I think I’ll name her Gladys.

I’m not sure that it isn’t.

I’m cooking for a party on Thursday night, and one of the pièces de resistance is a dry-cured filet, diced up and served on potato crisps.

The simple but fascinating dry-curing process involves covering the filet completely in a mixture of sugar and salt (I used 2lbs. of kosher salt and 3-4 of sugar, plus a rosemary sprig I’d had left over) for three days.  The filet is practically buried in the sugar-salt combo, then the whole thing placed in the fridge.  And as time goes by, the salt and sugar draw the liquid out of the filet, like in that awesome coffee shot in Blue.

I’ll get more into curing at a later date, but in short: the curing process, which dates back to at least the Greeks, was developed solely to preserve meat in the days before refrigeration.  And it really works; it kills bacteria by drawing water out of meat and microbe both, rendering meat safe, even without cooking.  However, it had another, unintended side effect: it made things delicious.
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