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Brine for Pickling Meats
1 quart salt. 1 ounce saltpetre. 1/2 cup brown sugar. cup brown sugar 1 gallon cold water Rub part of the salt into the meat; dissolve the rest of the salt, the sugar, and the saltpetre in the water, put in the meat, and set a weight above to keep the meat under the brine. Let stand in a cool place. Thin pieces of meat and tongues will be ready to cook in three or four days. For less salt meat, shorten the time in the brine.
This is a wet cure, and the text as it survives is missing the numbers that matter most. What remains cannot be followed safely.
- The ingredient list is truncatedOnly "cup brown sugar" and "1 gallon cold water" survive. The quantities of salt and saltpetre — the two ingredients that determine whether the cure works — are gone from the page entirely.
- Saltpetre is dosed by weight, not by eyePotassium nitrate is a regulated curing agent with a narrow safe range. Guessing at it risks either far too much nitrate in the finished meat or too little to inhibit Clostridium botulinum during a multi-day cure at cellar temperature. There is no way to reconstruct the intended amount from what is printed here.
- "A cool place" is not a temperatureA brine cure depends on holding the meat in a narrow band, cold enough to suppress spoilage organisms but warm enough for the cure to penetrate. An unheated period pantry might sit anywhere from just above freezing to well into the danger zone depending on the week.
- Three or four days assumes a thickness the book never statesBrine penetrates at a roughly fixed rate per inch. "Thin pieces" and "tongues" cover a wide range, and an under-cured centre in a piece held for days at ambient temperature is the specific failure this recipe invites.
- Modern curing salts are not a substitute you can improvisePrague powder #1 and #2 are premixed at fixed nitrite and nitrate concentrations precisely so that home cooks are not measuring pure saltpetre. They are not interchangeable with each other or with the saltpetre called for here.
- If you want to cure meatUse a current recipe from a source that gives salt, cure and sugar by weight as a percentage of the meat, plus a holding temperature and a target time.
Wet-curing in an open crock was the ordinary way of keeping beef, pork and tongue through the cold months before household refrigeration, and preserving manuals of the period print dozens of variants — some with molasses, some with spices, many with saltpetre for colour as much as for keeping. Saltpetre had been used in meat curing for centuries, valued because it fixed the pink of corned beef and ham rather than letting it turn the grey of plain salt pork; the nitrite chemistry behind that colour, and behind its protective effect, was not traced until the 1890s, in the work of Polenske (1891) and Lehmann and Kisskalt (1899), and commercial premixed cures with standardised nitrite content came later still. The instruction to "set a weight above to keep the meat under the brine" is the one piece of technique here that has not changed: anything that floats above the surface spoils. Tongue appears by name presumably because it was a cheap cut that cured well and sliced handsomely cold, a staple of the period supper table.