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OX KIDNEY. (See KIDNEY, OX, STEWED.)
OX LIVER, TO CURE AND PRESERVE, FOR GRAVY. Mix half a pound of moist sugar with two table-spoonfuls of salt. Rub the liver well with this mixture, lay it in a shallow pan, and turn it and rub it every day for a week. Make a pickle by boiling a pound of salt and an ounce and a half of saltpetre in a gallon of water for a quarter of an hour. Pour it when cold over the liver, and let the liver remain in the pickle for six weeks, turning it every other day. Take it out, drain it well, and hang it in a cool place. When dry, it is ready for use. The liver should be cured in cold weather. When gravy is required, cut about four ounces of the liver into thin slices. Pour over them a pint of cold water and any flavouring that may be wished, and simmer gently for three-quarters of an hour. Strain and serve. Salt will not be needed. Probable cost of liver, 9d. per pound.
This is a long ambient cure for offal, written for a household with a cold larder and no way to measure anything. It cannot be reproduced safely in a modern kitchen, and the notes below explain where it fails rather than how to adjust it.
- Saltpetre out of any measurable rangeAn ounce and a half of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) boiled into a gallon of water gives no usable indication of how much nitrate ends up in the meat, which depends entirely on how long and how deeply the brine penetrates. Modern curing works with weighed nitrite salts at fixed percentages of meat weight for exactly this reason.
- Six weeks of brining with no temperature givenThe instruction is only "cured in cold weather," which in an unheated Victorian larder might mean anything from just above freezing to the mid-fifties Fahrenheit. Curing brines held above about 40F for weeks are a growth window for spoilage and pathogenic bacteria, and liver, being soft and highly perfused, takes up brine unevenly.
- Ambient hanging of offalLiver has a fine, wet texture and does not dry down the way a whole muscle cut such as a ham or a side of bacon does. Hanging it 'in a cool place' until 'dry', with no control of temperature or humidity and no way to know how much curing salt the meat took up, is an open invitation to spoilage; under-cured meat held for long periods is also the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum, which is why modern cures fix nitrite by weight.
- The final cooking does not fix itForty-five minutes of gentle simmering (the recipe's three-quarters of an hour) will kill vegetative bacteria, and would destroy botulinum toxin, but it will not destroy heat-stable toxins such as staphylococcal enterotoxin, and it does nothing about excess nitrate.
- What to use insteadFor a concentrated meat gravy base, follow a current recipe for a reduced brown stock or a commercial glace de viande. The flavour role this preparation filled is met today by stock reduction and refrigeration.
- Reading the original"Moist sugar" is unrefined light brown sugar, damp enough to clump. The "probable cost of liver, 9d. per pound" is nine old pence, a standard price note running through Cassell's entries and a rough index of how cheap offal was relative to butcher's joints.
Cassell's belongs to a long stretch of British cookery in which the pressing problem was not flavour but keeping. A household that killed or bought a beast had to convert every part of it into something that would last, and liver, among the most perishable of the offal, was a hard case. Curing it into a dry, salty block that could be shaved into water for instant gravy solved two problems at once: it stopped the liver going to waste, and it gave the cook a shelf-stable savoury base at a time when bottled meat extracts, though beginning to appear commercially in the second half of the nineteenth century, were still an expense. The technique itself, a dry sugar-and-salt rub followed by a boiled saltpetre brine and an air-dry, is the standard bacon and ham method of the period applied to an organ meat it was never really suited to. Saltpetre was the universal curing agent of the age, valued for keeping meat red and for a preservative action nobody yet understood chemically; the nitrite chemistry that explains what it actually does was not established until around the turn of the twentieth century, from work begun in the 1890s.