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THE DESPARD RED ROUND
A round of beef weighing twenty-five pounds, one ounce of cloves, three ounces of saltpetre, three ounces of coarse sugar, half an ounce of allspice, six ounces of common salt, one nutmeg. The beef should hang two or thee days; then take out the bone, rub the spices and salt thoroughly together, and rub them well into the beef on both sides; cover the beef, turn and rub it every day for from two to three weeks. When you wish to use it, dip it in cold water to remove the loose spice; bind it closely several times around the sides with a long strip of cotton cloth two inches wide; put it in a pan with half a pint of water in the bottom to prevent burning; cover the top of the meat with shred suet, and cover the pan with a crust half an inch thick, made of water and Graham or other flour, seeing that it adheres to the edge of the pan. Lay a brown paper over the crust; bake it slowly for five or six hours. The gravy, of which there will be a large quantity, may be used in soup, in beef-pie, or in hash. The place from which the bone was taken may be rubbed with fine chopped parsley, and sweet herbs may be laid between the skin and the meat.
This is a dry-cure for a 25-pound round of beef held for two to three weeks, and it cannot be reproduced safely in a modern kitchen. The notes below explain what the terms mean and where the method fails.
- The saltpetre is far out of rangeThree ounces of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) rubbed into 25 pounds of beef is about 0.75 percent of the weight of the meat, roughly 4,600 parts per million of nitrate ion, several times what modern curing standards permit for a dry cure (on the order of 2.75 ounces of nitrate per 100 pounds of meat). It is a surface rub and the recipe dips the loose spice off before baking, so the dose eaten is lower than the dose applied; even so, nitrate at this level is a toxicological problem in its own right, not merely a flavour or colour agent.
- Too little salt to preserve anythingSix ounces of common salt across 25 pounds of meat is about 1.5 percent by weight, well below the level a dry cure needs to control spoilage and Clostridium botulinum over two to three weeks. The recipe is relying on the saltpetre and on a cold larder to do work that salt should be doing.
- No temperature is given anywhereThe beef hangs two or three days, then sits under spice for up to three weeks, with no indication of how cold the room must be. A nineteenth-century cellar in winter is not a refrigerator, and the recipe gives the cook no way to know whether the cure is working or the meat is simply rotting.
- The bone is removed firstBoning the round opens the interior of a very large muscle mass before curing. Surface spice and salt cannot reach the centre of a 25-pound joint in any reliable way, which is precisely the condition that makes uncontrolled long cures dangerous.
- What the cuts and terms meanA "round" is the whole hind leg section, sold today as top round, bottom round and eye of round separately; a single 25-pound piece is a butcher's special order. "Shred suet" is hard beef kidney fat cut into slivers, and "coarse sugar" is unrefined raw sugar.
- The flour crust is not foodThe flour crust is not the dish -- The half-inch paste of water and Graham flour sealed to the pan rim is a flour-and-water lid of the kind sometimes called huff paste, used to trap steam during long baking; the recipe itself gives it no name. It was generally discarded rather than served, and the brown paper over it slowed scorching.
- If you want spiced beefUse a current recipe with weighed cure salts, a stated percentage of salt, and refrigerated curing temperatures. The spice profile here, cloves, allspice and nutmeg, is worth borrowing; the preservation method is not.
Spiced and cured beef rounds of this kind belong to a British and Irish winter tradition that crossed into American household cookery largely intact: a large joint rubbed with salt, sugar, saltpetre and sweet spice, left for weeks, then baked very slowly under a flour paste and served cold in slices over the holidays. Saltpetre was the ordinary domestic curing agent of the period, sold by the ounce at any druggist, which is why quantities in nineteenth-century recipes are so often wildly high by modern standards. The title suggests a named contributor's receipt, and the sheer scale of the joint is a reminder that these were households cooking for large families and expecting a cured round to feed them, cold, for a week or more.