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BEEF, HUNG (another way)
This recipe can be used for beef either smoked or unsmoked. It may be salted dry, or put into a pickle made with the same ingredients. The beef must be hung for three or four days, then rubbed with bay-salt, brown sugar, saltpetre, and a little pepper and allspice; afterwards hang it up in a warm but not a hot place, rolled tightly in a cloth, for a fortnight or more till it has become sufficiently hard. It may be hung in the corner of a chimney over a wood fire to get the flavour of smoke, or sent to a smoking-house. A small clove of garlic put in the pickle is considered an improvement. Time, two or three weeks to remain in brine. Probable cost, 10d. per pound.
This is a dry-cure and cold-smoke method written for a cold Victorian larder and an open wood chimney, and it gives no weights at all. The gaps are the reason it cannot be followed.
- No quantities anywhereBay-salt, sugar, saltpetre, pepper and allspice are listed with no proportions, and the size of the joint is never given. Curing is arithmetic: the cure has to be calculated against the weight of the meat, and a recipe that omits both sides of that equation cannot be scaled or checked.
- Saltpetre out of rangeSaltpetre is potassium nitrate. Modern curing uses nitrite and nitrate in tightly controlled parts per million because the margin between a working cure and a toxic dose is narrow, and nitrate rubbed on by eye is exactly the practice those limits were written to end.
- "A warm but not a hot place"Beef hung warm and wrapped in cloth for a fortnight sits in the danger zone throughout. Curing of this kind was generally carried out in cold weather in an unheated larder; "warm" here is likely warm relative to a house without central heating, not a modern heated room.
- Botulism risk in low-oxygen cured meatBotulism risk in an unmeasured cure -- Salt-cured meat held at ambient temperature without a measured cure is a setting in which Clostridium botulinum can be a hazard. Nitrite in measured amounts is the specific control for it, and this recipe has no measured nitrite.
- Chimney smoking is not a preservative stepCold smoke over a wood fire adds flavour and a little surface antimicrobial effect. It does not cook the meat and does not compensate for an unmeasured cure. The "smoking-house" of the period was a purpose-built structure with a managed draught, not a domestic flue.
- Three or four days' hanging firstThe initial hang assumes freshly slaughtered carcase meat aged on the bone in a cold larder. Supermarket beef has already been aged and chilled, and further hanging in a modern kitchen risks only spoilage.
- If you want hung beefUse a current recipe with weights, a measured curing salt, a stated cure time per inch of thickness, and a controlled temperature. Bresaola and biltong methods published to modern food-safety standards cover this ground.
- Reading the old measuresA fortnight is two weeks. Bay-salt is coarse salt made by solar evaporation of sea water; the name is usually connected with such bay or pan workings, though the derivation is not certain. "10d. per pound" is ten old pence.
Hung beef belongs to the long era when a household bought or slaughtered meat in quantity and had to make it last through months without ice. Salt drew out water, saltpetre kept the interior red rather than grey, sugar softened the harshness of the salt, and smoke from the kitchen chimney finished the job — Cassell's assumption that a reader might simply hang the joint "in the corner of a chimney over a wood fire" says a good deal about the domestic hearth still in use when the Dictionary was compiled in the 1870s. The result could be closer to what we would now call bresaola or air-dried beef than to a roast: sliced thin and eaten raw at breakfast or supper, though it was also boiled. The alternative of sending it to a smoking-house points to the commercial smokers who took in hams and sides from private customers. The clove of garlic in the pickle is a small continental touch in an otherwise thoroughly English procedure, and the fact that it is noted as an improvement rather than assumed tells you how sparingly garlic was used in Victorian kitchens.