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BEEF-STEAK FOR WINTER USE
Cut the steak large, and the usual thickness; have ready a mixture made of salt, sugar and finely powdered saltpetre, mixed in the same proportion as for corning beef; sprinkle the bottom of a large jar with salt, lay in a piece of steak, and sprinkle over it some of the mixture, as much or a little more than you would use to season in cooking, then put in another slice, sprinkle, and so on till jar is filled, with a sprinkle of the mixture on top; over all, put a plate, with a weight on it, and set in a cool, airy place, where it will not freeze. This needs no brine, as it makes a brine of its own. Twenty-five or thirty pounds may be kept perfectly sweet in this way. Take out to use as wanted, and broil or fry as usual.
This is a dry-cure for raw beef held for weeks at cellar temperature, and it is the class of recipe that modern food safety rules out entirely. The problems are in the quantities, the temperature, and the nitrate.
- The saltpetre is unmeasuredPotassium nitrate (and the sodium nitrite that replaced it in modern curing salts) is effective and safe only within a narrow range measured to the gram against the exact weight of meat. "Finely powdered saltpetre... in the same proportion as for corning beef" is not a proportion, and the reader is then told to judge the sprinkle by how much they would use "to season in cooking." Nitrate underdosed does nothing; overdosed it is a genuine toxin.
- No stated temperature"A cool, airy place, where it will not freeze" describes an unheated nineteenth-century pantry or cellar in a northern winter, which might be anywhere from 33F to 55F depending on the day. Curing safety depends on holding meat below 40F throughout; the upper end of that range is squarely in the growth zone for spoilage and pathogenic bacteria.
- Botulism risk in the self-made brineAnaerobic conditions in the self-made brine — The recipe relies on the meat throwing its own brine under a weighted plate, producing a low-oxygen, submerged environment. Anaerobic conditions of this kind are where Clostridium botulinum becomes a concern if the salt and nitrate are too weak, which is one reason cure quantities are prescribed by weight in current practice rather than left to a sprinkle.
- Steaks are the wrong cut for a slow cureLarge slices stacked flat have a great deal of surface area and cure at very uneven rates depending on how much salt happened to land on each face. Corned beef works because a thick piece sits fully submerged in a brine of known strength for a known time.
- Twenty-five or thirty poundsThe scale matters. A batch this large, drawn on over weeks with the plate lifted and hands going into the jar each time, is repeatedly recontaminated and cannot be assessed once the outer slices are gone.
- If you want cured beefUse a current recipe with weighed curing salt, a stated brine strength, a stated holding temperature and a stated time. Nothing in this entry can be usefully corrected by adjusting one variable.
Buckeye Cookery includes directions for cutting and curing meat because in the 1870s and 1880s a farm household killed its own beef in cold weather and had to make the animal last. Steak was packed down in salt, sugar and saltpetre, the same trio used for corning, and drawn from the jar through the winter. Saltpetre was valued as much for colour as for preservation, since salt alone turns beef a dull grey while nitrate keeps it red. The phrase "perfectly sweet" here means simply "not spoiled" — an older use of the word that appears constantly in period preserving instructions.