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Beef, Aitchbone of, Salted
Most persons roast this joint, but we think it far superior salted and boiled according to the following recipe:--Take a piece of beef, say ten pounds, and rub into it a mixture composed of three-quarters of a pound of salt, one ounce of dark moist sugar, and half an ounce of saltpetre. Turn the meat each day, and rub the pickle well in every time. Keep it in this condition four or five days, when it will be found salt enough for most people. When wanted for use, put it into a large saucepan with enough boiling water to cover, let it boil, then draw back, and simmer gently for two hours and a half. "If," says Dr. Kitchener, "it boils too quickly at first, no art can make it tender afterwards; the slower it boils the better." Carrots, turnips, and suet dumplings are the proper accompaniments to this dish. The soft, marrow-like fat at the back of the joint should be eaten when it is hot, the hard fat left until the joint is served cold. The liquor in which the beef is boiled should not be thrown away, it will make excellent pea soup. Probable cost, 7 1/2d. to 8 1/2d. per pound. Sufficient for eight or nine persons.
The boiling half of this recipe is sound Victorian practice; the curing half is not something to reproduce. The points below explain the cut, the terms, and where the recipe fails.
- Why the cure failsHalf an ounce of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) rubbed into ten pounds of beef works out to roughly 3,000 parts per million of saltpetre by weight of meat, about 1,900 ppm expressed as nitrate — several times the level permitted in dry cures today, and applied by hand with no way to know how much lands where. Use a current corned-beef or brisket-cure recipe with weighed curing salt instead.
- No temperature givenFour or five days of turning and rubbing assumes a cold larder in a cold season. The recipe never states a temperature, and a dry salt rub left at room temperature on a ten-pound joint risks spoilage in the thick interior, where the salt penetrates slowest. Cure under refrigeration.
- AitchboneThe aitchbone is the rump-end pelvic bone and the meat around it, cut from the top of the round. Butchers rarely break a carcass this way now; the equivalent counter cuts are bottom round, silverside or a boned-and-rolled rump roast.
- Dark moist sugarThis is unrefined soft brown sugar — British light or dark muscovado is the direct descendant. American brown sugar is close enough in flavour, being refined sugar with molasses returned to it.
- "Draw back"To draw back is to pull the pan off the direct heat or to the cool side of the range, bringing a rolling boil down to a bare shiver. Kitchiner's point holds for any large piece of boiled beef: hard boiling at the start seizes the muscle fibres and no amount of further cooking loosens them.
- The two fatsThe distinction between the soft fat at the back of the joint, eaten hot, and the firm fat left for the cold cut is a genuine one and worth knowing. Rendered marrow-like fat is unpleasant once set; firm fat slices cleanly cold.
- The cooking liquorSalt-beef liquor as the base for pea soup is standard thrift and still works — but taste it before committing, since a heavily salted joint can leave the broth too salty to use undiluted.
- Cost and yieldSevenpence-halfpenny to eightpence-halfpenny a pound is late Victorian pricing, quoted for readers keeping household accounts. Eight or nine servings from ten pounds on the bone is about right, with plenty left cold.
The odd name has nothing to do with the letter H: aitchbone is a worn-down form of Middle English nache-bone, from Old French nache (haunch, buttock), and "a nachebone" was reanalysed over time as "an aitchbone" — the same trick of the ear that turned a napron into an apron. The joint was a butcher's staple in Britain for centuries and a classic candidate for salting, since the pelvic end of the round is lean, sizeable, and improves under a long slow simmer far more than under dry roasting heat. The Dr Kitchener quoted here is William Kitchiner, who held an MD but is better known as an optician, amateur cook and writer, and whose The Cook's Oracle (1817) was still being mined for maxims by compilers decades after his death; Cassell's, apparently assembling a household dictionary for late Victorian middle-class kitchens, seems to borrow him as an authority on the one point that mattered most before thermostats existed — that the pot must never be allowed to gallop.