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Beef, Dutch
Take ten pounds of the buttock of beef without fat, rub it well with brown sugar, and allow it to lie five or six hours, turning frequently during the time. Put the beef into an earthenware pan. Press into it a small table-spoonful of saltpetre mixed with three table-spoonfuls of salt, and rub and turn every day for a fortnight. Then put it into a coarse cloth under a cheese-press for twenty-four hours, and dry in a chimney. When boiled it should be put into a cloth. Probable cost, 10d. to 1s. per pound.
This is a dry-cure and air-dry preservation method, not a cooking recipe, and it falls outside what can be done safely in a modern home. The notes below explain the terms and the specific reasons the process fails.
- Saltpetre out of measured rangeA tablespoon of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) to ten pounds of beef is an eyeballed quantity with no stated purity or weight, and nitrate curing depends on precise parts-per-million. Modern curing uses weighed nitrite or nitrate salt blends at controlled percentages precisely because both under- and over-dosing are dangerous.
- Two weeks at room temperatureThe beef sits in an earthenware pan for a fortnight, rubbed and turned daily, with no refrigeration and no stated temperature. Salt penetrates a ten-pound buttock slowly, and the interior spends days in the range where Clostridium botulinum and other spoilage organisms multiply.
- Drying in a chimneyChimney drying was a working kitchen technique that combined warm updraught with smoke. No modern flue offers a controlled temperature or airflow, and creosote-laden domestic chimneys are not food-contact surfaces.
- The cut"Buttock of beef" is the older butcher's term for the round, specifically the topside and silverside. It is lean and dense, which is why it was chosen for curing and why salt takes so long to reach the middle.
- Cheese-pressA cheese-press was a screw or lever press used in households that made their own cheese. Twenty-four hours under it would have expelled liquid and compacted the meat into a dense slab suitable for slicing thin.
- "Dutch beef" and its relativesIf you want the dish, use a current, tested recipe with weighed cure salts and controlled temperatures, or buy the cured beef ready-made. The historical text is worth reading; it is not worth following.
- Probable cost10d. to 1s. per pound is pre-decimal British currency, roughly ten to twelve pence per pound in a shilling of twelve pence. The note is a period price guide, not part of the method.
Dutch beef is the English name for a pressed, salt-and-sugar-cured, air-dried beef, often grouped, loosely, with Hamburg beef and the Swiss B dnerfleisch; the "Dutch" label in English cookery books is sometimes said to signal an imported Continental style rather than a specific Netherlandish origin, and such names travelled loosely. Cassell's appeared in the last decades of the nineteenth century, when a large household might still cure its own meat, and the entry survives in the dictionary as much for reference as for use. The combination of brown sugar, salt and saltpetre is the classic pre-refrigeration cure: sugar to soften the harshness of the salt, salt to draw water out, saltpetre to fix the colour and suppress spoilage. Pressing and chimney-drying were the finishing steps that turned a wet-cured joint into something that would keep and slice, and they belong to a kitchen built around an open hearth and a working flue.