145. The cottager's pig should be bought in the spring, or late in winter; and being then four months old, he will be a year old before killing time; for it should always be borne in mind, that this age is required in order to insure the greatest quantity of meat from a given quantity of food. If a hog be more than a year old, he is the better for it. The flesh is more solid and more nutritious than that of a young hog, much in the same degree that the mutton of a full-mouthed wether is better than that of a younger wether. The pork or bacon of young hogs, even if fatted on corn, is very apt to _boil out_, as they call it; that is to say, come out of the pot smaller in bulk than it goes in. When you begin to fat, do it by degrees, especially in the case of hogs under a year old. If you feed _high_ all at once, the hog is apt to _surfeit_, and then a great loss of food takes place. Peas, or barley-meal is the food; the latter rather the best, and does the work quicker. Make him _quite fat_ by all means. The last bushel, even if he sit as he eat, is the most profitable. If he can walk two hundred yards at a time, he is not well fatted. Lean bacon is the most wasteful thing that any family can use. In short, it is uneatable, except by drunkards, who want something to stimulate their sickly appetite. The man who cannot live on _solid fat_ bacon, well-fed and well-cured, wants the sweet sauce of labour, or is fit for the hospital. But, then, it must be _bacon_, the effect of barley or peas, (not beans,) and not of whey, potatoes, or _messes_ of any kind. It is frequently said, and I know that even farmers say it, that bacon, made from corn, _costs more than it is worth_! Why do they take care to have it then? They know better. They know well, that it is the very _cheapest_ they can have; and they, who look at both ends and both sides of every cost, would as soon think of shooting their hogs as of fatting them on _messes_; that is to say, for _their own use_, however willing they might now-and-then be to regale the Londoners with a bit of potato-pork.
146. About _Christmas_, if the weather be coldish, is a good time to kill. If the weather be very mild, you may wait a little longer; for the hog cannot be too fat. The day before killing he should have no food. To kill a hog nicely is so much of a profession, that it is better to pay a shilling for having it done, than to stab and hack and tear the carcass about. I shall not speak of _pork_; for I would by no means recommend it. There are two ways of going to work to make bacon; in the one you take off the hair by _scalding_. This is the practice in most parts of England, and all over America. But the _Hampshire_ way, and the best way, is to _burn the hair off_. There is a great deal of difference in the consequences. The first method slackens the skin, opens all the pores of it, makes it loose and flabby by drawing out the roots of the hair. The second tightens the skin in every part, contracts all the sinews and veins in the skin, makes the flitch a solider thing, and the skin a better protection to the meat. The taste of the meat is very different from that of a scalded hog; and to this chiefly it was that Hampshire bacon owed its reputation for excellence. As the hair is to be _burnt_ off it must be _dry_, and care must be taken, that the hog be kept on dry litter of some sort the day previous to killing. When killed he is laid upon a narrow bed of straw, not wider than his carcass, and only two or three inches thick. He is then covered all over thinly with straw, to which, according as the wind may be, the fire is put at one end. As the straw burns, it burns the hair. It requires two or three coverings and burnings, and care is taken, that the skin be not in any part burnt, or parched. When the hair is all burnt off close, the hog is _scraped_ clean, but never touched with _water_. The upper side being finished, the hog is turned over, and the other side is treated in like manner. This work should always be done _before day-light_; for in the day-light you cannot so nicely discover whether the hair be sufficiently burnt off. The light of the fire is weakened by that of the day. Besides, it makes the boys get up very early for once at any rate, and that is something; for boys always like a bonfire.
