Salting Meat is in most cases a very wasteful process; salt when applied to fresh meat extracts a very large proportion of the nutritious juice of the flesh, and at the same time hardens the fibres and renders them much less easily digestible. The brine that runs from salted meat contains so much nutritious albumen that it becomes nearly solid on being heated, and as there is no means of extracting the salt, it is necessarily wasted.
The salting of meat before cooking is an English prejudice which is not followed in any other country, nor is there any good reason why beef and pork should be salted before boiling, and mutton and veal boiled without salting. The plan followed on the Continent of slowly stewing a joint of beef without first salting it, yields a much more nutritious, tender, and well flavoured food.
In cases where it is necessary to preserve meat, as on shipboard, salting may be useful, but health cannot be preserved for any length of time on meat from which the most valuable part, the nutritious juice, has been extracted by salting.
In the case of very fat meats, as bacon, salting is not objectionable, as in them the most valuable constituent is the fat, which is not injured by the process.
In the case of ham a peculiar flavour is produced during the process of salting which is highly esteemed, but it should be remembered that the value of the flesh of ham as food is very much less than that of the meat from which it is produced.