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HUNTER'S BEEF (another way)
Take as lean a piece as can be procured of the flank of beef. The thin end is the best. Take out the bones, and rub the meat well every day for a fortnight with a mixture made of one pound of salt, one ounce of saltpetre, a quarter of a pound of moist sugar, one ounce of pounded allspice, one ounce of pounded cloves, and one grated nutmeg. At the end of the time roll it as closely and firmly as possible, and bind it securely with skewers and tape. Just cover it with water, and boil or bake it for five or six hours. Do not loosen the tapes, etc., until the meat is quite cold. Probable cost, 7 1/2d. per pound.
This is a two-week dry cure followed by a long boil, and it is the curing stage that puts it out of reach. The notes below explain the terms and then why the method cannot be followed as printed.
- Saltpetre, unmeasured against the meatAn ounce of potassium nitrate is specified for a rub, but the weight of beef is never given — "as lean a piece as can be procured of the flank" could be four pounds or twelve. Nitrate curing is safe only when the curing salt is weighed as a percentage of the meat, and this recipe gives no way to do that. Nitrate and nitrite levels in food are now legally capped precisely because the margin between preserving and poisoning is narrow.
- Fourteen days at no stated temperatureThe meat sits in a rub for a fortnight, rubbed daily, with no instruction to refrigerate, and no temperature is given anywhere. A Victorian cold larder was uncontrolled and could sit well above modern fridge temperature. Curing beef that way, without a cure weighed against the meat, leaves room for spoilage organisms and, in the wrong conditions, for the bacteria that cause botulism. If you want spiced pressed beef, use a current recipe with weighed cure and a stated fridge temperature.
- Rolled and bound before cookingRolling the flank moves the surface, and anything on it, into the centre of a thick cylinder, where heat arrives last. That geometry is exactly why modern rolled-meat recipes insist on verified internal temperature rather than a span of hours.
- Flank of beefThe cut called flank here is the thin belly muscle, sold today as flank or thin flank. The book asks for as lean a piece as can be found, and prefers the thin end, though it does not say which end of the cut that is.
- Moist sugarMoist sugar is unrefined or partly refined soft brown sugar, damp and slightly sticky — what would now be sold as light or dark muscovado. It was cheaper than loaf sugar and standard in curing mixtures.
- "Boil or bake it for five or six hours"Covered with water and given five or six hours, the collagen in flank breaks down completely and the roll slices cleanly when cold. The instruction to leave the tapes on until the meat is quite cold is the one sound piece of technique here: the roll sets under its own binding and holds its shape.
- The price note7½d. per pound is pre-decimal British currency, roughly three modern pence, and reflects the 1870s–90s market in which flank was among the cheapest beef on the block. Cassell's quoted costs so readers could judge a dish against the household budget.
Hunter's beef belongs to a family of English spiced, salted and pressed beefs that were eaten cold over a period of weeks — sliced thin for breakfast, supper trays and travelling baskets — and the name is usually associated with that portable, keepable role, though the connection is traditional rather than documented. The cure is the giveaway of its age: salt with saltpetre for colour and keeping, sugar to soften the harshness of the salt, and the same trio of allspice, cloves and nutmeg that ran through British spiced beef, mincemeat and pickling recipes from the seventeenth century onward. This is headed "another way", so the book carries more than one method for it. The price per pound reflects the thrift of the dish: a cheap, tough belly cut turned by two weeks of salt and six hours of gentle heat into something sliceable and keepable. Domestic refrigeration and commercial cured meats removed the need, and modern controls on nitrate curing removed the casualness with which recipes like this handled it.