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Beef, Pickle For
This pickle is intended for dry-salting. The ingredients must be well pounded and mixed together before the meat is rubbed with it, and the beef, or hams, turned and well rubbed every day until salt enough. Two pounds of common salt, one and a half ounces of saltpetre, four ounces of brown sugar, and one tea-spoonful of black pepper, will be found to impart a good, rich flavour to the meat. Cost of ingredients, about 3d.
This is a dry cure, and it is the kind of recipe that cannot be carried over to a modern kitchen: the nitrate dose is untethered from any stated weight of meat, and nothing in the method establishes a safe temperature or duration. The notes below explain the terms and then why the procedure fails.
- No meat weight, so no cure rateThe mixture specifies 1½ oz saltpetre but never says how much beef or ham it is meant to cover. Nitrate curing is safe only when the nitrate is calculated as a percentage of the meat's weight; an open-ended "rub it on" instruction can deliver anything from an ineffective dose to one well above the residual nitrite limits food authorities now set.
- Saltpetre is not interchangeable with a modern cureSaltpetre is potassium nitrate. In a cure it is slowly converted by bacteria to nitrite, which is the compound that actually does the work. Modern curing salts are pre-blended at a fixed, low nitrite percentage precisely so the cook cannot misjudge it. Substituting one for the other by volume is not a conversion that can be done responsibly from this text.
- "Until salt enough" is not a specificationCuring time for a large piece of beef or a ham runs from days to weeks depending on thickness, and undercuring leaves the interior unpreserved while the surface tastes done. A daily rub-and-turn tells you nothing about whether salt has reached the centre.
- No temperature anywhereDry curing must be held at refrigeration temperature throughout. A Victorian larder or salting trough sat wherever the weather put it. Meat held for days in the danger zone while nitrate slowly does its work is the exact condition that allows spoilage and pathogen growth to outrun the cure.
- Botulism is the specific riskSalted meat kept without air movement and without adequate nitrite is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum. It is the reason nitrite levels in commercial curing are regulated rather than left to the cook's hand, and the reason an unmeasured historic cure should not be reproduced.
- If you want to cure meatUse a current recipe that gives cure percentages by weight of meat, a target internal temperature or water activity, and a holding temperature. This entry is worth reading as a document, not following.
- The rest of the ingredients, for contextTwo pounds of common salt, four ounces of brown sugar and a teaspoon of black pepper are the flavour side of the mixture and are unremarkable; sugar softens the harshness of the salt and feeds the bacteria that convert nitrate. "3d." is threepence in pre-decimal British currency.
Dry-salting was the default way of holding beef and pork through a British winter well into the nineteenth century, and Cassell's includes it under an alphabetical dictionary heading. Saltpetre had been part of such mixtures for centuries: cooks observed, long before anyone could explain it, that a pinch of it kept salted meat red instead of grey-brown and gave the characteristic cured flavour. The chemistry nitrate is reduced to nitrite by bacteria, and nitrite is what inhibits spoilage organisms and fixes the pigment was not worked out until the closing years of the century and after. The recipe is costed in pence, as is the way of the Dictionary.