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Beef, Hunters'
Get a nice round of beef, weighing about twenty-five pounds, and hang it for two or three days, according to the weather. When hung long enough, put it into a salting-pan, reduce the following ingredients to powder, and rub it into the meat every morning for eighteen or twenty days, turning it at every rubbing. Three ounces of saltpetre, three ounces of coarse sugar, one ounce of cloves, one nutmeg, half an ounce of allspice, one pound of salt, and half a pound of bay-salt. When salt enough, cleanse it from the brine, put a bandage round the whole extent of the meat to keep it in shape, and lay it in a pan with half a pint of water at the bottom, and some shredded suet on the top of the beef. Cover all with a paste composed of flour and water, and bake it for about six hours. Do not remove the paste until the heat has quite gone off. The gravy left in the bottom of the pan should be preserved; it will be found excellent for made dishes of any kind. The beef may be glazed and garnished with savoury jelly. Average cost of beef, 10d. per pound.
This is a dry-cured spiced round of the kind that used to sit in a Victorian larder for weeks before baking. The curing stage cannot be reproduced safely in a modern kitchen, and the points below explain why rather than how.
- The saltpetre is far out of rangeThree ounces of saltpetre rubbed into twenty-five pounds of beef is on the order of 7,000 parts per million of saltpetre by weight of meat if all of it were taken up (rather less reckoned as nitrate), and it is applied by hand rubbing so it is never evenly distributed. Modern curing salts are used at a small fraction of that, measured to the gram, because nitrate and nitrite are toxic in quantity and concentrate unevenly in a hand-rubbed cure.
- An uncontrolled cure at unknown temperatureThe beef is hung two or three days "according to the weather" and then rubbed daily for eighteen to twenty days in an open salting-pan. This assumes a cold stone larder in a British winter. Modern guidance for meat held three weeks is a documented temperature below about 40F throughout; without that, the interior of a twenty-five pound round carries a spoilage and Clostridium risk that later baking cannot be relied on to correct.
- No measured brine strength or endpoint"When salt enough" is the only test given. A safe cure depends on knowing salt concentration, weight loss and time together, none of which this recipe records. Use a current, measured curing recipe if you want to make spiced beef.
- The size is the other problemA twenty-five pound round is over 11 kg of solid muscle. Salt and nitrate penetrate slowly and from the outside only, so the centre of a piece this large is the last part to be protected and the hardest part to verify. Domestic spiced beef today is made in joints of a few pounds for exactly this reason.
- On the flour-and-water pasteThe recipe calls only for "a paste composed of flour and water"; crusts of this kind (sometimes called huff paste) were not eaten but acted as a sacrificial seal so the joint steamed in its own juices during the six-hour bake, and leaving it on while the meat cools keeps the beef moist. The technique itself is sound and survives in modern slow-roasting under foil or in a covered braiser.
- Bay-saltBay-salt is coarse salt obtained by evaporating sea water in salt pans, and has nothing to do with bay leaves.
- The price lineTenpence a pound is consistent with the nineteenth-century British beef market, and the recipe plainly assumes a household with a cold larder and a joint of beef that had to be preserved rather than refrigerated.
Spiced or "hunters'" beef belongs to the long English tradition of the spiced round, a Christmas and hunting-season joint dry-cured with salt, sugar, saltpetre and warm spices, then baked slowly under a flour crust and served cold in slices. The saltpetre was there for keeping quality and for the deep red colour that distinguishes cured beef from roast, and the sugar softened the harshness of a heavy salt cure. A joint of this size could be cut over several days for breakfast, luncheon and supper without further cooking, which is precisely what a household without refrigeration wanted from it. Related versions survive as Irish spiced beef and as spiced rounds still sold in parts of northern England around Christmas, though all of them are now made in smaller joints with measured cures.