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Beef, Spiced
A small round of about eighteen or twenty pounds will take a fortnight to cure. Prepare the following ingredients: one pound of common salt, one ounce of saltpetre, three ounces of allspice, one of black peppercorns, and half a pound of coarse sugar. Pound the saltpetre, allspice, and black peppercorns, and mix well together with salt and sugar. Rub all into the meat; do this every day and turn, for the time mentioned. Then wash the brine off the beef, and put it into an earthenware baking-dish with about a pint of water and a layer of suet over and under, with a common paste over the dish; bake from six to eight hours, and allow it to cool thoroughly before using. Probable cost of meat, 10d. to 11d. per pound.
This is a two-week dry cure at room temperature, and the failure is in the cure itself rather than in the baking. The points below explain where it goes wrong and gloss the older terms.
- The saltpetre is out of rangeOne ounce of potassium nitrate rubbed into twenty pounds of beef works out to roughly 3,000 parts per million applied, well above the levels permitted in a modern dry cure, and the rubbing method distributes it unevenly so some parts of the round will carry far more than others. Some is washed off with the brine, so the retained figure is lower and unknowable — which is the problem: nitrate loading here cannot be measured or reproduced as written.
- No temperature for the fortnightThe recipe says only "every day" for fourteen days. A curing round must be held at refrigerator temperature throughout; a Victorian larder in winter did that incidentally, a modern kitchen does not, and fourteen days of surface-rubbed beef in a warm room is a food-safety problem the text never addresses.
- Salt alone is not doing the workA pound of salt to twenty pounds of meat is about five per cent, which flavours and firms the beef but does not by itself make a two-week ambient cure safe. Use a current, tested spiced-beef recipe with weighed curing salt if you want this dish.
- A small roundThe round is the upper hind leg. A "small round" at eighteen to twenty pounds is a large bone-in joint cut from that primal rather than a domestic-sized piece, and it is far more meat than a domestic refrigerator will hold under cure.
- Common pasteThe "common paste over the dish" is a plain flour-and-water paste used to seal the baking-dish and trap steam. Sealing crusts of this kind were often broken off and discarded rather than eaten.
- Coarse sugarCoarse sugar here means an unrefined or partly refined brown sugar, closer to today's demerara than to white granulated. It contributed colour as much as sweetness.
- The price lineTen to eleven pence a pound is late nineteenth-century money, and the "probable cost" formula is a standing feature of the book, which regularly tells readers what a dish ought to cost.
Spiced beef belongs to the long tradition of curing a large joint in autumn or early winter and eating it cold through the Christmas season, a practice recorded across Britain and Ireland and still commercially alive in Cork, where spiced beef remains a December fixture. The spicing — allspice, peppercorns, sugar — sits on top of an older salt-and-saltpetre cure; saltpetre in meat curing is generally traced to the later medieval and early modern period, and was valued because cooks observed that it kept cured meat red rather than grey, long before nitrate chemistry was understood. The slow covered bake under suet with a flour paste seal is the standard nineteenth-century way of cooking a cured joint gently enough that it slices cold without crumbling, and the instruction to cool it thoroughly before use fits what this food was for: sideboard food, cut thin, kept for days, and served to whoever arrived.