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Beef, Hung
This meat should be hung as long as is consistent with safety to make it tender. Rub into the meat weighing, say from twelve to fourteen pounds, one pound of bay-salt, one pound of coarse brown sugar, and six ounces of salt-petre pounded and mixed together. It should be rubbed every morning, and will then be ready for smoking in a fortnight. Probable cost of beef, 10d. per pound. Smoke the meat about three weeks.
This is a dry-cure and cold-smoke for a large piece of beef, written when curing was judged by eye, smell and habit. Read it as a document rather than a method: the nitrate quantity alone puts it far outside any range now considered acceptable.
- The saltpetre is the problemSix ounces of potassium nitrate rubbed into twelve to fourteen pounds of beef works out at roughly 27,000-31,000 parts per million by weight of meat. Modern curing practice permits only a small fraction of that, and commercial cure mixes are deliberately sold pre-diluted so this kind of error cannot be made. Not all of it penetrates, but enough does that the finished meat would carry a nitrate load far beyond anything defensible.
- "Hung as long as is consistent with safety"The original leaves the single most important variable — how long, and at what temperature — entirely to the cook's judgement. Safe curing depends on holding the meat in a defined cold range for a defined time while salt penetrates to the centre; a fortnight of rubbing in an unspecified larder does not establish that.
- Three weeks of cold smokeSmoking for three weeks means smoke below about 85F, which is squarely in the range where Clostridium botulinum and other pathogens grow if the cure has not done its work. The recipe gives no smokehouse temperature, no humidity, and no target weight loss, all of which a current cold-smoking procedure specifies.
- Bay-saltBay-salt is coarse solar-evaporated sea salt; the name is generally taken from the bays or evaporating basins where sea water was left to dry, and it is often associated with the French Atlantic coast. It is not flavoured with bay leaves. Its coarseness mattered: it dissolved slowly and drew moisture out over days rather than hours.
- What the sugar was doingA pound of coarse brown sugar against a pound of salt is a high proportion, and it would soften the harshness of the cure rather than sweeten the meat. Nineteenth-century brown sugar was less refined than today's and carried more molasses.
- The price noteTenpence a pound is consistent with beef prices in the later nineteenth century, when Cassell's was compiled.
- If you want smoked beefUse a current recipe from a source that gives cure percentages by meat weight, a measured nitrite or nitrate product, and stated temperatures for both curing and smoking.
Hung beef — also called dried beef — belongs to the long tradition of preserving a whole muscle by salt, nitrate and smoke rather than by cooking. In British households of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was a standing item of the cold larder, sliced thin for breakfast or supper alongside tongue and ham, and recipes under this name appear in eighteenth-century cookery books. Saltpetre earned its place in these cures because it fixes the red colour and inhibits spoilage; the chemistry behind that, the conversion of nitrate to nitrite by bacteria on the meat, was not established until the closing years of the nineteenth century. The vagueness of "as long as is consistent with safety" is the honest heart of the entry: it assumes a cook working from experience rather than measurement.