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SPICED CORNED BEEF
To ten pounds beef, take two cups salt, two cups molasses, two table-spoons saltpeter, one table-spoon ground pepper, one table-spcon cloves; rub well into the beef, turn every day, and rub the mixture in; will be ready for use in ten days.
This is a dry cure, not a cooking recipe, and it is the one category of old meat instruction that does not translate. The problems are the quantity of saltpetre, the absence of any temperature, and the missing final cooking step.
- The saltpetre is far out of rangeTwo tablespoons of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) is roughly 30 grams for ten pounds of beef, several times what modern curing standards permit for a dry cure. At that level the nitrate is a real hazard rather than a seasoning excess, and household saltpetre was of uncertain purity.
- No temperature is givenTen days of daily rubbing and turning only works in a cold cellar or springhouse in winter, which the book presumably took for granted. At room temperature the same schedule is an incubation period; salt penetrates a solid ten-pound piece of beef slowly, and the interior stays in the danger zone.
- No brine strength, no weight controlModern curing is done by percentage of the meat's weight, with the cut thickness and the cure time matched to each other. "Rub well into the beef" gives no way to know whether the centre of the piece has been cured at all.
- Molasses without nitrite controlTwo cups of molasses is a large sugar load sitting on raw meat for a week and a half. Sugar feeds surface fermentation, and the recipe has no mechanism to keep it in check other than the salt and the overdosed nitrate.
- "Ready for use" does not mean ready to eatCorned beef of this kind was normally simmered or boiled before serving, but the recipe never says so, and a reader treating the cured piece as a finished product would be eating undercooked cured beef.
- What to do insteadUse a current corned-beef recipe with measured curing salt (a nitrite blend sold for the purpose), a stated brine percentage, and refrigeration at a specified temperature. The historical text is worth reading; it is not worth following.
"Corned" beef takes its name from the coarse grains, or corns, of salt used to preserve it, and has nothing to do with maize. Buckeye Cookery (1877) came out of Ohio farm households that killed their own beef in late autumn and had to convert a whole animal into food that would last until spring, which is why the book devotes a section to cutting and curing rather than assuming a butcher. Saltpetre appears here for the reason it appears in nearly every nineteenth-century cure: it fixes the pink colour and suppresses spoilage organisms, effects that were well observed long before the chemistry of nitrate reduction to nitrite was understood. The molasses, cloves and pepper mark this as a "spiced" cure in the older sense, closer to the sweet-spiced beef of the English and Irish tradition than to the plain salt-and-pepper brisket most Americans now associate with the term.