Salt, smoke, and lard

Dry-cure bacon (belly)

1. Weigh the belly. Measure 2.5% pickling or kosher salt and 1% sugar by weight. A pinch of cure #1 (pink salt, 6.25% nitrite) if you have it — 0.25% of meat weight. If you do not have nitrite, you can still salt-cure, but you must keep it cold and you accept more risk and a gray (not pink) product.
2. Rub, bag or crock, 7 days in the 36–40°F range, flip daily.
3. Rinse, dry overnight, then smoke cold under 90°F for flavor, or hot-smoke to 150°F internal if you want it cooked.
4. Wrap and keep cool, or hang in a true smokehouse winter.

Warning. Nitrite (‘pink curing salt’) is not the same as table salt and not the same as Prague powder used at random spoonfuls. Weigh it. Too much is poison. None at all is an older, colder, shorter-keeping cure.

Country ham, in spirit

A ham packed in salt for ~2 days per pound, kept cold, then hung to dry in a screened, fly-free, humid winter room, is the old method. It is also how people lose hams to skippers and mold. In a first emergency year, can or smoke-and-eat the hams. Graduate to hanging hams the second year.

Lard

Chop leaf fat (from around the kidneys) or back fat, simmer with a splash of water until the cracklings brown and the fat is clear. Strain into clean jars. It keeps months in a cellar, longer sealed. Leaf lard is pie crust; the rest is frying.