, Why should not a rocket, instead of wasting itself in an exhibition of fireworks, do service and become a means of carrying a rope to a vessel among the breakers? When a communication has been established between the wreck and the shore, above the waves, it may become an aerial passage along which those in distress may pass to safety.
Something of the same idea had already occurred to Lieutenant John Bell in 1791, but his proposal was that a shot with a chain attached to it should be discharged from a mortar. Captain George William Manby had his attention drawn to this in February 1807, and in August of the same year exhibited some experiments with his improved life-preserving mortar to the members of the Suffolk House Humane Society. By the discharge of the mortar, a barbed shot was to be flung onto the wreck, with a line attached to the shot. By means of this line a hawser could be drawn from the shore to the ship, and along it would be run a cradle in which the shipwrecked persons could be drawn to land.
Manby’s mortar was soon abandoned as cumbrous and dangerous; men were killed during tests; notwithstanding which he was awarded, £2000. The great merit of Trengrouse’s invention was that the rocket was much lighter than a shot from a mortar, and was, moreover, more portable, and there was a special line manufactured for it that would not kink, nor would it snap, because the velocity of the rocket increased gradually, whereas that from a discharge of a mortar was sudden and so great that the cord was frequently ruptured.
The distinctive feature of Trengrouse’s apparatus consisted of “a section of a cylinder, which is fitted to the barrel of a musket by a bayonet socket; a rocket with a line attached to its stick is so placed on it that its priming receives fire immediately from the barrel”; whereas a metal mortar could not be conveyed to the cliff or shore opposite the scene of disaster without being drawn in a conveyance by horses, and where there was no road with the utmost difficulty dragged over hedges and ploughed fields by men. Not only so, but a shot discharged by Captain Manby’s mortar was liable to endanger life. Wrecks generally happened in the dark, and then the shot would not be visible to those on the wreck. But Trengrouse’s rocket would indicate its track by the trail of fire by which it was impelled and could be fired from either the ship or the shore.
Trengrouse expended £3000 on his experiments and sacrificed to this one object—that of saving life—his capital, his business, and his health. He cut off the entail on Priske, which had belonged to the family for several generations, and sold it to enable him to pursue his experiments. There was much that was pathetic in his life: there were the long and frequent journeys to London from Helston, four days by coach, sometimes in mid-winter and in snowstorms, with the object of inducing successive Governments to adopt the rocket apparatus, meeting only with discouragement. Nor was this all. After all his own means had been exhausted, he received a legacy of £500 under a brother’s will, and this sum he at once devoted to further endeavours with H.M. Government for the general adoption of his rocket apparatus.
The Russian ambassador now stepped forward and invited Trengrouse to S. Petersburg, where he assured him that, instead of rebuffs, he would experience only the consideration due to him for his inventions. But Trengrouse’s reply was, “My country first”; and that country allowed him, after the signal services he had rendered to humanity—to die penniless.
His original design was to supply every ship with a rocket apparatus; as vessels were almost invariably wrecked before the wind, the line might the more easily be fired from a ship than from the shore.
Trengrouse once met Sir William Congreve, who also claimed to be the inventor of the war-rocket; and Trengrouse said to him in the course of their discussion, “As far as I can see, Sir William, your rocket is designed to destroy life; mine is to save life; and I do claim to be the first that ever thought of utilizing a rocket for the saving of human lives.”
Trengrouse moreover invented the cork jacket or “life preserver.” This was a success and has never been improved on. It has been the means of saving many hundreds of lives. He also built a model of a lifeboat, that could not be sunk, and was equal to the present lifeboats of the Royal Lifeboat Association in all respects except the “self-righting” principle. It was not until February 28th, 1818, after many journeys to London, and much ignorant and prejudiced objection that he had to contend against, such as is found so usual among Government officials, that Trengrouse was able to exhibit his apparatus before Admiral Sir Charles Rowley. A committee was appointed, and on March 5th it reported favourably on the scheme.
In the same year the Committee of the Elder Brethren of Trinity House reported in high terms on the invention, and recommended that “no vessel should be without it.”
Thereupon Government began to move slowly; in the House, the matter was discussed and haggled over. One speaker exclaimed: “You are guilty of sinful negligence in this matter, for while you are parleying over this invention and this important subject, thousands of our fellow-men are losing their lives.”
At last, Government ordered twenty sets of the life-preserving rockets, but afterwards resolved on making the apparatus itself, and paid Trengrouse the sum of £50, the supposed amount of profit he would have made on the order. Fifty pounds was all his ungrateful country could afford to give him. In 1821, however, the Society of Arts pronounced favourably on his apparatus and presented Trengrouse with their silver medal and a grant of thirty guineas.
Through the Russian ambassador, the then Czar sent him a diamond ring, in consideration of the great advantage his apparatus had proved in shipwrecks on the Baltic and the Black Sea. Even this he was constrained to pledge, that he might devote the money to his darling project.
With these acknowledgements of his services, he had to rest contented, but ever the news of lives having been saved through his invention was a solace to an even and contented mind.
Henry Trengrouse died at Helston on February 19th, 1854.
As he lay on his deathbed with his face to the wall, he turned about, and with one of his bright, hopeful smiles said to his son, “If you live to be as old as I am, you will find my rocket apparatus all along our shores.” They were his last words; in a few minutes he had passed away.
The rocket apparatus is along the shores at 300 stations, but not, as he had hoped, onboard the vessels. He had despaired of obtaining that, yet that is what he aimed at principally.
In April 1905, owing to the loss of the Kyber on the Land’s End coast, questions were asked in the House of Commons relative to wireless telegraphy between the lighthouses and the coast. On that occasion one of the most valuable suggestions was made by a shipping expert, who considered that the Board of Trade should make it compulsory that a light rocket apparatus should be carried by all vessels, so that, when in distress if near the coast, the crew could send a rocket ashore. This marine engineer said: “On shore the rockets must be fired by practised men, such as coastguards because they have to strike a small object; but on a vessel, they have only to hit the land, and if people are about, the line will quickly be seized and made fast. At present, too, horses and wagons have to be used, and sometimes it is difficult to find a road leading down to the spot from which help must be rendered. Probably for twenty pounds an appliance could be kept on board a vessel which would send a line ashore in less time and with more certainty than at present. When a vessel is being blown ashore, I have seen rockets fired from the land return like a boomerang to the cliff on account of the strength of the gale. In my judgment, mariners should assist in their own salvation.”
On this Mr H. Trengrouse, grandson of the inventor, wrote to the Cornishman, 24th April 1905:—
“Your suggestion in the Cornishman of the 15th instant … that all vessels should be compelled by the Board of Trade to carry this apparatus, is very practical, and should, and I trust may be soon adopted.”
It may interest your readers to learn that the inventor, my grandfather, the late Mr. Henry Trengrouse, of Helston, urged this upon successive Governments without any encouragement whatever, and I on two occasions have also suggested it to the principals of the Marine Department of the Board of Trade, who have informed me of a strong opinion always entertained, that on the occasion of wreck, there would probably not be any one on board possessing sufficient knowledge of the use of the apparatus to render it of any value; which seems very strange indeed, and might be readily obviated by, at least, the captain and officers of vessels being instructed in its use—surely simple enough. My grandfather devoted much time to make it so; and the advantage of an appliance for use on board is so palpable, and the loss of life during many years by its absence so considerable, that it is extremely gratifying to observe a renewed and increasing interest in the subject, which I hope, Sir, as you state, being so important, may now be kept to the fore.”
I am, Sir,
“Your obedient servant,”
“H. Trengrouse.”
That this admirable letter to the Cornishman should at the time produce no effect on the Board of Trade is what every one who has had any dealings with that Board would predicate.
At length, however, some goading has roused that obstructive, inert body into inquiring into this matter. I read in the Daily Express of 27th January 1908: “The question whether the carrying of rockets for projecting lifelines should be made compulsory on all British ships is being investigated by a special committee appointed by the Board of Trade. One witness before the committee said that he had seen fifty men drowned within sixty yards of the shore in a gale, and that all might have been saved had the vessel been equipped with line-throwing guns.”
So—after the lapse of eighty-six or seven years, and the loss of thousands of lives that might have been saved had not the Board of Trade been too inert to move in the matter—an inquiry has once more been instituted. Let us hope that after this inquiry the matter may not be allowed to fall again into neglect.
That the rocket fired from the shore has been already the means of saving lives, the following report on it made to the Board of Trade, for the year ending 30th June 1907, will testify:—
“During the year ended as above, 268 lives were saved by means of the life-saving apparatus, that is to say, 127 more than the number saved by the same means during the previous year, and 67 more than the average for the previous ten years. The total number of lives saved by the life-saving apparatus since 1870 is 8924. This number does not include the large number of lives saved by means of ropes and other assistance from the shore.”
After the loss of the Berlin, belonging to the Great Eastern Company, in 1907, the attention of the Dutch Government was called to the advantage of having the rocket apparatus on board ship, and legal instructions were drafted, making it obligatory upon all vessels of over two hundred tons gross to carry rocket apparatus.
Henry Trengrouse’s noble life was a failure in so far as that it brought him no pecuniary results—covered him with disappointment, reduced him to poverty. He received, in all, for his life’s work, and the sacrifice of fortune and the landed estate of his ancestors, £50 from Government, £31 10s. from the Society of Arts, and a diamond ring that in his time of need he was constrained to pawn, and which he was never able to redeem.
Russell Lowell puts these lines into the mouth of Cromwell, in his Glance behind the Curtain:—
My God, when I read o'er the bitter lives
Of men whose eager hearts are quite too great
To beat beneath the cramp'd mode of the day,
And see them mocked at by the world they love,
Haggling with prejudice for pennyworths
Of that reform which this hard toil will make
The common birthright of the age to come—
When I see this, spite of my faith in God,
I marvel how their hearts bear up so long;
Nor could they, but for this same prophecy,
This inward feeling of the glorious end.
Henry Trengrouse married Mary, daughter of Samuel and Mary Jenken, 19th November 1795. She was born at S. Erth, 9th September, 1772, and died at Helston, 27th March 1863. By her he had one son only who reached manhood, Nicholas Trevenen Trengrouse, who died at the age of seventy-four; and one daughter, Jane, who married Thomas Rogers, solicitor, of Helston; Emma, who married a Mr Matthews; and two, Mary and Anne, who died unmarried, the first at the age of eighty, the latter at that of ninety-four.
To Mr. Henry Trengrouse, the son of Mr Nicholas T. Trengrouse, I am indebted for much information relative to his grandfather, as also to a lecture, never published, delivered in 1894 by the Rev. James Ninnis, who says in a letter to Mr H. Trengrouse, junior: “Most of the detail I have taken from notes of my father, dated 1878; he got them from a conversation with your respected father.”
Mr J. Ninnis’ grandfather had stood on the beach by the side of Henry Trengrouse, watching the wreck of the Anson.
A portrait of the inventor, by Opie the younger, is in the possession of the family at Helston, as is also the picture of the wreck of the Anson sketched at the time by Mr. Trengrouse. For permission to reproduce both I am indebted to the courtesy of the grandson of the inventor.
Journal of the Royal Society of the Arts, no 3078, Vol LX, 17 November 1911
Lebrecht, N. 2019. Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947. Simon and Schuster
Molander, E.. 1985. Effect of Singeing on the Texture and Histological Appearance of Pig Skin. Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University, Department of Meat Technology and Process Engineering, 11 Howitzvej, DK-2000 Copenhagen F, Denmark
The story of bacon is set in the late 1800s and early 1900s when most of the important developments in bacon took place. The plotline takes place in the 2000s with each character referring to a real person and actual events. The theme is a kind of “steampunk” where modern mannerisms, speech, clothes and practices are superimposed on a historical setting. Modern people interact with old historical figures with all the historical and cultural bias that goes with this.
Finally
October 1960
Bacon & the Art of Living
When I say that it was my study of bacon that taught me the essence of the art of living, the reality is that in the first place it taught me to accept who I am in life. As important as my hopes and aspirations are, I am not my ideals and dreams. I am not the most current fad of the ever-changing mental world we live in. I am in the first place the physical being who lives in a physical world, connected to the bountiful earth that brought me forth. Despite the fact that I am in my mental world the centre of the universe, I am not! Life is not the life I live in my brain minus the physical world. It is all one thing and my mental world is only my perception of the real world I live in. In reality, I am nature!
I am Nature
My brain is a very complex physical event and my consciousness, as I define it with my human mind is here today and gone tomorrow. My thoughts, my thinking, is predicated upon my memory and indoctrination (learned information and past experiences). What is fundamental and what bacon taught me is that my connection with the earth itself is not primarily through my brain. The billions upon billions of atoms that form the molecules and the amino acids and bacteria and proteins and synapsis and organs that make up my body by its most basic essence is my connection to nature. My essential nature is my oneness with the universe and the universe is nature. Bacon curing is not a study of any food in that it mimics natural physiological processes essential for life. Nitrogen plays an essential role in it irrespective of the current thinking on the benefits or dangers of its consumption.
My initial resistance against eating bacon was initially not restricted to the question of nitrites. I had to work out for myself if I am comfortable eating other animals. Like the question about nitrogen, the fact that I eat other animals is a fact of my existence as a human being whether it is fashionable to do so or not. We only perceive this as a moral dilemma because we have departed our natural environment and so we think that in the plant kingdom the same predatory behaviour does not exist. If we see all living organisms as essentially the same, we will understand that to arbitrarily choose to eat one group and not another is non-sensical.
The Zambian Revelation
A fig attacking a water berry tree. Eventually, it will kill the water berry tree.
During my second trip to Zambia, I’ve spent days in the forests in the north of the country close to the Kongolese border with a remarkable man, Richard Horton. He looks at the trees and plants and knows every one of them by name. Which one is related to which. The basic characteristic of each individual fruit and flower. The locals call him “Capenta Mabullo,” meaning “The Man who Counts Leaves.” It was through the eyes of Richard and walking the forests of Zambia that I discovered that in the plant kingdom we find the same struggle for life and death as we find in the animal kingdom and the same predatory behaviour of many plant species. Walking with him through the woods becomes the same experience as seeing a lion hunt in the Kruger National Park or crocodiles hunting wildebeest in the great migrations on the Serengeti plains of Kenia.
It is here that I learned that to think that plants are different from mammals or other animals is a view based on our removal from the forests of our youth. Humanity lost its perspective on our essential nature. In the first place, the plants and trees of the forest are just as much alive with struggles and pleasures as the world of animals and insects. Both are living. Both have intellect – yes, not as we would define it in our human-centric worldviews of intellect. Choosing one over the other – to assign intellect and emotions as we understand it arbitrarily to the one group and not the other is supreme foolishness. In the Zambian forests, I have seen plants behaving like animals. They strive and compete; they weep and reach out in joy.
Evaluating the effect of the human intellect on the natural world, I am at a loss to see the benefit of our version of intellect and I fear that if we don’t come to our senses, our time as a species is short and nature will remove the element poised to destroy its world from the universe. Then, again, saying that we evolved intellect for a particular reason beyond simply survival is an assumption I can not make. That our intellect is not superior to that of plants and animals and insects and microbes is clear when we evaluate the effect our intelligence have on the natural world. The most we can say, it seems to me, is that our intellect is different in degree and an effective means to dominate. It manifests in a different way but I fail to see its superiority in quality or the result of its “differentness.” So, at least, it seems to me. Superseding everything is nature and it is nature that dictates that we eat in order to live and as a food source, nature feeds itself from all it brings forth, including humans as part of the world of animals.
I Consume and Will be Consumed – the Same Eternal Sycle for All
Before I could engage the issue of nitrites in meat I had to come to grips with the fact that no matter what I assign to animals and plants – the fact is that I consume both natural “forms” just as I will be consumed by them one day is the natural cycle of everything. The micro-world and insects will feast on my body one day long with plants. The possibility still exists that my initial end may be brought about by an animal if I continue to venture into forests. This does not make the animals or trees or microorganisms or insects immoral. It is life. Nature does not care about my view of morality. Nor yours!
When I transfer my view of emotion, righteousness or morality to non-human living beings (plants, animals, insects, microorganisms), it is supreme foolishness. These are mental constructs that operate solely in the mind-space of humans and within the ambit of human culture. It is natural in the sense that it is from nature (being our natural brains), but what we think and dream up is not a result of nature and is not inherently “natural.” It does not represent nature automatically.
One of the best recent developments in our mental world is the fact that we start to value the animals and plants who share the world with us. Abusing and mistreating them becomes cruel and unnatural. Inflicting suffering on nature for the sake of our own comfort is the most unnatural thing we can do and recognising this is a sign of a maturing understanding. Mistreating our food source becomes physical harm we do to them and mental harm we do to ourselves! However, to assign more to them than what nature intends is unnatural. I consume living beings that I share this world with. It took me years to understand this and it came to me through the understanding of the curing of bacon. I struggled with the fact that I am making my living through the death of other animals. The first lesson I had to learn was that it is unnatural to try and be more natural than nature itself.
The Basic Problem – Our Evolving Culture
As human populations increased and our culture developed we changed our natural habitat. We urbanised and had to design our own food sources. Humans incorporated the preparation of food into our culture and changed it for the sake of distributing it to the cities and towns we started living in. Food, in its most natural form, is best suited for our bodies as this is how we initially evolved. In so doing we did not always understand the implications of what we were doing. One of the most important lessons we had to learn, not just related to additives but also food sources themselves, like red meat, was the issue of “how much.” Including many additives at the wrong inclusion ratio becomes unhealthy and even poisonous. Red meat, for example, must be consumed in moderation. Too much will have serious health consequences. Not just ingredients and types of foods must be carefully considered, but also methods of preparations. Science is invaluable in a continual investigation into these matters so that we can improve our health.
A curious position emerged in particular related to the use of nitrites in foods. Despite the fact that nitrogen is an inherent constituent of animal and plant proteins and despite the essential role it plays in human physiology, there exist among parts of our population a perception that nitrite is one of the key villains in modern food. This group of our population further see the presence of nitrite restricted to cured meat and bacon in particular.
The advice from the WHO that intake of cured meat must be limited as is the case with red meat, alcohol, fatty food, refined carbohydrates and sugars, in particular, is something that every food scientist will agree with. In general, humans per capita consume more food than ever with the accompanying diseases of obesity and the impact on our general health. For some reason, the perception still exists that bacon or possibly cured meat should be singled out. Some go as far as to equate the consumption of these products with cigarette smoking.
Understanding why this is the case and dealing with this issue brought me to the greatest realisation about life namely the value of using nature itself as our guiding principle in the design of our food and our lives. Right at the outset then I can reveal that the greatest lesson I learned from bacon over many years is that if we want to be safe, we must strive to use the ratios and proportions of various compounds naturally found in the human body and in plants. This extends much further than only food. Over the years I have taken these lessons and applied them to every area of my life including things like exercise, water intake and stress. I learned to limit my mental activity during the day by quieting my mind whenever the flurry of mental activities goes out of hand. The blueprint of nature became the essence of my goals.
How I discovered that nitrate and nitrite have key physiological functions in the body and that it is by no means a villain to be avoided at all times in foods came to me through the contemplation of and search for the original location on earth where nitrate curing of meat most probably developed into an art form. I will deal with nitrosamines and the fact that most nitrosamines are cancer-causing in animals, but before I do so, let me start by giving you the chronology of my own discovery that nitrate, nitrite and nitric oxide are three absolutely essential molecules for our existence on earth.
How I discovered the Value of Nitrate, Nitrite and Nitric Oxide to Human Health
It was my search for the original location where meat curing was turned into an art form that made me look at the use of salt in meat preservation which predates the use of nitrogen salts. The general consideration of salt led me to mummification which took me natural deposits of nitrate in the Atacama Desert in South America and the Turfan Depression in the West of China. In searching for supporting evidence of the general development of technology related to nitrates, I happened upon a very clear and effective remedy from this region which used nitrate, a cure so revolutionary that it was only finally understood by science in the 1980s which unlocked the reality of the absolutely key role of nitrate, nitrite and nitric oxide in human physiology. So, in re-capping the progression of my search for the location of the birthplace of nitrate curing of meat, I am actually telling the story of my discovery of the value of nitrite, nitrate and nitric oxide to human existence and health.
The Story at a Glance
My quest started with a consideration of salt which is older than humanity itself. My interest is in its use as a meat preservative. When did this start and how and what are its functional benefits? Most of this has been dealt with in Chapter 12.10: Meat Curing – A Review, but I left an important link out in that discussion namely a realisation that studying mummies and mummification technology through the ages may be a very productive way of searching for the oldest known meat preservation technology and the use of salts at a time before writing was invented. I applied this thinking and did a survey of the oldest mummies on earth which yielded the most startling two results.
A semi-natural mummy in Chile’s Atacama Desert
The oldest mummies on earth, dating from around 7000 BCE are the Chinchorro mummies from the one place on earth that is at the same time the dryest and is replete with the highest concentration of natural sodium nitrate, the Atacama Desert from Chile and Peru! What makes this startling is that sodium nitrate has been the curing agent of choice for meat until it was replaced after World War 1 by sodium nitrite. I always thought that the use of sodium nitrate in meat curing became popular due to the cured colour it imparts to meat and that its preserving ability was a secondary application. I also thought that its widespread use was a very recent development that reached a height in Europe at the end of the 1800s. Following my logic about mummification technology, I was certainly not expecting a date of 7000 BCE for a probable use of sodium nitrate in meat curing.
I turned my attention to Asia from where, in an iconic review article from Binkerd and Kolari (1975), they claim that the use of nitrates in the curing of meat was first used as meat preservative “in the saline deserts of Hither Asia and in coastal areas.” They say that “desert salts contained nitrates and borax as impurities” and the discovery was accidental when they actually thought they use ordinary sea or bay salt (sodium chloride). I wanted to examine the veracity of their claims.
What I discovered was the most startling possibility, that curing technology was developed into an art form between a particular location in China and another one in Austria. Even more than that, following the mummy trail, I managed to identify one particular geographic location which is a prime candidate for the exact location where the technology of curing was discovered, developed and spread across the rest of Asia and into Europe. This is an amazing possibility and the fact presented by themselves are startling!
The oldest mummies in China are found in the Taklimakan Desert, in the Tarim Basin. Right here, in the region where the mummies are found, in the Turpan-Hami Basin, massive nitrate ore fields, close in proximity to the Tarim Basin exists. Nitrate deposits, so massive that it is estimated to be at least 2.5 billion tonnes and comparable in scale to the Atacama Desert super-scale nitrate deposit in Chile.
A Tarim mummy
At the graves near Loulan, one of the bodies were subjected to radiocarbon dating which indicated that she died about 1200 BCE. In the oldest cemetery so far discovered, the Small River Cemetery, mummies were discovered which carbon tests, done at Beijing University, show to be 3980 years old. This takes the known date for meat preservation, by our logic of linking it with mummification, to almost 4000 years ago in China.
The two areas in the Atacama Desert and the Taklimakan Desert in China share a striking similarity in weather. They are both some of the aridest regions on earth. A second factor that plaid a role in the natural mummification is rapid freezing due to extreme cold conditions in the winter and then, of course, the very high sodium chloride content of the soil.
I honed in on this region in China for its geographical importance as being on the important Silk Road connecting Asia with the Middle East and Europe. I asked if there is any evidence of the development of sophisticated thinking pertaining to the use of sodium nitrate salt from this particular region. My reasoning is that if meat curing as an art developed here, that would have been a springboard for the development of related applications.
The results of my enquiry have been nothing less than startling and leave me with little doubt that I have identified one of the exact locations on earth from where the art of curing meat developed and was spread into Europe and back into Asia. Not that they were the only ones who would have discovered this. I am convinced the ancients in the Atacama Desert would have easily made the same link with meat preservation but it was here, in China’s Western front, on the Silk Road, where a level of sophistication in thought related to the application of sodium nitrate developed that is unrivalled, as far as I am aware off, by any other location on earth.
The first factor in favour of the Tarim Bason for the birthplace of curing technology that was spread into Europe is then the enormous natural deposits of sodium nitrate. Secondly, you have the mummies which are something that observant ancients would have noticed almost immediately. It won’t take you 4000 years to realise that something extraordinary is happening with the corpses. The third fact relates to the level of sophistication in the application of sodium nitrate.
The clue of such sophistication of thought comes to us in the discovery of an ancient medical prescription dating from some time between CE 456 and 536, during the life of the famous Daoist alchemist and physician Toa Hongjing in a cave close to the city of Dunhuang, right in our area of interest.
The text describes the treatment of a condition identified as a case of severe angina, i.e. restricted blood flow due to the narrowing of the cardiac arteries. The treatment was to place saltpetre (potassium nitrate) under the tongue.
The basic curing pathway that alleviates the condition by the ancient prescription is a reduction of the nitrate through bacteria under the tongue to nitrite and in the tissue, transported there by the blood, the nitrite is converted to nitric oxide. The role of nitric oxide as a vasodilator was, amazingly, only discovered in 1987 simultaneously by a group of researchers at the Wellcome Research Laboratories in Beckenham led by Professor Salvador Moncada and by a group in the USA led by Professor Louis Ignarro. So momentous was this discovery that the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine was awarded for the work. Once nitric oxide was identified as playing a role in physiological processes, it was found to be involved in many processes from inflammation to crying. So, here we have a text, detailing a medical prescription in the 5th and 6th decade of the Christan Era, from China, that has only been fully understood by modern science in 1987! This by itself is an astounding fact!
It gets even more startling. It turns out that this exact reaction sequence of nitrate ion that is reduced to nitrite through bacterial reduction and changed to nitric oxide, along with the influence of acidity and various reductants on the speed of the process is something that is well known in meat science. Humphrey Davy, in 1812 (cited by Hermann, 1865) was the first one to note the action of nitric oxide upon haemoglobin. On 7 May 1868, Dr Arthur Gamgee from the University of Edinburgh, brother of the famous veterinarian, Professor John Gamgee (who contributed to the attempt to find ways to preserve whole carcasses during a voyage between Australia and Britain), published a groundbreaking article entitled, “On the action of nitrites on the blood.” He observed the colour change brought about by nitrite. He wrote, “The addition of … nitrites to blood … causes the red colour to return…” Over the next 30 years, it would be discovered that it is indeed nitrites responsible for curing and not the nitrates added as saltpetre. It was Polenski who first speculated that saltpetre is reduced to nitrite in the curing of meat in 1891 and 1901 Haldane showed that nitrite is further reduced to nitric oxide (NO). (Fathers of Modern Meat Curing)
Meat curing has been known to follow this exact pathway since 1901. The tantalising possibility, now presents itself that the preserving nature of the salt was recognised from things like the natural mummification in this exact region in China. The salt was applied to meat in which it had an amazing preserving impact as well as, what must have been, a mysterious reddening effect. To the ancients, it probably looked as if the meat was coming to life again. The Chinese alchemists in all likelihood gravitated to this as a possible key component of the elusive elixir of immortality. Finding such an elixir was the goal of Chinese alchemy. They probably applied its preserving power to all kinds of ailments and in a process of trial and error, a treatment for angina must have been especially effective.
Such experimentation takes many centuries and if this was a known cure and part of a medical prescription by CE 400 or CE 500, it means that curing of meat must have been very advanced in terms of it being practised in this region by this time. From here, in terms of its key position on the Silk Road, the curing technology would have spread across Asia and into Europe.
Mummification – Key to Preservation Technology
The use of salt in embalming is an obvious application of the preserving power of salt to meat. It also seems reasonable to speculate that salt for preserving meat for domestic consumption came first and the application of the technology to mummification was probably a later development. One obvious reason for this is that meat preservation for consumption would have been a daily requirement. An immediate need, for a large group of people. So, many people, over a long time would have been engaged in experiments with various salts and ingredients to determine by a simple process of observation which salts ingredients and combination of factors preserved meat best. Burying the dead and mummification, on the other hand, was a far more infrequent event, with very few people working on solving the problem resulting in a much slower development trajectory. It is far more probable that techniques for meat preservation in general use would have been applied to the preservation of human bodies after death and in the art of mummification.
If one assumes this logic, it becomes an important tool to establish a date by which food preservation with salt was done by a society. The use of salt in embalming leaves us with clear records with precise dates and exactly what was used in meat preservation. If one assumes that meat preservation for general consumption would have predated the use for embalming, we can fix precise dates by what time a society used which salts to preserve meat.
I found support for this reasoning from Valerie Wohl. She writes, “While we do not know exactly how embalming began, it is likely that methods common at the time for preserving meat, fowl or fish probably suggested a clue for early techniques. One might bleed a fish, for example, then preserve it by salting, smoking, sun drying or otherwise heating it to prevent decomposition and store it for a later time. By the time of the very earliest documentation of the process of embalming (in about 500 BCE), it had become a sophisticated technique that had been evolved over hundreds of years.” (Wohl, V.)
The Chinchorro Mummies of the Atacame Desert
This line of reasoning yielded the most surprising results imaginable. Not in my wildest imagination did I think that the oldest mummies and their preservation would be linked, not with sodium chloride, but with what has been the curing salt of choice up until at least 1905, namely sodium nitrate. I have always thought, based on research on the subject, that sodium nitrate was used for preserving meat from the 1600s and reached its height in Europe in the 1700s and 1800s before it was replaced with sodium nitrite from around 1905 and in particular after World War 1. I thought it was used in isolated places around the world where various cultures re-discovered the reddening effect it had on meat, independently and over a long time and that this slowly filtered through to Europe where it gained popularity over time until it became a general practice. Never did I expect sodium nitrite to have been used for meat preservation since between 5000 and 7000 years BCE and not due to its reddening effect, but for its preserving properties. Let’s look at this case.
It turns out that the oldest mummies on earth are the Chinchorro mummies from the Atacama Desert in Chile and Peru, dating from as early as 7000 BCE. (Guillén, S. E.; 2005) Gypsum, a sulphate mineral, was later used with clay (3000 – 1300 BCE), but mud and clay played an important role from as early as 5000 BCE.
The fascinating link is between this region and sodium nitrate. Nowhere on earth are such large natural deposits of this salt found. The soil here is rich in sodium nitrate salt which is known as Chilean Saltpeter to distinguish it from potassium nitrate or regular saltpetre. A war was fought over these deposits and securing it was a major consideration of Germany going into World War 1. The second important factor is that the Atacama desert is the dryest place on earth. The soil is so rich in saltpetre and it is so dry that mummification occurred naturally, leaving mummies that exist since 7020 BCE.
Two of the most important ingredients in meat preservation namely heat/ drying and saltpetre were present in the mummifications rituals of the Chicharro people of the Atacama Desert since as early as at least 5000 BCE. I do not think that it is too far a stretch to assume that these people knew about the meat preserving ability by drying in combination with their special salts (sodium nitrate). Even though it is complete conjecture, I am comfortable to say that preserving meat through sodium nitrate salt and drying was probably known since at least 5000 BCE in Chile and parts of Peru. It is then not a stretch to say that this was likely to be known in the other two main regions in the world where saltpetre is found naturally namely in China and India. This is, of course, a fascinating possibility since this particular salt became the curing agent of choice in the 1700s which gave rise to the food category of cured meats and directly resulted in our use of sodium nitrite in meat curing today. This date of between 5000 and 7000 BCE is completely in line with a date proposed by Binkerd and Kolari.
Despite this tantalising possibility, the actual sodium nitrate concentrations at the burial sites in the Atacama Desert has never been studied. The degree of mummification varies tremendously (Aufderheide, A. C.; 2003: 141) which will indicate that various factors have been present in varying degrees.
The Tarim Mummies of China
A date of between 5000 and 7000 BCE is completely in line with a date proposed by Binkerd and Kolari. According to their iconic 1975 review article about the history and use of nitrates and nitrites in the curing of meat, “it appears that meat preservation was first practised in the saline deserts of Hither Asia and in coastal areas. Desert salts contained nitrates and borax as impurities. However, the reddening effect of nitrates was not mentioned until late Roman times.” (Binkerd, E. F. and Kolari O. E.; 1975: 655) A probable time for this discovery is however not given.
I first thought that what they were talking about was salt preservation generally, but the more I look at events in the Atacama desert, the more I wondered if the particular preserving power of sodium and potassium nitrate was not known from the earliest times and the discovery, focusing on its preserving power and not on its reddening effect on cured meat.
A further elaboration of what Binkerd and Kolari may have been talking about comes to us from a 1977 newspaper article. According to it, the suspicion is that prehistoric nomadic hunters in Western Asia began carrying salt, containing nitrate with them to preserve the hunting catch. (The Indianapolis Star; 1977) The focus was indeed on nitrate and its preserving ability and not just on salt generally. I learned that nitrate deposits occur and precipitate as an efflorescent crust in amongst other the Egyptian and Namibian deserts, the Abu Dhabi sabkhas, and deserts of the Mojave, Death Valley and of course, the Atacama Desert and the Gobi Desert. (Warren, J. K.; 2016: 1278)
It is, however, the largest desert in China, the Taklimakan Desert of Western China that offers the biggest surprise when I find the oldest examples of natural mummification in China, right in this desert region, replete with natural nitrate deposits. The conditions are almost identical to those of the Atacama desert.
Like the Atacama desert, the Taklimakan Desert is at the same time one of the aridest regions on earth and massive nitrate ore fields exist in the Turpan-Hami Basin, close in proximity to the Tarim Basin, in the Xinjiang province, where the oldest mummies in China was found. The nitrate deposits are so substantial, that an estimated 2.5 billion tons exist, comparable in scale to the Atacama Desert super-scale nitrate deposit in Chile. (Qin, Y., et al; 2012) The mummification happened, as was the case with the mummies of the Atacama Desert between 5000 BCE and 7020 BCE, spontaneously.
The initial discovery was made in 1939 by the Swedish archaeologist Bergman Folke. A set of tombs were discovered in the Chinese province of Xinjiang, known as the Xiaohe Tombs. For 60 years the tombs were forgotten until in 2000 a researcher, head of the Xinjiang Cultural Relics and Archaeology Institute, found the tombs again. It wasn’t until 2005 that the excavations were complete. (www.ancient-origins.net)
The size of the area is unprecedented. So far there have been 330 tombs found in multiple different layers. The tombs include adults and children as well as 15 intact mummies. About half of the tombs were looted by grave robbers. It is the first time anywhere on Earth that so many mummies have been found. (www.ancient-origins.net)
“Several bodies have been excavated from graves near Loulan, a site that once bordered a still shrinking lake fed by the Kongi River. Among these is the body of a young female with remarkably well-preserved facial features, whose radiocarbon date indicates that she died she died about 1200 BCE.” Subsequently, more than 500 tombs have been studied. Dr Wang Bing Hua, director of the Ürümxi’s Archeological Research Institute, attributes the spontaneous mummification to three factors: arid climate, salty soil and shallow, winter burial. Average salt content of the desert soil near Turpan is about 10g/ L but in the very surface layer, it can be five times greater. At Hami the soil contains layers of gypsum and at Cherchen actual salt blocks are obvious within the soil, especially near the surface. Most burials are only about a meter below the surface. (Aufderheide, A. C.; 2003: 268, 269) In the oldest cemetery so far discovered, the Small River Cemetery, mummies were discovered which carbon tests, done at Beijing University, show to be 3,980 years old. This takes the known date for meat preservation, by our logic of linking it with mummification, to almost 4000 years ago in China. The nitrate in Xinjiang Lop Nur exists in two forms: natural sodium nitrate mine and natural potassium nitrate. (en.cnki.com.cn)
The Turpan Basin is a “fault-bounded trough located around and south of the city-oasis of Turpan, in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in far western China, about 150 kilometres (93 mi) south-east of the regional capital Ürümqi.” “The surrounding mountain ranges are the central Tian Shan in the west, the Bogda Shan in the north-west, the Haerlike Shan in the north-west, and the Jueluotage Shan in the south. Beyond the surrounding mountain ranges lie the Junggar Basin in the north and the Tarim Basin in the south.” (www.revolvy.com)
“Some geographers also use the term Turpan-Hami Basin, which is understood as including the Turpan Depression along with the Hami Depression (located to the east of the Turpan Depression, and to the southwest of the city of Hami) and the Liaodong Uplift separating the two depressions.” (www.revolvy.com)
One of these mummies may hold a further clue to their preservation. She became famous for her “excellent preservation and beauty and it is known as the Beauty of Xiaohe. It is a white person with round eyes, perfect eyelashes, and long hair and has features that are more similar to a European person than a Chinese person.” (www.ancient-origins.net)
According to Elizabeth Wayland Barber, her “beautiful eyelashes finally proves an earlier hypothesis, deduced from little detail at Zaghunluq, that those bodies that mummified had to have died in early winter, flash freezing and gradually freeze-drying over the next few months whereas other bodies decomposed.” She was dismayed at people’s acceptance or refutation of his arguments without dealing with the arguments posed. In the Beauty of Xiaohe she, at last, had hard evidence. “Eyeballs, being wet, cause rapid decomposition of both themselves and the eyelash-holding eyelids when warm; but by the same token, being wet, cause rapid decomposition of both themselves and the eyelash holding eyelids when warm, but by the same token, being wet, both they and the thin overlaying eyelids will freeze rapidly when being very cold, thus securing the eyelashes in place. Unlike putrefaction, the gentle process of freeze-drying will not dislodge eyelids.” (Mair, V. H., Hickman, J.; 2014: 35)
It has been known from the earliest times that meat curing could be done only in the winter in the absence of refrigeration. If not, the putrefying and decomposing forces would overtake the preserving action of saltpetre and decomposition would be unstoppable. It is the combination of cold and dry conditions along with the use of sodium nitrate to preserve and ordinary salt (sodium chloride) to aid in drying out the meat, that forms a link between the earliest forms of mummification and modern meat-curing techniques. It seems unreasonable to think that the result of these forces, in combination, would have gone unnoticed. I further suspect that the power of these forces would have been practised in relation to fish, fowls, game and domesticated animals for centuries before they found inclusion in the earliest mummification practices.
The Silk Road
The location of the Turpan-Hami and Tarim Basins are very important. Crossing the Taklimakan Desert is possible at the foot of the mountains surrounding the Turpan-Hami Basin or along its streams such as the Tarim, “that spring from the mountains to enter the desert from its periphery but soon vanish into the sand. As ancient caravans from Eastern China approached Dunhuang at the edge of this segment of what eventually came to be part of the Silk Road to the Mediterranean, the near absence of water in the desert’s centre forced them to make a choice. The southern option skirts the desert along its southern edge at the foot of the steep Kunlun slopes descending from Tibet’s high plateau. Alternatively, the northern route passes through Hami and those communities living along the Kongi and Tarim rivers that lead to Loulan and Lop Nor. It is along these routes that mummies from the Tarim Basin have been found.” (Aufderheide, A. C.; 2003: 268, 269)
The caravans on the Silk Road approached Dunhuang, crossing vast sodium and potassium nitrate deposits. If the knowledge of its power was developed in this region and exported to Europe, I am sure that there should be remnants of this ancient knowledge in this city.
“One of the people who has extensively studied the Caucasian mummies of China, Professor Victor Mair of Pennsylvania University, said that he believes that early Europeans long ago spread out in different directions. He believes that some of these peoples travelled west to become the Celts in Britain and Ireland, others went north to become the Germanic tribes, and still, others journeyed east to find their way to Xinjiang. These ancient European settlers are believed to represent some of the earliest human inhabitants of the Tarim Basin, and Mair has stated that from around 1800BCE the earliest mummies to be found here are exclusively Caucasoid or Europoid rather than Chinese in origin.”
The origins of the mummies have been studied extensively using DNA technology. Writing in the journals BMC Geneticsand BMC Biology, Chunxiang Li, an ancient DNA specialist at Jilin University, and colleagues report on their analysis of human remains from the Xiaohe tomb complex also on the eastern edge of the basin.
They conclude that by reconstructing a possible route by which the Tarim Basin was populated, Li and colleagues conclude that “people bearing the south/west Asian components could have first married into pastoralist populations and reached North Xinjiang through the Kazakh steppe following the movement of pastoralist populations, then spread from North Xinjiang southward into the Tarim Basin across the Tianshan Mountains, and intermarried with the earlier inhabitants of the region, giving rise to the later, admixed Xiaohe community.” (Killgrove, K, 2015)
“The populations from the Russian steppe seem to have contributed more genetically to this population than did the populations from the oases of Bactria. “The groups reaching the Tarim Basin through the oasis route,” the researchers note, “may have interacted culturally with earlier populations from the steppe, with limited gene flow, resulting in a small genetic signal of the oasis agriculturalists in the Xiaohe community.”” (Killgrove, K, 2015)
A New York Times article on the origin of these people presents the picture clearly. It reads that “all the men who were analyzed had a Y chromosome that is now mostly found in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Siberia, but rarely in China. The mitochondrial DNA, which passes down the female line, consisted of a lineage from Siberia and two that are common in Europe. Since both the Y chromosome and the mitochondrial DNA lineages are ancient, Dr Zhou and his team conclude the European and Siberian populations probably intermarried before entering the Tarim Basin some 4,000 years ago.” (Wade, N; 210)
It is however not the origin of these people who interest me as much as their destination and the destination of the traders who passed through this region. The Silk Road that ran through this region reached into the heart of the Middle East and Europe to the West and into the rest of China and India to the East. There is an interesting possibility that comes up and that is if it is possible that the Europeans brought the technology with them. Of course, this is a possibility but then there is the matter of the unique level of sophisticated insight into saltpetre from this exact region. Such a level of understanding of saltpetre did not exist in Europe for many centuries. It seems more likely that the transfer of technology went from Tarim, East, into Europe, rather than the other way round. The next section explains what I mean by this.
Dunhaung
The question is if there is any evidence that anything was done with the nitrate deposits and the clear evidence of its preserving power in the mummification. If this was the region where curing of meat was progressed into the art that we know it as today, is there any evidence of this? Any ancient document or reference, not just from China generally, but linked to this region. These were the actual questions I asked myself as I was searching. This is not a device I employ after the fact for the sake of creating drama.
I knew my general geographic area of focus was the one I show below featuring the Tarim Basin.
I started plotting the important points.
Looking at the images above, the saltpetre deposits are the largest at Yuli, marked as NO3-. Loulan is the city where many of the mummies have been found. Dunhuang is a major city before the trip past or across the desert was undertaken on the Silk Road past the Tarim Basin.
I did a search for any reference to saltpetre from the city of Dunhuang which would have been a key trading city in the area and important in terms of its location on the Silk Road. Not in my wildest imagination did I expect to uncover what I found!
It is here, in the Mogao Caves, where a remarkable find was made by the Daoist monk, Wang Yuanlu on 25 June 1900. The mix of religious and secular documents date from the 5th to the early 11th centuries. One text is of particular interest to us, the Dunhuang Medical Text. “The text has been carefully studied by China’s leading experts in traditional Chinese medical literature and ancient manuscripts. The text is attributed to the famous Daoist alchemist and physician Toa Hongjing (CE 456 – 536).” (Cullen, C, Lo, V.; 2005) There is evidence that it relies on earlier traditions from the Han and Sui Dynasties. “The original was decorated with images of the Three Daoist Lords and the Twelve Constellations, indicating links with Doist traditions. In Translation, it reads as follows:
(Cullen, C, Lo, V.; 2005)
Until the 1500s this is the only script of its kind that we know off. “The symptoms described by the patient, as described in the Dunhuang manuscript, suggests an advanced case of cardiovascular distress. The colour of the fingernails (cyanosis) indicates ischaemia (lack of oxygen in the tissue) due to restricted blood flow. Cold hands and feet are additional symptoms of this condition. Also, acute pain suggests that the patient may be suffering from severe angina, i.e. restricted blood flow due to the narrowing of the cardiac arteries.” (Cullen, C, Lo, V.; 2005)
“Modern treatment for angina is glyceryl trinitrate or isosorbide dinitrate. So, at first glance, there seems to be a similarity in treatment. All three remedies contain the all important nitrate. Salpeter is, however, an inorganic compound that exists as a positively charges potassium cation (K+) and a negatively charged nitrate anion (NO3-). Concerning organic nitrate, such as glyceryl trinitrate, there is a covalent bond or a molecular bond between the nitrate moieties (NO3) where they share electron pairs which form the bond with the rest of the molecule (CH2). Where glyceryl trinitrate relaxes the muscle lining of the artery to relax, enlarging the vessel and so allowing more blood flow, saltpetre by itself will have no effect on the treatment of angina. (Cullen, C, Lo, V.; 2005)
This is however not the full story. The remarkable feature of the Dunhuang text is that the combination of the use of saltpetre, not on its own, but when applied according to the dictates of the text, becomes a remedy for exactly the condition described. “The thing about glyceryl trinitrate is that this too, in itself, is not a vasodilator (relaxing of the arterial lining). It is transformed, probably in the arterial wall, into a chemical species which is the vasodilator. Under very special circumstances, exactly as detailed in the Dunhuang text, the nitrate ion from saltpetre also converts to exactly the same species which is the vasodilator. Despite the fact that glyceryl trinitrate has been in use for over a hundred years, the identity of this species has only been discovered in 1987.” (Cullen, C, Lo, V.; 2005)
“Lining almost all blood vessels on the inside is a layer of cells known as the endothelium. A very important function of the endothelium was first reported in 1890 by Furchgott and Zawadzki. The presence of acetylcholine (a small biologically active molecule) in the bloodstream affects vasodilation and it was generally assumed that acetylcholine acted directly upon vascular muscle. However, this was found not to be the case. Furchgott and Zawadzki showed convincingly that acetylcholine acted, not upon the muscle of the artery, but upon the endothelium and the endothelium produces a “second messenger” which then acts upon the muscles to effect relaxation. This second messenger was christened “the endothelium-derived relaxing factor” (EDRF).” (Cullen, C, Lo, V.; 2005)
During the 1980s, an intense effort was effected to identify the EDRF. It was initially assumed that it would turn out to be a complex molecule like a hormone. This speculation enhanced the surprise when the chemical nature of the molecule was finally determined. It turned out to be a small diatomic molecule called Nitric Oxide (NO). “That it had a physiological role, in a process as important as vasodilation, came as a complete surprise.” (Cullen, C, Lo, V.; 2005)
“The discovery was made simultaneously by a group at the Wellcome Research Laboratories in Beckenham led by Professor Salvador Moncada and by a group in the USA led by Professor Louis Ignarro. The 1998 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine was awarded for this discovery. Once nitric oxide had been detected in one physiological process it was found to have roles in many others, from inflammation to crying. That it should have remained undetected during a hundred years of intense scrutiny of human physiology is astonishing. Glyceryl trinitrate is a vasodilator because it is transformed by an enzymatic process (possibly by the enzyme xanthine oxidoreductase) into nitric oxide.” (Cullen, C, Lo, V.; 2005)
Let us now return to the Dunhuang text. Is there any way that the inorganic nitrate could be transformed into nitric oxide? “In a healthy body it is very unlikely, that nitrate which is present in the blood plasma, is converted to nitric oxide. However, there is a species, nitrite (NO2-), very closely related to nitrate (NO3-), for which conversion into nitric oxide is quite possible. Do humans ever convert nitrate into nitrite? Such a conversion can occur in the mouth and it is this aspect of the Dunhuang prescription that is so interesting. The saliva contains many bacteria, some of which contain the enzyme nitrate reductase, which converts nitrate into nitrite.” (Cullen, C, Lo, V.; 2005)
“Experiments on rats have shown that reduction of nitrate to nitrite is confined to a specialised area on the posterior surface of the tongue. If the same applies to humans, the Dunhuang procedure, which specifies that the saltpetre should be placed under the tongue will maximise the conversion of nitrate into nitrite. The retention of saliva as described would also enhance nitrite production. Unlike nitrate, nitrite is physiologically active. t is an antiseptic and a vasodilator, although not a powerful one. It has been suggested that animals, particularly cats, lick wounds because of the antiseptic effect of nitrite in the saliva. Although not a powerful vasodilator, there is now direct evidence that rat hearts, when subjected to global ischaemia, generate nitric oxide and that a significant proportion comes from nitrite present in the tissue. Ischaemic tissue is very acidic and the acid affects the conversion of nitrite to NO via the following equilibria:”
(Cullen, C, Lo, V.; 2005)
“Calculations, assuming only a modest level of nitrite in ischaemic tissue, show that enough nitric oxide from the above equilibria to activate guanylate cyclase, the enzyme responsible for the initiation of the cascade of reactions which lead, eventually, to vasodilation. So, if nitrite enters the plasma, as a result of administration of sublingual saltpetre, it could generate nitric oxide in ischaemic tissue. Because of the abundance of blood vessels under the tongue sublingual administration of a drug is a good way of getting a drug into the bloodstream and bypassing the stomach. Also, the tongue, in traditional Chinese medical theory, is linked to the function of the heart.” (Cullen, C, Lo, V.; 2005)
“The interaction of saliva and nitrate to generate nitrite before conversion to nitric oxide in ischaemic tissue gives considerable credence to the Dunhuang procedure as a treatment for cardiovascular distress.” (Cullen, C, Lo, V.; 2005)
Here, in the Tarim Basin, we have three things present. One of the world’s largest natural saltpetre deposits. Natural mummification dating back to just over 3000 years ago. From these, the preserving power of these soils would have been evident to all since the mummies existed then already. The longevity of the corpses would have been evident to the ancients. We have a record of very sophisticated use of saltpetre from very early in the Christian Era from this exact region. In fact, some of the most sophisticated use of the salt on record and the exact mechanics is even today mirrored in the act of curing itself which has been until the early 1900’s when the direct addition of sodium nitrite replaced saltpetre as curing agent of choice.
Until that happened, curing was done by the addition of saltpetre which was reduced, through bacterial action to nitrite which diffused into the muscle for the purpose of preservation. The similarity in the curing action and the mechanism relied on, in the utilisation of saltpetre in the Dunhuang Medical Manuscripts is startling, to say the least. Of course, I am not suggesting that the full or even a partial understanding of the mechanism was known to the ancients, but the application did suggest a much more detailed understanding of saltpetre and its efficacy on meat muscles which could easily have originated from the experience with curing! Seeing the preserving power of the salt and the reddening effect of the meat could have led them to an application of the salt for heart conditions even though the reduction steps may not have been fully understood.
This is without a doubt the best possible location from anywhere in the world where the curing of meat could have originated in an art form which would have been preserved and transmitted to successive generations through societies which later became known as guilds. The picture is not of wondering hunters who stumbled upon the salt and early farmers using it for preserving meat – or at least, it could have started like this. But if it happened in this exact region, it soon found itself in the most advanced society on earth of its time with the most sophisticated thinking about chemistry. The Chinese alchemists in all likelihood gravitated to this as a possible key component of the elusive elixir of immortality. Finding such an elixir was the goal of Chinese alchemy. They probably applied its preserving power to all kinds of ailments and in a process of trial and error, a treatment for angina must have been especially effective.
Here, at a key location on the silk road, the knowledge of curing and the power of saltpetre could easily have been spread through India and China to the East and right into the heart of Europe to the West.
This is a remarkable find!
The Fascinating Link between Turfan and Salzburg
The possibility that the art of meat curing was developed in Turpan and spread around the world is most promising. Despite this not being my main point under discussion here, it is important to note that Europe may also have influenced the community around Turpan. Influences certainly did not only go one way.
A fascinating link has been discovered between the mummies in Turfan and the Austrian city of Salzburg. Victor Mair, a professor of Chinese in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Pennsylvania was committed to trace the ancestry of the mummies. “In Xinjiang, a Chinese colleague had slipped him a . . . gift: a swatch of blue, brown, and white cloth taken from a twelfth-century-bc mummy. The fabric looked like a piece of Celtic plaid. Mair passed it over to Irene Good, a textile expert at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Good examined it under an electron microscope. The style of weave, known as a “two over two” diagonal twill, bore little resemblance to anything woven by Asian weavers of the day. (Indeed, it would be almost another two millennia before women in central China turned out twill cloth on their looms.) But the weave exactly matched cloth found with the bodies of thirteenth-century-BCE salt miners in Austria. Like the DNA samples, the mysterious plaid pointed straight towards a European homeland.” (Tocharians: The Whites of Ancient China)
This startled me. The thread that ties it all together is salt and meat curing. Is it possible that a mummy found in the region which I believe may have been pivotal in spreading nitrate curing of meat across the world may have some direct or indirect link with the Austrian salt mines? It unlocks the possibility that work done on the use of nitrate salts was influenced by work done in Austria.
In my mind, the fact that nitrate and nitrite did not only have negative effects on human health was discovered by contemplating the possible location where the art of meat curing with nitrate originated. Today students learn this from textbooks but I somehow like the journey of discovery that I took much more.
Villifying Nitrite: A Drama for Fools
After telling the story of my own discovery that nitrate, nitrite and nitric oxide is far from evil molecules, tantamount to poison being added to meat, I return to the primary subject at hand. Is bacon safe to consume? Is the use of nitrate and nitrite in meat curing irresponsible? What about the claims that it causes cancer?
There is no greater illustration of willing enslavement to an incomplete understanding of nature than the drama related to the use of nitrites in meat processing. Humans happened upon a natural phenomenon that special salts containing nitrate change the colour of meat and has the power to preserve it. Since the start of the use of nitrites in meat curing, it was viewed with great suspicion due to its inherent toxicity. Much of Bacon & the Art of Living is dedicated to chronicling the unfolding of the great saga of nitrate and nitrite and the discovery of its essential nature and role in meat curing. There is no need to repeat any of what has been written by me earlier in this work except to point the reader specifically to the following chapters. The first two deal with the initial objection against the use of nitrite in food as a poison. This dilemma was resolved through science and legislation.
The use of a substance that is, in high concentrations, poisonous is, after all, nothing new to humans. Alcohol is one of the best examples. Aspirin is another example where, in high dosages, it is dangerous despite its positive benefits at low dosages. Ultra-high dosages of ascorbic acid are equally likely to have adverse effects, cause diarrhoea and nausea. Vinegar is another good example which in moderation is beneficial but consuming too much over a long period of time will have serious detrimental health implications. There are hundreds of other examples we can give. I heard of a well-known speaker in the Uk who addressed a group of meat processing professionals and started his talk by accusing them of poisoning the public through the use of nitrites. Statements like this show a serious lack of understanding not just nitrites but almost every other food ingredient customarily used in food production.
A far more serious issue was discovered in the late 60s and early 70s related to the formation of n-nitrosamines. Nitrosamines are cancer-causing. We have already dealt with the matter in great detail in Chapter 12.06: Regulations of Nitrate and Nitrite post-1920’s: the problem of residual nitrite where we outlined the scientific, industry and government response to the issue.
A friend of mine who is a 3rd generation German Master Butcher tells the story of his grandfather who used to buy nitrites from the pharmacy in the early days and made the most beautiful rich pink bacon. There were no limits on ingoing nitrites in those days and the role of ascorbate was poorly understood and sadly he passed away from colon cancer. This anecdotal account has been subsequently confirmed by countless studies and indeed it is true that at the wrong concentrations, without the use of ascorbate or erythorbate, the high nitrite levels used in curing meat is tantamount to poisoning the consumers. The chapter which I just mentioned deals with the international response to the subject and the combined legislative framework for the use of nitrites in food. The minuscule amounts of nitrites used in bacon curing today along with the use of ascorbate render bacon a safe product to consume in moderation. Of course, the caveat should always be remembered that this should be done in moderation as is the case with any other processed food, red meat, beer, cheese, milk, alcohol, dried milk powder, etc.
What has been said before should settle the issue, but over the years a number of other factors occurred to me which must be added to the discussion to un-vilify nitrite.
Nitrosamines – A Much Broader Issue than Bacon
At the outset, I want to apologise to the reader because the issue becomes wonderfully complex almost right from the start. You don’t have to remember all the terms used and all the intricate connections. I chose an article as the basis for our discussion which broadly introduces you to enough of the important factors so that you will be able to see that the issue with bacon is the same issue with beer, cheese, fish, red meat and many other foods. You will see that it even extends to packaging and food preparation. So, don’t be intimidated by the technical discussion which follows.
I firmly believe that despite the fact that a mammoth amount of work has been done on bacon and cured meat since the 1970s; despite the fact that I am absolutely convinced that based on the preponderance of the latest scientific data on nitrite in meat showing that it is a completely safe food to consume, the responsible producer will continue to work on doing even better by limiting residual nitrite in its products after it has been prepared by the consumer even further so that the consumer will be satisfied that concerns, valid and non-valid are being taken seriously by the producer.
Having said all this, let’s now delve into the issue.
a. What is N-nitrosamines?
Nitroso compounds refer to non-organic compounds containing the NO group. This immediately will get the readers attention because we know that it is NO (nitric oxide) which is responsible for the pinkish/ reddish colour in cured meat. The NO group in nitroso compounds for example directly binds to the metal via the N atom, giving a metal–NO moiety. A nonmetal example is the common reagent nitrosyl chloride (Cl−N=O).
If you combine nitroso with amines, you get nitrosamines or as they are more formally called, N-Nitrosamines. So, the next question is: what is an amine. Amines are compounds and functional groups with a nitrogen atom and a lone pair. Amines are formally derivatives of ammonia (NH3). Nitrosamines then is a group of organic compounds with the chemical structure R2N−N=O, where R is usually an alkyl group. An alkyl group, very simply stated, refers to hydrogen and carbon atoms arranged in a tree structure in which all the carbon-carbon bonds are single. The nitroso group (NO+) binds to a deprotonated amine. The reader with no background in organic chemistry will be able to spot the nitrogen in the three structures below.
Primary Amine
Secondary Amine
Tertiary Amine
The important point for our discussion is that most nitrosamines are carcinogenic in animals.
b. How are they formed in Food?
Look at the three structures of amines represented above. Nitrosamines are formed by the reaction of secondary or tertiary amines with a nitrosating agent, such as nitrite from which nitric oxide and an R-NO group formes. When water is eliminated from a compound, we say that an anhydrate is formed. This describes the formation of NO (nitric oxide) from NO2 (nitrite). So, in food, NO is formed from nitrite in an acidic, aqueous solution. The nitrosating agent is usually then a nitrous anhydride, formed from nitrite in an acidic, aqueous solution. This is, for example, the condition found in our stomachs or in the mouth and if we ingest nitrites, we run the risk of nitrosamine formation after we swallowed the food.
Another culprit for nitrosamine formation is the frying of bacon. Nitrite in combination with fats (lipids) seems to be the nitrosating agent during the frying of bacon. “The formation is related to the relatively high internal temperature of bacon during frying and the relatively low moisture content of bacon as compared to other cured meat products. When bacon is cooked by other methods, particularly in a microwave oven, considerably lower amounts of nitrosamines are found.” (Scanlan, 2003)
c. Bacon is not the only Product of Concern
From the point just made about the frying temperature of bacon in an environment where there are lipids and low internal water content which leads to nitrosamine formation, it should be a clue to the fact that processing techniques are also responsible for its formation. This was indeed shown and since the late 70s and 80s, it has been known that processing techniques, as well as packaging procedures, are responsible for introducing these carcinogens into food. Hotchkiss (1984) writes that these processing and packaging “procedures include drying foods in direct flame heated air, migration from food contact surfaces and direct addition as contaminants. In addition, other reports of N-nitrosamines in foods have less well defined routes of contamination.”
Hotchkiss (1984) cautions that despite the presence of nitrosamines in food, it is actually “occupational exposures” which may be responsible for “the highest individual exposures (Fine and Rounbeh1er, 1981).” Still, “the largest numbers of people have been exposed to exogenously formed N-nitroso compounds through the diet.”
There are three abbreviations I want to introduce at this point namely NA (N-nitrosamines), NVNA (non-volatile NA) and VNA (volatile nitrosamines where “volatile” refers to those compounds amenable to gas chromatography without derivatization). VNA includes for example “N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA), N-nitrosopyrrolidine (NPYR), N-nitrosopiperidine (NPIP) and N-nitrosodiethylamine (NDEA), which occurs generally at low levels <5 µg kg−1 but levels up to 20 µg kg−1 has been reported (Hill et al, 1988, Massey et al, 1991). NDEA has been evaluated as the most potent carcinogen among the known meat related VNAs (Peto et al., 1984).” (Herrmann, 2015) NVNA include “the N-nitrosamino acids, e.g. N-nitrosohydroxyproline (NHPRO), N-nitrosoproline (NPRO), N-nitrososarcosine (NSAR), N-nitroso-thiazolidine-4-carboxylic acid (NTCA), N-nitroso-2-methyl-thiazolidine-4-carboxylic acid (NMTCA), generally occur at significantly higher levels than the VNAs, i.e. up to several thousand microgram per kilo (Herrmann et al, 2014a, Massey et al, 1991, Tricker, Kubacki, 1992).” (Herrmann, 2015)
Hotchkiss (1984) continues that “several groups have demonstrated that a number of foods can contain trace quantities of VNA. To date nearly all types of foods have been analyzed for VNA and, hence, some important generalizations can be made. Most importantly is that the use of nitrite as a curing agent is not solely responsible for the VNA content of foods. Several foods to which nitrite has not been intentionally added have now been shown to contain trace levels of VNAs. Equally significant is that the N-nitrosamine content of foods has decreased as a result of research in this area. He classified the routes and mechanisms by which foods can become contaminated. “The routes of contamination can be divided into 5 groups: Additives; drying processes; migration from contact surfaces; addition of performed NA; and those for which the route is not clearly defined.
Additives
This is the class where cured meats fall in. We are already familiar with the story as we discussed it in Chapter 12.06: Regulations of Nitrate and Nitrite post-1920’s: the problem of residual nitrite. Let’s recap what we said by quoting Hotchkiss (1984). “The suspicion that the use of nitrite in foods might result in the formation of NA stems from an incident in which animals fed nitrite preserved fish meal developed liver necrosis. The causal agent was determined to be NDMA and it was shown that the compound resulted from the nitrosation of the amines in the fish by nitrous acid formed from nitrite (Ender et a1., 1964). Nitrite is an economically and technically important food additive in the curing process in order to fix color, develop flavor and inhibit toxigenesis by C1. botulinum.” (Hotchkiss, 1984)
“Since the late 1960s, a substantial research effort has resulted in a body of information concerning the occurrence and formation of VNA in cured meats. This has resulted in the knowledge that the addition of nitrite to meat is not, in most cases, sufficient to routinely cause the formation of VNA. In order for cured meats to consistently contain more than 1 μg /kg VNA6 the product must be subjected to temperatures greater than 100 C in a low moisture environment. The only cured product which meets these criteria is bacon. Other cured products only sporadically contain VNA in excess of 0.1 μg /kg (Gray and Randall, 1979). In a recent large survey, only 6 of 152 cooked sausage products had a VNA content greater than 5 μg /kg and only 4 of 91 dry sausages had similar VNA contents. In the same study, however, 11 of 12 dry-cured fried bacons contained VNA, some as high as 280 μg/kg. The fact that fried cured bacon consistently contains detectable VNA has been observed by numerous workers (Scanlan, 1975).” (Hotchkiss, 1984)
“Efforts have been directed at determining the chemical mechanism and precursors to the major VNA, NPYR, found in fried bacon. While several potential precursors to NPYR have been identified, including collagen, ornithine, hydroxyproline, citrulline, putrasine and arginine, it is generally accepted that the major precursor is proline (Gray, 1976). While the free-radical mechanism proposed by Bharucha et a1. (1979) is often cited as the mechanism which best fits observations, the steps of the reaction have not been clearly elucidated. At least two possible routes exist; proline could be nitro sated to form NPRO which is subsequently decarboxylated during frying to NPYR, or proline is first decarboxy1ated to the amine pyrrolidine which is then subsequently nitrosated. Both decarboxylation and nitrosation, regardless of order, must occur during frying because uncooked bacon does not contain NPYR or sufficient preformed NPRO (Hansen et aI, 1977). Nakamura et al. (1976) have suggested that the mechanism is temperature dependent; at temperatures above o 175 C decarboxylation precedes nitrosation and at lower temperatures nitrosation precedes decarboxylation.” (Hotchkiss, 1984)
“In addition to NDMA and NPYR, Kimoto et a1. (1982) and Gray et a1. (1982) each have reported that fried bacon also contains NTHZ. This VNA was likely missed by many researchers due to its long retention time or its on-column decomposition. We have also confirmed this VNA in fried bacon and have further identified the compound in the fried-out fat from bacon. NDMA and NPYR are, under most frying conditions, found in higher concentration in the fried-out fat than in the edible portion. However, in our experiments NTHZ consistently occurs in higher concentrations in the edible portion regardless of the frying conditions. The mutagenicity of NTHZ has been demonstrated (Sekizawa and Shib, 1980) but the compound has not been tested in whole animals for carcinogenicity. The formation of precursors of NTHZ have also not been studied in fried bacon but thiazolidine has been identified as a browning product in a glucose-Cysteamine model system (Mihara and Shibamoto, 1980).” (Hotchkiss, 1984)
“Nitrate may be added to certain cheeses to retard the growth of microorganisms which might cause defects. Concern has been expressed that the nitrate might be reduced to nitrite by reductase containing microflora and that this nitrite could nitrosate amines endogenous to the product. The Danish government has published the results of a large survey of cheeses in which no correlation between the use of nitrate and concentration of VNA in the product could be made (Anon. 1980). Only very small amounts (less than 0.7 μg/kg) were found in any cheese. Sen et al. (1978), however, found 21 of 31 cheeses imported into Canada contained VNA up to 20 μg/kg. These apparent discrepancies with regard to the use of nitrate in cheese have not been resolved.” (Hotchkiss, 1984)
Drying
“In addition to the use of nitrite and nitrate as additives, a second general mechanism by which foods may become contaminated with NA is through the drying of foods in air which has been directly heated in an open flame. The highest levels of VNA resulting from this common method of food processing have been in the kilning of malted barley. Concentrations of NDMA -in the dried malt of over 100 μg/kg have been reported (Hotchkiss et al. 1980; Preussmann et al. 1981). A number of workers have shown that the NDMA in the malt survives the brewing process and can be detected in the resulting beer in concentrations expected from the dilution of the malt (Havery et al. 1981). This widespread contamination was shown to be the result of the formation of oxides of nitrogen in the air as it is heated in the flame. Oxides of nitrogen have been demonstrated to be effective nitrosating agents over a wide pH range (Challis and Kyrtopoulos, 1978).” (Hotchkiss, 1984)
“Scanlan and coworkers have extensively investigated the formation of NDMA in malt. They have demonstrated that the plant alkaloids hordenine and gramine are effective precursors of NDMA in model systems and that it is likely that NVNA may also be present in direct fired kiln dried malt (Mangino et a1. 1981).” (Hotchkiss, 1984)
“The first reports of NDMA in beer indicated average concentrations in the range of 2 to 6 μg/kg (Spiegelhalder et a1. 1981). While these levels seem, at first, low it is possible to consume 1 to 2 kg of beer at a single serving. This represents more NDMA exposure than from any other food source. Spiegelhalder et a1. (1980) have estimated that 64% of a West German’s dietary NDMA came from beer. There is recent evidence, however, that the VNA content of beer has decreased sharply (Mangino et a1. 1981). This decrease is due to the widespread use of sulfur dioxide or indirect heating of the drying gases in the malting industry. The application of sulfur dioxide during the early part of the kilning process may be either by direct injection of gaseous sulfur dioxide or by burning elemental sulfur in the drying air. The inhibition by sulfur dioxide is most likely due to the formation of bisulfite which may react with the nitro sating agent in a redox reaction.” (Hotchkiss, 1984)
“Other foods which are dried in direct flame heated air have also been shown to contain trace amounts of VNA, albeit at lower levels than malt. Most notable is the finding that nonfat dried milk may contain traces of NDMA. Several reports have shown NDMA levels of 0.1 to approximately 5 μg/kg (Libbey et al. 1980; Lakritz and Pensabene, 1981). In a recent nationwide survey of 57 nonfat dried milks conducted by the US Food and Drug Administration, an average NDMA level of 0.6 μg/kg was found with 48 samples being positive (Havery et al. 1981). Apparent NPYR and NPIP were also detected in sub μg/kg concentrations. Because nonfat dry milk is diluted lOx before consumption some have onsidered it not to be a significant problem while others have been concerned because of the widespread use of this product by the young.” (Hotchkiss, 1984)
“Other dried foods have been shown to sporadically contain detectable VNA. Sen and Seaman (1981) analyzed nonfat dry milk, dried soups, and instant coffee and found VNA in all dried milks, 3 of 20 dried soups and 5 of 10 instant coffees, most at levels of less than 1 μg/kg. Perhaps more importantly, 3 of 8 dried infant formulas contained detectable VNA. Fazio and Havery (1981) have observed VNA in soy isolates and concentrates and dried cheeses.” (Hotchkiss, 1984)
Migration
“In addition to formation from direct additives or from the direct flame drying process, recent evidence indicates VNA may enter foods through migration from food contact surfaces. In 1981 Spiegelhalder and Preussmann (1981) reported that a number of rubber products including nursing nipples contained substantial levels of VNA and that these compounds could migrate to water and milk. Later Havery and Fazio (1982) investigated one brand of nipple available in the US. They confirmed the presence of VNA in this product and demonstrated that when inverted nipples were sterilized in milk or formul, migration occurred.” (Hotchkiss, 1984)
“We have investigated the VNA content of 8 types of rubber nipples available in the US from several domestic and foreign manufacturers (Babish et al. 1982). One or more VNA were detected in all nipples tested and when each nipple was boiled for 3 minutes in 150 ml water or incubated 3 hours at 37oC, 6 to 44% migration occurred. Total VNA contents ranged from 42 to 617 μg/nipple (nipple weight is approximately 5 gm) and most nipples contained more than one VNA.” (Hotchkiss, 1984)
“Direct food contact paper and paperboard packaging may also be a source of VNA and nitrosatable amines in foods. Analyses of 34 food packages by GC-TEA revealed 9 to be contaminated with NMOR. Perhaps more importantly, all packaging materials examined had levels of the parent amine morpholine ranging from 98 to 842 μg/kg (Hotchkiss and Vecchio, 1982). Morpholine is easily nitrosated and there is evidence that it may be nitrosated in the stomach to produce the carcinogenic N-nitroso derivative (Mirvish, 1975). Two experiments indicated that both the NMOR and morpholine may migrate to dry foods. First, when a food package was found to contain NMOR and morpholine, the food closest in the package often also contained NMOR and morpho line (Hoffmann et ale 1982). Secondly, when paperboards which contained NMOR and morpho line were incubated at elevated temperatures in closed vessels with dry foods migration could be demonstrated. Further research is needed to determine the extent of the contamination and degree of migration under normal conditions.” (Hotchkiss, 1984)
Direct Addition
“When agricultural chemicals or food additives contain preformed VNA, it is conceivable that a portion of the VNA contaminate could be added to food. For example, meat curing premixes which contained salt, sugar, spices and nitrite and were designed to facilitate the mixing of curing brines were shown to contain relatively high levels of VNA including NPIP (Sen et ale 1974). This VNA resulted from the nitrosation of piperidine ring containing compounds in the spices. The NPIP was then added along with the cure solution to the meat and could be detected in the product.” (Hotchkiss, 1984)
“Certain agricultural chemicals were shown at one time, to contain mg/kg quantities of VNA (Ross et al. 1977). Although current levels have been greatly reduced (Oliver, 1981) it has been demonstrated under laboratory conditions that when these mixtures are applied to food crops, absorption of the VNA either directly through the plant or indirectly through the soil is possible (Khan, 1981). For example, Dean-Raymond and Alexander (1976) have shown that radio labeled NDMA incorporated into soil could be taken up by edible plants. A recent survey of dried waste sludge also indicates most sludges contain small amounts of VNA (Mumma et al. 1982). If sludge is incorporated into soil uptake may be possible. It should be noted that no confirmed report of VNA in foods as a result of the use of pesticides or sludge in actual field use has appeared. On the contrary, Ross et al. (1978) analyzed soil, run off water and edible plant tissue after the application of a commercial herbicide containing NDPA and failed to detect the VNA in any sample. As pointed out by Oliver, (1981) it is difficult to draw conclusions about the VNA contamination of foods based on laboratory experiments.” (Hotchkiss, 1984)
“Another potential source of direct addition of NA to food maybe through the use of processing water which has been deionized by anion exchangers. Kimoto et al. (1980) have shown that NDMA and NDEA at levels of less than 1 μg/kg can be detected in water which has been passed through an anion exchange column. This is a common treatment process in food plants.” (Hotchkiss, 1984)
Miscellaneous
“In addition to the above four mechanisms by which food may become contaminated with small amounts of VNA, other less well defined or uncorroborated contamination processes have been reported. For example, one group of Japanese workers have reported that broiling fish under a gas flame may result in substantial increases in the VNA content of the food (Matsui et al. 1980). The average NDMA content of 20 fish and seafood products increased 3 fold after broiling under a gas flame and one dried squid sample increased in NDMA from 84 to 313 μg /kg. When broiled under an electric element or covered with aluminium foil smaller increases in NDMA content were seen. Presumably, VNA is being formed by a mechanism similar to that occurring in dried foods such as malt and nonfat dried milk. Further work is needed to evaluate this source of dietary NA. Smoking fish has also been reported to result in the nitrosation of the amines associated with fish (Kann et aL 1980).” “Another potential source of direct addition of NA to food maybe through the use of processing water which has been deionized by anion exchangers. Kimoto et al. (1980) have shown that NDMA and NDEA at levels of less than: 1 μg/kg can be detected in water which has been passed through an anion exchange column. This is a common treatment process in food plants.” (Hotchkiss, 1984)
The Occurance and Benefit of Nitrate in Our Diet
So far we have looked at the occurrence of nitrite and the dangers associated with nitrosamines. I deal with it directly because it is the main charge levelled against the curing industry that poison is used to cure the meat. The second, and equally important consideration is the benefit of nitrate in our diets. The reader should be well familiar by now that nitrite is converted through bacteria from nitrate. Such bacteria occurs for example in our mouths and when we ingest nitrate much of these are converted into nitrite. So, in a way, when we talk about nitrate, we also talk about the occurrence of nitrate in our food.
Nitrate has been shown to be beneficial to our health and occurs naturally in, for example in beetroot. It has been credited with a speedy recovery after a strenuous workout, thus enhancing our exercise performance as well as lowering our blood pressure. Nitrates are the active ingredient in medicine for the treatment of angina where blood flow is restricted causing chest pains.
It is reported by the BBC that “only around 5% of nitrates in the average European diet come from cured meat, while more than 80% are from vegetables. Vegetables acquire nitrates and nitrites from the soil they grow in – nitrates are part of natural mineral deposits, while nitrites are formed by soil microorganisms that break down animal matter.” BBC
Uddin (2021) published an extremely helpful list of fruits and vegetables containing nitrate and the mg/kg which they typically contain all of which should be the end of the debate about nitrite in bacon.
My life has been guided by invisible forces from my birth. I believe this force to be nature itself. The biggest thing I have learned is that what I believe is completely irrelevant. Nature does not care for my belief! It is not swayed by it! What IS will prevail, irrespective of my personal belief or even our universal belief as humans. Every step of life was crafted by nature itself in a way that I don’t understand.
I came to realise that my own intellect and our ability as humans to perceive life through the matrix of our minds is not the most important aspect of our lives. I examined the most important mental constructs very carefully and realised that they are all bankrupt. The first quest was to understand God. I wrote a book about it, The Anatomy of a Sceptic. This magical time in my life introduced me to the amazing world of the human mind and the gods we create! We first create them and then we worship them just as we do with all our mental constructs. We do the same with concepts such as democracy and the free market system and yes, even with the idea of science! We first created these mental concepts and then we worshipped them.
It was my quest to understand bacon that brought me back to nature and to understand that I exist as a living being, in the first place not in my mind, but in my body as every bodily need and desire and instinct and drive is connected in the first place to nature. I eat to live and I eat that which I share this earth with. My quest to understand the secrets of bacon taught me that life is infinitely interconnected and I am nature itself!
Bacon evolved over millennia in a way that my quest only briefly introduced. Living life excellently means that I re-connect with nature. This is the art of living! It is why so many people who looked deeply into this tell us that the problem is not that we think too little. The problem is often that we think too much and the art of reconnecting with life is to become quiet and to stop thinking! It is that simple.
The story of bacon is set in the late 1800s and early 1900s when most of the important developments in bacon took place. The plotline takes place in the 2000s with each character referring to a real person and actual events. The theme is a kind of “steampunk” where modern mannerisms, speech, clothes and practices are superimposed on a historical setting. Modern people interact with old historical figures with all the historical and cultural bias that goes with this.
The Best Bacon on Earth Cape Town, October 1960
The kids visited last December. Is it almost a year ago? Where did the time go! Where does one begin to wrap up an epic adventure? As in Homers Odyssey, you quickly learn that it is all about the journey. The destination is a bonus. What we discover, however, is enriching and life-changing! Still, not even wisdom comes to anything! Our heavenly Jerusalem or Nordic Valhalla is precisely in the fact that we are conscious and in the moment of consciousness, the universe is conscious through us. I am saving a full explanation to the end of the book, yet, I can not progress if I don’t give you this glimpse into the art of living that bacon steered me to. My quest has always been more than bacon, yet, it was never less than. Within this simple culinary marvel, I started to discern the secret of life itself. Bacon curing is the instrument that the universe used to lead me to the answer to life, death and everything there is. Is it not fitting for such a simple thing to hold such rich wisdom!
The secret processes of the creation of bacon have been discovered by humans, yet it was not invented by humans. It mimics natural physiological processes yet in the incorrect understanding of those processes and their limitations we endanger ourselves because we do not appreciate the powers we unleash! Still, the truth is that its processes are natural! Its discovery a fait accompli. Its wonder is both in its taste and the beauty of its processes. Discovering the laws governing its creation is complex and requires the utmost diligence and complete dedication to the quest. Yet, it exists not for this purpose. Its reason for being is the sustenance it gives at the right time. It provides nutrition in the time of want. So is life. Life is simple and the one who never gives a thought as to the purpose of our existence or our ultimate end can enjoy every good gift on this earth, bear all the grief and ends his or her days completely satisfied. Yet, for those, wholly absorbed in understanding the meaning of it all, there are answers – great, profound and satisfying. Still, this quest has the potential of taking the very enjoyment of life away from the investigator in which case it would have been better not to have started the journey!
Dawie Hyaman’s Widsdom
Dawie wrote to me from America. We were discussing the fact that for all our reasoning ability, humans are not very intelligent. He writes, “that is a fascinating thing.. thought of it many times myself. I look at the intelligence in a tree, to take manure and sunshine and turn it into a juicy fruit, or a fragrant flower. Or the intelligence in my body that takes all the food I throw at it and converts it into a human. I can eat all the bananas I want but I won’t become a monkey! Then this other thing, we call intelligence, which is reasoning, and logic, and seeing patterns and following insights over instincts.. and there .. there is NO intelligence there .. or very very little. Seems to me the intelligence in the universe is everywhere except in the reasoning capacity!!” Is this not precisely the point! The reason why we are alive is completely apart from our logic. The very search for the eternal is itself a mirage. It is getting lost in the complexity of the processes of bacon curing without ever curing bacon and enjoying it yourself! Still, there is great value in a pursuit of its secrets. The end must always be to enhance its enjoyment when consumed. Life is exactly the same. We can ask for the eternal and the fixed but if this becomes the end in itself, we are completely missing the point.
To the point, Dawie writes that “there’s nothing wrong with the world as it is. I think it’s heaven. Look at the exquisite beauty, the endless complexity, colour, flavour, possibility. Sure we suffer biological pain because the protection mechanism of the body is not intelligent enough to turn itself off when its no longer doing much (or maybe it is, we just don’t like the settings hahaha) .. and of course we only appreciate pleasure because we know pain.. but my point is .. most of what we suffer is in the constructs of our mind… we suffer our memory and our imagination!! WE suffer our experience. And that seems to me because we think we are our mind, we think we are our body.. when we are not that.. because when we sleep we still exist, and when we lose our legs we still exist… so the whole thing of freedom to me is to stop suffering the thinking mind, and then just “be” .. and when we are present like that.. we are in bliss .. every single time.” Do you get his point? What he is saying is that the quest is not the goal. When it all gets so frantic, stop and quiet your spirit and just be. Think less!
He concluded by writing: “Seems to me .. we are always Here, Now. We always have been. Our thoughts, feelings and perceptions come and go, and are experienced in time .. it has to.. it has conceptual start and end, and a conceptual space.. so it is not always here.. so in that sense, we die. But beyond perceptions… the Nothing beyond Thinking .. the no-Thing … its nothing to the constructs and perceptions of the mind.. but it is the source of everything. Where else did forms come from, but from the formless?”
Living in the Real World
Just like the incorrect application or understanding of some of the complex processes in bacon can get us in trouble on many fronts including health and wellbeing, so the incorrect view of reality can create endless misery for ourselves and others. Politics in our beautiful country did not turn out as I would have liked, but it did happen exactly as I predicted! I see us steering the course of conflict as I saw it all these years ago while riding transport. Still, I continue to learn about life and had many years where I could put everything I learned about bacon to good use.
Daily News New York, 7 October 1960
The country voted for independence from Britain! It breaks my heart because it was done for all the wrong reasons! I am in full support of independence from Britain, but not for the reason that the referendum was fought over. It ended up as a fight between the white English and Afrikaans speaking people which was merely a rehash of the Anglo-Boer war, contrary to the efforts of Smuts and Botha to unite the groups after the war.
It would have been far better if the discussion included the non-white population of the country and was focused on doing what is right for everybody instead of the selfish ambitions of a few. All South Africans should have been allowed a say in their future as equals. The end result will be untold hardship for many millions of people.
Still, there is an important lesson for me. No matter our circumstances, we can find in ourselves and in things around us reasons to be thankful. This is a tremendous human ability. Amidst the greatest injustice, we can hope! When all hope is lost, we can persevere, and we can hope, against hope! The strange thing that I learned over my life is that this kind of hope never disappoints! This too is part of the art of living! I have no doubt that the Afrikaner and every other race in the country will rise up to take their rightful place as co-heirs of this land as equals. Anything less will be an injustice!
When I left Cape Town for the first time as a young man many years ago, I set out with a single-minded objective to learn the mechanisms underlying the art of curing. We desired to create the best bacon on earth. Did I achieve this? I would like to think that for a time, just before I left Woody’s, that we did just that. We created amazing bacon. Now Koos and Duncan have the company and are facing new challenges. They went through a time of great hardship themselves in the company, but from what I can see on the shelves, the quality is returning to the brand. It makes me incredibly proud of what they have achieved since Oscar, Will, James, Roy, Stanford, Adrian, myself and so many others left. I keep on learning! That making the best bacon on earth, consistently, year in and year out is a very difficult thing and an art in itself.
Many great bacon companies exist around the world. There are three examples of companies that I got to know very well who manage to achieve amazing quality bacon. Two of the companies have been doing it now for over 100 years! I salute them both by concluding the most amazing journey imaginable by focussing not on what Oscar and I manage to achieve, but on others. Others can judge our success or failure in this regard. Three companies who also learned how to make the best bacon on earth stand out! The last few chapters deal with them.
Best Bacon on Earth
Below are photos of some of the best bacon produced on earth by a Master Butcher from Germany whom I have the honour to work with. The best bacon on earth is being created. No compromise! Just quality! Some are cooked fully and some not, depending on where it is made and for what market. The pale bacon is cooked. These are all created in large, high throughput factories in Europe.
Note that all the commercial bacon was produced using a grid system. At Woody’s, we designed, what I believe to be, the best grid system. This can be seen under The Best Bacon System on Earth.
Bacon & the Art of Living focuses mostly on commercial bacon. There is an entirely different discipline around dry-cured, artisan bacon. This is the subject of Chapter 02: Dry Cured Bacon. My mentor here is an Englishman living in Canada, Robert Goodrich.
The photos below are not all “bacon” but it showcases some of the work of the master!
To prove my point about Robert’s bacon, here are some other examples of his work.
Mild Cure bacon
Wiltshire short black bacon
Traditional dry cured Irish Shortback bacon
Stuart Wraith – Short bacon from a supermarket pork loin
I give Vladimir’s recipe to illustrate the difference between artisan bacon and those produced in large high-throughput factories. You can see that time is not an enemy or a factor to overcome in the example below, but an ally to be embraced.
Vladimir’s recipe is given as:
Ingredients – Nitrite salt – 2.2% – Brown sugar – 1% – White vinegar (100 ml) and spice (Black pepper, several peas of juniper, bay leaves)
Procedures. People say that real bacon from Ayrshire should be marinated in a liquid with vinegar. I did not do this. – 4 weeks in a vacuum with salt, wine, vinegar and spices. – Rinse, dry and tie bacon into a roll. – Smoking – 8 hours. – 4 weeks of maturation in the chamber at + 10С and humidity 80%
The white vinegar was a surprise!
Companies who Achieve This
Of all the amazing bacon companies out there I have opted for three examples. There can be many as there are amazing companies out there! I close the three because they have unique ties to South Africa.
The amazing thing about these companies, as with so many others, is that they possess real soul. In their DNA are locked up unique qualities which made them and still make them stand out head and shoulder above the rest. One element of this DNA is a pursuit for quality. Another one is that at some point in their history they were led by a group of people who understood the secret of life. That we are here today and gone tomorrow and our greatest joy (purpose) is in being! These companies have the most fascinating stories to tell and the amazing thing is that I bet you it is the same with every good bacon company out there. They all have great stories to tell becasue bacon people, I mean REAL bacon people, understand humility, comradery and friendship. They are what we refer to as salt-of-the-earth kind of people. They know how to make great bacon and the art of living! These stories form the closing chapters of this epic journey!
![IMG_0132[1].PNG](https://i2.wp.com/earthwormexpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/img_01321.png?resize=700%2C307&ssl=1)
![IMG_0134[1].JPG](https://i0.wp.com/earthwormexpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/img_01341.jpg?resize=700%2C700&ssl=1)
