Pork, to be the best, should not be more than a year old. The chine is the best roasting piece; the spare-ribs are very sweet food, but too rich to be healthy. The shoulder is good roasted, stuffed with bread and sage. If too large, half of it can be laid a week or two in brine, and will be good boiled, to eat cold. It is well for a small family, in November to buy half of a spring pig; this will furnish several nice pieces, to roast, strips for salting, a ham and shoulder for smoking, and leaf enough for a pot or two of lard, besides remnants for sausage meat.

In winter, all meat may be kept a long time; and, with the exception of pork, is much better for it; therefore it is easier to furnish a table without waste in winter than in summer. Meat will keep in an ice-house or a good refrigerator several days in hot weather; if you have neither, take your meat the moment it is brought in, wipe it dry if at all damp, and hang it in the cellar, sprinkling first a little pepper and salt over it, especially over the parts which flies are most apt to visit. In mutton and lamb, these are the tenderloin and the large end of the leg. The pepper and salt will also tend to preserve the meat from taint.

If you wish to keep it longer than two days, wrap it in a piece of cloth (no matter if it is very thin), and lay it in a charcoal bin, and throw a shovel of coal over it. A leg of mutton will keep several days wrapped in a cloth which has been dipped in vinegar, laid upon the ground of a dry cellar.

Meat that is to be salted for immediate use, should, if the weather is cool, be hung up a day or two first.* Where a large quantity of beef is to be salted, a different method is pursued. In winter, unless you wish to keep meat several weeks, place it where it will be cold without freezing. Mutton never looks as nice after being frozen hard; it has a dark, uninviting appearance. To thaw frozen meat, bring it over night into a warm room. If this has been forgotten, lay it, early in the morning, into cold water. If meat is put to roast, boil, or broil, before being entirely thawed, it will be tough. It is best to preserve fowls without freezing. They will keep very well packed in snow; the liver, etc, being taken out and laid by themselves in the snow, and the body filled with it.

* See directions for salting meat, page 190.

Meat that has been kept perfectly clean, or a beef steak just cut off, should not be washed; but, generally, it is necessary to wash a roasting piece. Pork having the rind on, needs great care in washing and scraping, to make it fit to cook.

Trim off the superfluous fat from beef, mutton, and fresh pork before cooking it.

Tough steak is made more tender by being pounded with a rolling-pin; but some of the juice of the meat is lost by the operation.