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Pickle for Beef, Pork, and Tongues
Put two gallons of cold water into a large stewpan with three pounds of bay salt, half a pound of good moist sugar, and two ounces of saltpetre. Bring it to a boil, skim carefully, and let it boil for twenty minutes. Turn it into a deep pan, and when it is quite cold it is ready for the meat. Meat may be kept in this pickle for three weeks in mild weather, though it may be used in five or six days. The liquid in which it is boiled will not be found too salt to use for soup. The pickle may be used repeatedly. Add one pound of common salt, or half a pound of bay salt, and a pint of water every time the pickle is boiled.
This is a curing brine rather than a dish, and it belongs to a period before refrigeration, before nitrite was understood, and before anyone measured what a piece of meat actually absorbs. The terms are worth knowing; the method is not one to reproduce.
- Why this cannot be followed todayCuring is the one branch of home cookery where the numbers are the safety margin. This formula gives no temperature, no meat weight, and no way to know how much curing salt any given joint takes up; the timings it does give (five or six days, up to three weeks) are tied to nothing more precise than "mild weather". Use a current, tested curing recipe with stated quantities and temperatures instead.
- The saltpetreTwo ounces of potassium nitrate in two gallons of water is far outside what modern curing practice permits, and nitrate uptake by the meat is entirely uncontrolled here. Contemporary cures use precisely weighted nitrite mixes, dyed pink specifically so they cannot be confused with table salt and overdosed.
- "Mild weather" is not a temperatureThree weeks of immersion at an unspecified ambient temperature is the central problem. Cold curing depends on holding the meat below about 40F throughout; a Victorian larder in mild weather was nowhere near reliably that cold, and the brine itself becomes a growth medium as meat juices dilute it.
- Reusing the pickleThe instruction to top the brine up and use it repeatedly means every joint inoculates the next. Boiling between uses kills vegetative bacteria but does nothing about the accumulating protein load or about spore-formers, and the salt strength after topping up is guesswork.
- Bay saltCoarse sea salt produced by solar evaporation in salt pans, greyer and less refined than table salt. It was commonly said to be preferred for curing because its coarse crystals acted slowly. Modern coarse sea salt is the nearest thing, though the mineral content differs.
- Moist sugarUnrefined or partly refined soft brown sugar of the period, damper and darker than today's light brown. It rounded the harshness of the salt.
- The soup remarkThe note that the boiling liquor "will not be found too salt to use for soup" is a reassurance that the meat would not come out so salty as to make its cooking liquor unusable.
A standing pickle tub was infrastructure in a Victorian household, not a dish: beef for boiling, pork for the flitch, and ox tongues all went through the same brine, and the tub was replenished rather than emptied. Saltpetre had been used in curing for centuries before its chemistry was understood, prized because it fixed the meat's colour to a bright pink instead of the drab grey that salt alone produces; the nitrate is reduced to nitrite by bacteria in the brine, which is what does the preserving and colouring, though this was not worked out until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bay salt, imported in bulk from the Atlantic and Mediterranean salt pans, was the curer's default because its coarse crystals drew moisture out slowly and evenly.