Pressed Beef
Cure a piece of brisket with salt and pulverized saltpetre for five or six days; boil slowly until quite done and tender; press until perfectly cold. Slice thin and serve with tomato sauce.
This is a short-form nineteenth-century direction for corned brisket, and the curing half of it cannot be reproduced safely as written. The problems are specific.
- No quantity for the saltpetreSaltpetre is potassium nitrate, and it is the one ingredient in a cure that must be weighed rather than judged. The recipe gives no weight for the meat, the salt or the nitrate, so there is no way to land inside the narrow range that is both effective and within modern nitrate limits. Guessing high is a real toxicity risk, not a matter of flavour.
- Modern curing salts are not interchangeable with itToday's cures use nitrite-based mixes (Prague powder #1, or #2 where nitrate is wanted) at fixed percentages of meat weight. Substituting a spoonful of one for an unspecified amount of the other is how people poison themselves. Any cured brisket should be made from a current recipe with weights given in grams.
- Five or six days at what temperatureThe recipe says nothing about where the meat is held; a cold larder or cellar is the likely assumption. A brisket held for the better part of a week in a salt cure needs to stay at refrigeration temperature throughout; at kitchen warmth the interior can spoil while the surface still looks and smells cured, and low-oxygen cured meat is the sort of environment Clostridium botulinum favours.
- Pressing until perfectly coldPressing a hot cooked brisket under weight, in a mould, cools it slowly from the middle outward, which is the wrong direction. A dense block of meat can spend hours in the range where surviving bacteria multiply, and nothing afterwards brings it back up to temperature.
- Reading the rest of it"Boil slowly until quite done and tender" means a bare simmer for several hours, not a rolling boil, which is sound practice for brisket and the one instruction here that has not aged. The tomato sauce is presumably a plain cooked, sieved tomato sauce served against the cold sliced beef.
Pressed beef is the thrift end of the corned-beef tradition: a cheap, coarse-grained cut cured in salt, simmered until it collapses, then compacted under a weight so it slices cleanly cold for sandwiches, cold suppers and picnic baskets. Saltpetre earned its place in these cures because nitrate is generally credited with keeping cured meat pink and, as was understood empirically long before the chemistry was, with discouraging spoilage; household books call for it casually, by the spoonful or the "piece," with no reference to the weight of the meat. That vagueness is the mark of a period when curing was a routine domestic skill learned by watching rather than reading, and when the meat was worked in a cold cellar in cool weather. The pressing itself points to a kitchen equipped with a beef press or simply a plate and a heavy stone.