Salo

Name: Salo
Total time: 120 h
Yield: Serves 6
Cuisine: Ukraine and Belarus
Ingredients: 500 g salo (pork back fat), in two pieces; 7 cloves garlic, thinly sliced; 1 litre boiled water; 3 to 4 tbsp salt; 1 bay leaf; 3 black peppercorns; 3 allspice berries

Ukraine

Salo, paper-thin slices of cured pork back fat, draped over dark rye bread with raw garlic and mustard: several translucent, ivory-white slices of pork back fat draped loosely over two thick slices of very dark rye bread, a few whole peeled garlic cloves and a small dark smear of grain mustard resting beside the bread.

Illustration

Time: 120 hours

Researched: Researched from 89 sources in the brief

Fresh pork back fat dry-cured with coarse salt, garlic, black pepper and bay leaf, packed under and over the fat, rested three to four days in a non-metal container per rung two. Sliced thin and eaten on black bread with raw garlic and mustard, or rendered into shkvarky, crisp-fried cubes, to top banosh and other dishes.

by Ukraine

The Holodomor, the famine of 1932 to 1933, was engineered by Soviet policy, chiefly grain requisition quotas set and enforced against a starving rural Ukrainian population, and is recognised by Ukraine's parliament and numerous other states as genocide. A range is stated, because the range is where the real, current scholarly work actually sits. Current demographic reconstructions from archival data, reported by the Ukrainian service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty as converging findings rather than a single settled figure, put excess deaths across 1932 to 1934 at roughly 3.9 to 4.5 million, around 3.6 million of that rural. Ella Libanova, director of Ukraine's own state Institute for Demography and Social Studies, has said publicly that the frequently repeated figure of seven million or more is a substantial overstatement the demographic evidence does not support. The text uses the lower, better-evidenced range, names the higher figures as coming from older or advocacy sources, and treats the scholarly convergence itself as recent and still being argued over, not settled decades ago. It matters here specifically because it explains something about the food: a cuisine this dependent on salting, drying, pickling and fermenting, salo, sauerkraut, dried fruit for uzvar, is not simply thrifty by habit, it carries the memory of a state that could, and once did, take the harvest away.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Serves 6. Cured 4 to 5 days in the fridge.

Ingredients

500 g salo (pork back fat), in two pieces
7 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
1 litre boiled water
3 to 4 tbsp salt
1 bay leaf
3 black peppercorns
3 allspice berries

Method

Cut the salo into two equal pieces. Peel and thinly slice the garlic.
Bring the water to the boil with the salt, bay, peppercorns and allspice until the salt dissolves. Cool to room temperature.
Put the salo in a container with the garlic, pour over the brine, cover and refrigerate 4 to 5 days.
Drain, pat it dry, wrap it in parchment or foil, and keep it in the fridge.

Notes

The recipe is Ievgen Klopotenko's salo po-kozatsky, a brine cure. Viktoriia Vaskovska in LVIV.MEDIA gives two brine cures of 3 days or more; Klopotenko's dry cure layers 1 kg of fat with 200 g of coarse salt in a jar, 5 to 7 days at 2 to 5°C.

What a modern chef changes

Cold-smoked over beech, sliced to order

Rungs 2 and 4

Method

Cure the fat as tradition dictates, per rung two.
Cold-smoke it whole on the Big Green Egg over beechwood for several hours at a genuinely low, controlled dome temperature, per rung four, a step traditional salo does not use but which suits the reader's own kit precisely.
Slice it paper-thin on a dedicated meat slicer rather than by hand.
Serve it draped, not stacked, over toasted black rye with a dill-and-horseradish crème rather than plain raw garlic, the horseradish freshly ground per the sourcing section below since its flavour fades within minutes.

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