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BEEF, PICKLE FOR (another way)
To two gallons of clear, spring water, take four pounds of salt, two pounds of sugar, and two ounces of saltpetre. Treacle may be used with sugar, part of each, if preferred. Boil all together until the scum has quite disappeared, and when cold throw it over the meat to be pickled. A piece of beef, weighing from fourteen to sixteen pounds, will take twelve, or even fourteen days, and a ham a fortnight or three weeks. Cost for two gallons, about 8d.
This is a wet cure for beef, and it belongs to a period before anyone understood what saltpetre does inside meat or how cold a curing room needs to be. The notes below explain the vocabulary and then why the method itself is unsound.
- Saltpetre is the problemSaltpetre is potassium nitrate. In a brine it is converted by bacteria, slowly and unpredictably, into nitrite, which is what actually cures and colours the meat. Two ounces in two gallons gives no way to know how much nitrite reaches the centre of a sixteen-pound joint, and nitrite is toxic in excess. Modern curing uses a pre-blended, dyed curing salt at a precisely specified percentage of meat weight for exactly this reason.
- No temperature is given anywhereThe meat sits in liquid for twelve to twenty-one days. That is safe only in a consistently cold place, and the recipe never says so because a Victorian larder or cellar was assumed. At ordinary room temperature this is a fortnight of incubation for spoilage organisms, and a cured, submerged, low-oxygen joint is precisely the environment in which Clostridium botulinum is a real rather than theoretical concern.
- The brine weakens as it worksMeat releases its own moisture into the pickle, diluting the salt over the first days. Commercial and modern home practice measures brine strength and, for a joint this size, pumps brine into the interior so the centre cures at the same rate as the surface. Immersion alone in a fourteen-pound piece leaves the middle relying on slow diffusion.
- Boiling and reusingThe instruction to boil the pickle until the scum disappears is for clarity and for dissolving the solids, not sterility of the finished cure. Period recipes of this type often direct that the pickle be boiled up again and used for further joints, which would compound every problem above.
- Imperial gallonsCassell's is British: two gallons is about 9 litres, not the 7.6 litres two US gallons would give. Any attempt to read this recipe's proportions against modern figures has to start from that.
- TreacleTreacle here means the dark, slightly bitter cane syrup sold in Britain as black treacle, closest to blackstrap molasses. It was used partly for flavour and colour and partly because it was cheaper than refined sugar.
- The eightpenceThe costing of 8d for two gallons is a reminder of how this book was used. Salt and saltpetre were pantry staples bought loose from a grocer or chemist, and the cure was cheap next to the value of the beef it preserved.
- If you want cured beefFollow a current recipe that specifies curing salt by weight as a percentage of the meat, a refrigeration temperature, and a cure time calculated from the thickness of the joint.
"Pickle" in a nineteenth-century kitchen book usually means a brine rather than anything vinegary, and a household with a large joint to keep through the season would have had a crock or tub of it standing in the cellar. Salt beef of this kind fed the British navy, the merchant fleet and the emigrant ship as well as the family table, and the addition of saltpetre — potassium nitrate, long imported from India and later manufactured from Chilean nitrate deposits — was what kept the meat red instead of a dull grey, which cooks valued long before anyone could explain the chemistry. Sugar or treacle was added to soften the harshness of a heavy salt cure. Cassell's gives several versions of the pickle, and proportions of this kind varied from household to household; this one, headed "another way," is the sort of recipe that circulated by copying rather than by invention.