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Beef, Corned
Lay a large round of beef into a good pickle. Let it remain for ten days or more, turning it every day. Put it into a stewpan with sufficient water to cover it, and let it boil very gently until it is thoroughly done. Corned beef is often smoked before it is boiled. Allow half an hour to the pound after it has come to a boil. Probable cost, 1s. per pound.
This is a curing instruction dressed as a recipe, and the curing half of it is missing. Everything that determines whether the meat is safe — the strength of the brine, the amount of nitrite, the temperature of the cellar — is left to the phrase "a good pickle."
- "A good pickle" is not a formulaCassell's assumes the reader already keeps a standing brine tub and knows its strength. Cure safety depends on salt concentration and curing-salt content measured against the weight of the meat; without those numbers there is no way to know whether the brine is preserving the round or merely flavouring it.
- Ten days at an unstated temperatureA large round is a thick piece, and brine penetrates slowly from the outside in. Ten days in a cold Victorian larder is a different process from ten days in a modern kitchen at 20C, where the interior of the joint can spoil long before the salt reaches it.
- The botulism problemSubmerged meat in a brine crock is an oxygen-poor environment, which is exactly where Clostridium botulinum can grow if the nitrite level is inadequate. The pink colour of corned beef comes from nitrite; period recipes generally relied on saltpetre, in quantities that were not standardised, and this one names none at all.
- Smoking makes it worse, not betterSmoking is not a safeguard -- "Often smoked before it is boiled" implies smoke that does not cook the meat, but the recipe gives no method, duration or temperature. Smoke that is warm rather than hot can hold the joint for hours in the range where bacteria multiply, and smoking of this kind is safe only on a properly cured piece. There is no verified cure here.
- Half an hour to the poundFor the boiling stage alone the timing is not unreasonable for a large salted round, which needs long gentle cooking to become tender. But a cooking time cannot rescue a joint that was unsafely cured; the hazard in this recipe is upstream of the pot.
- If you want corned beefUse a current recipe with weighed salt, weighed curing salt and a stated refrigeration temperature, or buy the brisket already cured.
- Probable costOne shilling a pound is consistent with the later nineteenth century, though the price alone does not date the entry; a shilling was a substantial part of a labourer's daily wage. A "round" comes from the upper hind leg, and a whole one can run to 20 lb and more -- a piece sized for a large household, not a household of two.
"Corned" has nothing to do with maize: it refers to the coarse grains, or corns, of salt used to preserve the meat, a usage that predates the recipe by centuries. Salting a round of beef in a brine tub was one of the standard ways a British household carried meat through the year before reliable refrigeration, and Irish corned beef exports supplied the Atlantic provisioning trade. Salt beef of this kind lies behind the boiled beef of London chophouses, though the pastrami and salt beef of later Jewish delicatessens rest on different cuts and different cures. The brevity of this entry may itself be the historical point: Cassell's could assume its readers kept a pickle and knew its strength, so the space goes to the boiling time and the price per pound instead. The optional smoking belongs to an older layered preservation -- salt first, smoke second -- from the days when a joint had to keep for months rather than days.