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HAM, PICKLE FOR (to keep for some months)
Put six quarts of water into a large saucepan, with four pounds of salt, three-quarters of a pound of sugar, and three ounces of saltpetre. Boil for twenty minutes. Skim thoroughly. When cold, pour it upon the ham. This pickle will answer equally well for tongues, beef, etc. The meat should be rubbed with salt, and drained for twenty-four hours before it is put in, and care should be taken that the liquid completely covers every part. The pickle should be boiled up every two or three months. The time required will depend upon the nature and size of the meat, and the degree of saltness desired. A ham of fourteen pounds will take about three weeks; a tongue, ten days; a large piece of beef, a fortnight Probable cost of the pickle, 6d.
This is a nitrate curing brine intended to hold whole hams, tongues and beef in a cool larder for months at a time. It cannot be reproduced safely in a modern kitchen, and the reasons are specific to what is happening in the crock.
- The saltpetre is unmeasured against the meatThree ounces of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) in six quarts of water is a strong nitrate load, and the recipe gives no ratio to the weight of meat being cured. Modern curing salts are dosed in parts per million of the meat itself, precisely because nitrate and nitrite uptake cannot be judged by eye or by the volume of liquid.
- Weeks at unspecified temperatureA fourteen-pound ham sits in this brine for about three weeks, and the pickle is reused for months. The original assumes a cold stone larder or cellar, which the recipe never states as a requirement. Held anywhere near room temperature, the interior of a large joint is in the danger zone for days before the salt reaches the centre.
- Botulism risk in a slow, anaerobic cureSubmerged meat curing slowly at cellar temperature is a classic setting for Clostridium botulinum, and nitrate is understood today to be the guard against it. Whatever protection it offers depends on measured cure concentration and controlled temperature, neither of which this recipe provides.
- Reusing and reboiling the brineBoiling the pickle up every two or three months was the period method for knocking back spoilage organisms, but each joint that comes out leaves protein, blood and sugar behind, and each boil concentrates the salt by evaporation to an unknown degree. The strength of the brine after the second or third use is simply not knowable.
- Nothing here is ever cookedThe pickle produces a raw cured joint that still requires boiling or baking afterwards. The recipe as printed stops at the curing stage, so following it alone yields raw meat that has been held for weeks without any step that reaches a safe temperature.
- If you want to cure a hamUse a current recipe with weighed cure, weighed meat and a stated refrigeration temperature. Read this one as a record of how a Victorian larder worked, not as working instructions.
Wet-curing in a reused brine tub was ordinary household practice in Britain well into the twentieth century. Saltpetre had been used in salt meat for centuries before anyone understood why it worked; the nitrate breaks down to nitrite, which both inhibits spoilage bacteria and fixes the pink colour that distinguishes cured ham from plain salt pork. The costing of sixpence for the whole brine is the point of the entry as much as the method: the economy lay in the tub serving hams, tongues and beef in succession over a season, at a time when a large joint arriving in the house had to be preserved rather than refrigerated. The staggered timings quoted here, three weeks for a ham and ten days for a tongue, reflect nothing more than how long salt takes to travel through meat of different density and thickness.