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HAMBURG BEEF (prepared in the German way)
Take about sixty pounds of beef, which may be composed of seven or eight pieces. Mix four pounds of salt with four ounces of saltpetre, and rub the meat thoroughly with it. Take a deep tub, see that it is scrupulously clean, and wash it out with cold water. Put into it a handful of the leaves of marjoram, sweet basil, and thyme, the same of bay-leaves, a dozen cloves, two blades of mace, a quarter of an ounce of juniper berries, and two ounces of white pepper. Pack the pieces of beef on part of this seasoning, and sprinkle the rest over, with as much of the salt and saltpetre as could not be rubbed into the beef. Place a weight on the top, and if, at the end of a few days, the liquid does not rise over the lid, pour a pint of strong salt and water into the tub. The smaller pieces can be used at the end of three weeks, the larger should be left for a month. Probable cost, 1s. per pound.
This is a bulk dry-cure for salt beef, written for a household or trade kitchen with a cold cellar and sixty pounds of meat to preserve. It cannot be followed safely today, and the reasons are worth setting out.
- The saltpetre is far out of rangeFour ounces of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) to sixty pounds of beef works out to roughly 4 g per kilogram of meat, many times over the nitrate level permitted in modern cured products. Saltpetre was used freely in nineteenth-century curing for colour and keeping; current practice limits it strictly, and measures it into a pre-blended cure so that it disperses evenly rather than sitting in pockets against the meat.
- No temperature is given anywhereThe whole method assumes an unheated larder or cellar sitting somewhere near 4-8C for three to four weeks. A modern kitchen has no such room. Curing at ambient temperature over that span allows spoilage organisms to outpace the salt, and the low-oxygen brine at the bottom of a weighted tub is exactly the condition Clostridium botulinum exploits.
- The brine is left to make itselfThe recipe relies on the meat's own liquid rising over the lid, with a vague pint of "strong salt and water" as a fallback. A salt-to-meat ratio is implied (four pounds of salt to sixty of beef), but no strength is given for the make-up brine, there is no check on it, and no way to know whether the pieces in the middle of the tub ever reach a protective level. Any reliable cure specifies brine strength or percentage of salt to meat weight.
- Seven or eight pieces, unspecifiedSalt penetrates by thickness, not by weight. A cure that treats a thin flank and a thick round to the same rub, distinguished only by "three weeks" versus "a month", will over-salt one and leave the other's centre uncured.
- Terms in the textA blade of mace is one piece of the lacy aril from a nutmeg. "Probable cost, 1s. per pound" is a shilling, part of Cassell's habit of costing dishes for the housekeeper. Saltpetre is potassium nitrate, sold at the period by chemists and grocers alike.
- If you want salt beefUse a current, tested recipe with weighed curing salt, a stated brine percentage and refrigerated curing throughout. Read this one as a record of how a large household got through a side of beef before mechanical cold.
"Hamburg beef" in English cookery books of the period generally means beef cured in the north German manner: a dry rub of salt and saltpetre, then a spiced pickle with juniper, bay and mace, rather than the sweeter English cure built on treacle or brown sugar. Juniper is characteristic of German and Scandinavian curing. Cassell's placed it among a long run of salting and pickling entries, at a date when preserving meat at home was still a common domestic task. Spiced, nitrate-cured and smoked beef remains a north German speciality associated with Hamburg.