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Hamburg Pickle
Take a gallon of water that has been boiled, mix with it two pounds and a half of common salt, a pound and a half of moist sugar, an ounce of saltpetre, and half a pint of vinegar. Simmer for twenty minutes, skim carefully, and, when cold, put in the beef, which should be turned every day, and will be ready for smoking in three weeks. If bay salt be substituted for common salt, the flavour of the meat will be much improved, though the expense will be slightly increased. This pickle will remain good for nearly twelve months if it is boiled again occasionally, with a little more salt, saltpetre, and sugar, to make up for waste. Probable cost of five quarts of pickle, 1s.
This is a curing brine for beef destined for the smokehouse, not a finished dish, and it belongs to a period before anyone measured nitrate in parts per million or kept a curing room at a known temperature. The notes below explain the vocabulary and then why the method itself is unsafe to follow.
- Why it fails: no meat weightThe brine is specified precisely but the beef is not. Nitrate uptake depends on the weight and thickness of the piece relative to the brine, so there is no way to know what dose the finished meat carries. Modern curing recipes fix the ratio of cure to meat by weight for exactly this reason.
- Why it fails: saltpetre out of rangeAn ounce of potassium nitrate in a gallon of brine is a nineteenth-century working strength, not a regulated one. Nitrate converts slowly to nitrite in the meat, and without a controlled cure level the residual nitrite in a three-week immersion cure is unknown. Nitrate and nitrite are the two curing chemicals whose quantities are now legally capped.
- Why it fails: no temperature at any stageThree weeks of immersion, daily turning, then smoking, with no cellar temperature given and no indication of whether the smoke is hot or cold. Cold-smoked, brine-cured beef sits in the range where Clostridium botulinum and Listeria are the recognised hazards, which is precisely the range that modern cure schedules are designed to control.
- Why it fails: a brine kept twelve monthsReboiling the pickle occasionally and topping up "with a little more salt, saltpetre, and sugar, to make up for waste" is guesswork. Each batch of meat dilutes the brine with its own juices and leaves its own bacterial load behind; the strength drifts downward while the organic load climbs. Use a current, tested recipe if you want to cure beef.
- Imperial measuresThe gallon here is the imperial gallon, 160 fl oz or about 4.5 litres, roughly a fifth larger than the US gallon of about 3.8 litres. The half-pint of vinegar is 10 fl oz on the same scale.
- Moist sugarMoist sugar is unrefined or partly refined cane sugar sold damp and sticky, closest today to light brown or demerara sugar. It was the cheap grade, well below loaf sugar in price.
- Bay saltBay salt is coarse solar sea salt, evaporated in shallow pans on the Atlantic coasts of France, Spain and Portugal. It carried trace magnesium and calcium salts, which is the usual explanation offered for the difference in flavour, though the recipe itself says only that the meat "will be much improved".
- The costingOne shilling for five quarts of pickle reflects the book's habit of putting a probable cost against its entries, for a housekeeper working to a weekly budget.
Smoked and pickled beef was one of Hamburg's export staples in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and English cookery books appear to have borrowed the city's name for the sweetened, saltpetre-cured brine associated with it, much as they attached Westphalia to ham. The technique itself is older and generic: sugar to soften the harshness of a heavy salt cure, saltpetre to hold the red colour that plain salt turns grey, vinegar to sharpen and slightly acidify the bath. The recipe's own instruction to reboil and replenish the pickle for nearly a year points to a standing tub kept in the cellar, replenished rather than remade. The claim that bay salt makes better meat than common salt was repeated by English writers long before anyone could say why, and is best read as received trade wisdom rather than a tested result.