Salt Pork

Salt pork is pork cured almost entirely with salt — a hard, snowy-white slab cut from the fatty back (fatback) or the fat-streaked belly of the pig, packed in dry salt or brine to keep for months without refrigeration. Unlike bacon it is usually unsmoked and only lightly seasoned, so it reads as pure salted fat: it is not eaten on its own but simmered, fried or rendered to melt its fat and salt into beans, greens, chowders and braises as a foundational seasoning meat.