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To Spice A Round of Beef
To a round of beef mix together four tablespoonfuls brown sugar, three tablespoonfuls saltpetre; with this rub your beef well. Two teacups of salt, one teacup of cloves, one teacup of allspice (the spice must be ground fine).
Rub the beef thoroughly with these ingredients. Put it into a tub just large enough to hold it well; turn it every day in the pickle it makes. In four weeks it will be ready to eat. For forty pounds use two and a half pounds of beef suet. When beef is cooked place sticks across the bottom of the pot to prevent its burning
This is a dry-cure for a whole round of beef, and it is one of the recipes in this book that belongs to reading rather than cooking. The problems are in the chemistry and the timekeeping, not in the technique.
- The saltpetre is far out of rangeThree tablespoonfuls of saltpetre is on the order of 45-50 grams of potassium nitrate. Modern curing practice caps ingoing nitrite at a couple of hundred parts per million of meat weight and limits nitrate as well, always measured on a scale, because nitrate converts to nitrite and excess nitrite oxidises haemoglobin to methaemoglobin. Nothing here ties the dose to the weight of the meat at all.
- No weight, no ratio"A round of beef" could be anything from 15 to 40 lb depending on how the butcher broke the carcass. A cure is a ratio; without a stated meat weight the salt and nitrate concentrations are unknowable, and the later line about forty pounds only confuses matters further.
- No temperature anywhereFour weeks in a tub in its own brine assumes a cold larder or cellar in the 34-40F range, which the recipe never says. Held warmer, a low-salt spot in a piece this thick is exactly where Clostridium botulinum and staphylococci get their opening, and the interior never reaches a temperature that would deal with them until the eventual boiling.
- The suet line is garbled"For forty pounds use two and a half pounds of beef suet" appears to belong to a different stage of the process, possibly larding or potting the cooked meat. As printed it is not usable, and guessing at it is not worth the risk.
- Units, for reading purposesA teacup in books of this period is usually reckoned at about three-quarters of a modern cup rather than a full measuring cup, though the measure was never standardised. On that reading, two teacups of salt is roughly a cup and a half.
- The sticks in the potThis detail is sound and survives in other forms: a wooden trivet or rack keeps the meat off the base of the pot during the long simmer so the underside does not scorch. Modern cooks use a metal trivet or an inverted plate for the same reason.
- If you want spiced beefUse a current recipe that gives cure weights as a percentage of meat weight and specifies refrigeration temperatures. The spicing here -- brown sugar, cloves, allspice -- is the recognisable part and has direct modern equivalents.
Spiced beef of this kind was a winter and Christmas dish across Ireland and the north of England, and the Irish version, associated particularly with Cork, is still sold at butchers' counters in December. A round -- the lean upper hind leg -- was rubbed with salt, sugar, saltpetre and warm spices, turned daily in the brine it drew out of itself, then boiled slowly and eaten cold in thin slices. The saltpetre was doing two jobs: it inhibited spoilage organisms and it fixed the red colour, which is why cured beef looks pink rather than grey. Nineteenth-century households bought it by the ounce from the chemist, and recipes like this one circulated for decades before anyone quantified the dose. The practice of curing whole cuts at home faded through the twentieth century as reliable refrigeration and commercial corned beef made a four-week project in a tub unnecessary.