On Food and Cooking

smaller doses of pure nitrite. This is now the
rule except in the production of traditional
dry-cured hams and bacons, where prolonged
ripening benefits from the ongoing bacterial
production of nitrite from nitrate.
We now know that nitrite does several
important things for cured meats. It
contributes its own sharp, piquant flavor. It
reacts in the meat to form nitric oxide (NO),
which retards the development of rancid
flavors in the fat by preemptively binding to
the iron atom in myoglobin, thus preventing
the iron from causing fat oxidation. The same
iron binding produces the characteristic bright
pink-red color of cured meat. Finally, nitrite
suppresses the growth of various bacteria,
most importantly the spores of the oxygen-
intolerant bacterium that causes deadly
botulism. Clostridium botulinum can grow
inside sausages that have been insufficiently
or unevenly salted; German scientists first
named the poisoning it causes