My wife declared salt pork off limits, but I cook with it today

By V. Paul Reynolds

Frankly, I never gave too much thought to the role of salt pork in cooking, outdoors or indoors. I recall that my mother used it once in a while when she made fish chowder or baked beans.

It had to be part of my vocabulary, though, because I slipped some salt pork in a verse that I penned more than 50 years ago for my hunting club’s official song: “In Hastie’s Hut we map our day, to slaughter those whitetails as they play. Our food is bad and our water is worse, but venison soon will grace our fork, sauteed gently with a little salt pork.”

In 60 years of marriage, salt pork never made it to the V. Paul Reynolds kitchen — not ever. Diane, my beloved late wife, who was very health conscious, especially about salt and saturated fat, declared salt pork off limits in her kitchen, almost the day after I carried her across the threshold in the U.S. Navy married officer quarters. 

Later in our marriage, when I took to baking beans every Saturday night, the culinary demons got a hold on me. When Diane spied the chunk of salt pork stacked upon on the kitchen table with the molasses, brown sugar and dry mustard, she hit the roof. The salt pork wound up in the trash. You would think that I had conspired to slip strychnine into the bean pot. 

Flash forward 60 years. For whatever reason, salt pork creeped into the conversation. A friend, whose culinary skills are formidable, recently told me that he would not come to my house for my newly honed fish chowder unless I made it with salt pork.

Another friend of French heritage who grew up in the St. John Valley told me last week that pork sale was a mainstay in his family’s diet. He recalls that salt pork was even used to flavor the boiled string beans. “My grandfather, who lived to be in his late 80s, cooked fat back and ate it,” he recalls.

Last week during a very successful three-day trout fishing trip, my host, Lagrange outdoorsman and bush flyer Tommy Russell, got out his oversized, long-handled skillet and cooked brookies and pan-fried potatoes over an open fire. 

And guess what? Before the trout and taters ever hit the pan, he sizzled up some stripped chunks of salt pork. Looking on, I could sense my late wife cringing.

Brook trout or venison backstraps browned up in a buttered iron skillet has been my way of cooking these two favorites for more than a half century. This was always the ONLY way to my way of thinking. 

Now, after consuming my share of Tommy Russell’s fried-in-salt-pork brookies, I may have to rethink my iron-skillet cooking orthodoxy.

If my bride were here, she would counsel me with references from the experts. She would go to Google and then tell me that salt pork is high in saturated fat, sodium and can raise bad cholesterol levels. 

A fellow I know, who takes nothing seriously, had this to say: “Salt pork is like the scrappy grandfather of bacon — tough, salty and always up at dawn making everything taste better whether it wants to or not. In the old days, it was the duct tape of frontier cooking: slap it in the beans, drop it in the chowder, grease the skillet with it — heck, some folks probably used it to shine their boots. It doesn’t just flavor food, it intimidates it into tasting better. Just don’t nibble on it raw unless you enjoy chewing rubber bands dipped in ocean water.”