Brine for Beef
Sixteen quarts of salt.
Thirty-four gallons of water.
Four pounds of brown sugar.
One pound of saltpetre.
Boil and skim. Let the beef get entirely cold, and drain off as much of the blood as possible before it is put into the brine. Sometimes it is necessary at the expiration of a few months to boil and skim the brine a second time.
The above quantity is sufficient for an ordinary sized beef.
This is a barrel brine for putting down a whole beef carcass for months of cellar storage. It is worth reading as a document of pre-refrigeration housekeeping, but it cannot be reproduced safely, and the reasons are specific to what it asks you to do.
- Saltpetre with no ratio to the meatOne pound of potassium nitrate in thirty-four gallons of water works out to roughly 0.3 percent of the brine by weight, and the recipe never states how much beef goes in or how long each cut stays. Modern curing limits are set as parts per million of nitrate or nitrite in the finished meat and depend on knowing both weights; there is no way to back-calculate a safe dose from these figures.
- Months at cellar temperatureThe instruction to reboil the brine "at the expiration of a few months" shows that the barrel stood at cellar temperature the whole time. If the brine weakens or the cellar warms, large pieces of meat held in a low-oxygen salt brine can favour Clostridium botulinum, and nothing here monitors temperature or brine strength at any stage.
- The salt quantity is genuinely unreadableThe salt quantity cannot be read exactly -- Sixteen quarts is a volume, and the weight depends on the grain: coarse dairy or bay salt of the period might run under two pounds to the quart, fine salt rather more. The resulting brine strength can therefore only be estimated, and brine strength is the whole basis of the preservation.
- No brine testerBrine testers (salometers) existed, and period sources also describe floating an egg or a potato to judge strength, topping the barrel up as the meat drew salt out; how widely either was used is not well documented. A household following these words alone has no feedback about whether the brine has fallen below preserving strength.
- Reboiling used brineSkimming and reboiling a brine that has held raw beef for months concentrates it by evaporation and removes surface scum, but it does nothing predictable about what has grown in the barrel. It was a practical measure of its day, not a safety step.
- If you want corned or salt beefUse a current recipe with weighed cures, a stated meat-to-cure ratio and refrigerated curing times. This entry is for reading.
Brine barrels like this one are the reason the phrase "an ordinary sized beef" could appear in a cookbook without further explanation: a rural household that killed a steer in cold weather had to convert several hundred pounds of meat into something shelf-stable within days, and salt was the tool that worked at that scale. Salt drew out water and made the meat inhospitable; brown sugar softened the harshness of the cure; saltpetre, potassium nitrate long sold by the druggist, kept the interior pink instead of the grey-brown of plain salt beef, which is why cured beef looks the way it does today. The scale of the recipe, thirty-four gallons of water and a full pound of nitrate, marks it as a survival from the era before home iceboxes and commercial cold storage; refrigerated railcars and centralised packing plants would eventually make the household beef barrel obsolete, and such entries persisted in cookbooks for readers who still butchered their own.