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Beef, Collared
Bone and skin about twelve pounds of thin flank beef, and rub it well with a mixture of common salt, saltpetre, and a little sugar. Let it stand for five days, then wash off the pickle; drain, and dry the beef with a cloth. Prepare some strips of bacon, make notches in the meat, and lay them into the cuts; then take two large table-spoonfuls of finely-chopped parsley, one of sweet herbs, a dozen cloves well pounded, a salt-spoonful of cayenne, a quarter of an ounce of mace, and half a nutmeg grated. Mix well together and strew the mixture over the inside part of the meat, taking care that every part shall be equally covered. Roll up and tie tightly; put it, well secured in a cloth, into a saucepan of boiling water, boil up, then simmer slowly for six hours. When ready take off the cloth and put the beef into a mould. Set a weight on the top and let it stand till cold. When sent to table garnish with parsley. Probable cost, 7d. to 8d. per pound.
This is a nitrate cure followed by a long simmer, and the curing half of it is written without a single measured quantity. That is the reason it cannot be followed today.
- Saltpetre with no quantityThe instruction is to rub twelve pounds of beef "well" with salt, saltpetre and sugar. Potassium nitrate is effective in curing only within a narrow band of concentration relative to meat weight, and "rub it well" gives no way to stay inside it. Excess nitrate in cured meat is a genuine toxic risk, not a matter of taste.
- Five days at an unstated temperatureA Victorian larder ran cool for much of the year; a modern kitchen does not. A five-day wet cure on a large flank with no stated holding temperature is exactly the condition under which spoilage and anaerobic pathogens outcompete an unmeasured salt level.
- The rolled shape is the hazardThe rolled shape -- Boning, seasoning and rolling moves any surface contamination into the centre of a dense cylinder, where heat arrives last. The recipe's six hours at a simmer will in practice go a long way to covering that, but no core temperature is stated and nothing verifies it; commercial curing of rolled meats is done to measured nitrite levels and checked core temperatures for this reason.
- Bacon strips inserted rawLarding the notches with strips of bacon puts a second cured product of unknown composition into the interior of the roll, adding an unknown quantity to an already unmeasured cure.
- If you want the dishUse a current, tested recipe for corned or spiced pressed beef, one that states cure percentages by weight of meat, a refrigerated curing temperature and a finished core temperature. Do not scale this text up or down and hope.
- Reading the originalA salt-spoonful is roughly a quarter teaspoon; "sweet herbs" means the mild kitchen herbs, thyme, marjoram and savory among them. Thin flank is the cut from the underside of the animal, sold now as flank -- the recipe still calls for it to be boned and skinned -- and the "probable cost" of 7d. to 8d. a pound is reckoned in pre-decimal pence.
Collaring is one of the oldest English methods of preserving and presenting meat and fish: the piece is boned, spread with spice, rolled into a collar, bound in a cloth, boiled long and slow, then pressed under a weight until it sets in its own gelatine. The same technique appears in English cookery books from the seventeenth century onward for brawn, eels, salmon and beef, and it survived into the Victorian period because it solved several problems at once, turning a cheap, sinewy cut into something that sliced cleanly cold, kept for days in a cool larder and looked handsome on a sideboard. The clove, mace and nutmeg here are the standard English pickling spices of the period rather than anything regional. Cassell's includes it among plain household work, priced by the pound.