Home › The Principles of Cookery › Hamburg Beef, Smoked
Hamburg Beef, Smoked
Take about six or seven pounds weight of the rump, or ribs of beef, and rub a little common salt and coarse sugar into it. Let it remain for two or three days, and turn it frequently. Drain and wipe the meat. Pound and mix thoroughly a quarter of a pound of common salt, a quarter of a pound of bay salt, an ounce of saltpetre, half an ounce of pepper, and half a dozen pounded cloves. Rub these well into the beef, and turn it every day for a fortnight. Take it up, drain it, roll it tightly in a cloth, and smoke it for ten or twelve days. It may be cooked whole, or in pieces, but if boiled whole should be pressed under a weight until cold. Probable cost, 1s. per pound.
This is a nitrate dry-cure followed by a fortnight of salting and up to twelve days in smoke, all of it uncontrolled. The proportions and the process both fall outside what is considered safe practice today, and the notes below explain where rather than how to fix it.
- The saltpetre is far out of rangeAn ounce of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) rubbed into six or seven pounds of beef works out to several thousand parts per million of nitrate in the meat. Modern permitted levels for dry-cured meat are far lower -- from a few hundred ppm up to around two thousand, depending on jurisdiction -- and commercial curing salts are deliberately diluted so that this quantity cannot be reached by hand-mixing. Nitrate at this level is a genuine toxicological concern, not a matter of taste.
- No temperature is given anywhereThe two or three days of first salting, the fortnight of turning, and the ten to twelve days of smoking are all specified without a single temperature. Cold-smoking beef for nearly two weeks in an unmeasured environment is exactly the window in which Clostridium botulinum and staphylococci become a real risk, and it is why current curing guidance insists on measured cure concentration, measured chamber temperature and a defined time.
- The meat is never brought to a safe temperatureThe smoking does not cook the meat -- Smoke in a nineteenth-century chimney or smokehouse was warm at best, so the beef emerges cured but raw. The recipe does say it "may be cooked whole, or in pieces," but gives no temperature or time, and the cure alone is being trusted for anything not thoroughly cooked.
- "Bay salt" no longer exists as soldBay salt was coarse, off-white sea salt made by solar evaporation, traditionally said to have come from the Bay of Biscay, and it carried variable amounts of magnesium and calcium impurities. Nothing is sold under that name today, though coarse solar-evaporated sea salt is the nearest thing.
- "Common salt" and "coarse sugar"Common salt here means ordinary kitchen salt as distinct from the bay salt and saltpetre named alongside it; its grain and moisture varied by source. Coarse sugar probably means unrefined or partly refined cane sugar, closest to a light demerara.
- The pressing stepPressing a boiled joint under a weight until cold, as directed at the end, means it cools slowly through the danger zone under insulation. It is a texture technique for slicing cold beef thin, and it made sense in a cold larder; it is not something to carry over.
- If you want this flavourSmoked, nitrate-cured beef of this kind is still made commercially and by curers working to measured formulas. Use a current recipe with a weighed curing salt and a stated chamber temperature, or buy the product.
- Probable costThe 1s. per pound is the book's own "probable cost" note, consistent with good beef in the later nineteenth century.
"Hamburg beef" in English cookbooks means the smoked, spiced cured beef of the north German tradition — close kin to the Rauchfleisch family. It belongs with brining, potting and drying because in a household without refrigeration these were not delicacies but the ordinary means of keeping a large cut of beef edible into the following month; the clove and pepper in the rub are as much preservative and masking agents as seasoning. Saltpetre had been used for centuries to fix the red colour of cured meat and, though nobody yet understood the nitrate-to-nitrite chemistry behind it, cooks knew it was essential; domestic recipes of this period call for it in quantities that later regulation would not permit.