To Corn Beef
To every fifty pounds of beef, take:
Three pounds of salt.
One pound of brown sugar.
One ounce of saltpetre.
Two ounces of soda.
One-half ounce of red pepper.
This must be dissolved in two gallons of water. Pack the beef closely in a barrel, and cover it over with the mixture. Let it stand a week, or longer if the weather is cold, then pour off the brine, boil it, and skim off all the blood. Let it cool, and pour back over the beef. It will keep well.
This is a nineteenth-century barrel cure, and it is the class of recipe that modern food safety practice has ruled out entirely. The points below explain where it fails; use a current, tested corned-beef brine recipe instead.
- The nitrate dose is out of rangeOne ounce of saltpetre (potassium nitrate, about 28 g) to fifty pounds of beef works out at roughly 1,250 ppm against the weight of the meat, above the 700 ppm nitrate ceiling permitted for immersion curing today, and the recipe gives no way to know how much any individual piece takes up. Current practice measures curing salts to the gram for good reason.
- The brine cannot cover the meatTwo gallons of liquid will not submerge fifty pounds of beef in a barrel, however closely packed. Any meat sitting above the brine line is uncured and unrefrigerated, which is precisely where spoilage organisms take hold.
- No temperature is specified anywhereThe whole cure runs at whatever the cellar happens to be o \
- The salt concentration is too low to preserveThree pounds of salt to fifty pounds of beef is roughly six percent by weight of meat, but diluted across the brine it is far weaker at the meat surface than the saturated or near-saturated brines that made barrel curing work at all.
- Boiling and returning the brineSkimming coagulated blood off boiled brine was standard practice, but reboiling concentrates the salt and nitrate unpredictably and reintroduces warm liquid to a barrel of raw meat. Nothing in the instruction brings the beef itself to a safe temperature at any point.
- "Soda" is ambiguousTwo ounces of soda most likely means sodium bicarbonate, used here to soften the meat and buffer the brine, but nineteenth-century texts also used "soda" loosely for washing soda (sodium carbonate), which is not a food ingredient. There is no way to tell from the page which was meant.
- ScaleFifty pounds of beef is a whole hindquarter's worth — a farm household's winter provision, not a domestic batch. Even scaled down, the proportions cannot be made safe by arithmetic alone.
Corning has nothing to do with maize: corn in older English simply meant a grain or granule, and to corn meat was to bury it in coarse grains of salt. Recipes like this one belonged to the working autumn kitchen, when beef was slaughtered and had to last until spring in a wooden barrel in the cellar, and they survived in print long after the icebox and the commercial packing house had made them unnecessary. The saltpetre is what makes corned beef pink rather than grey — nitrate converting to nitrite and fixing the pigment in the muscle — though the chemistry behind that was not understood until the late nineteenth century, well after cooks had learned the effect by observation. The brown sugar softens the harshness of the salt and feeds the fermentation; the red pepper is flavouring, and was also widely believed to help keep the barrel sweet. Household books of this period routinely printed such cures at farm scale, an indication of how many of their readers were still provisioning a family rather than shopping for one.>