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Pickle--One That Will Keep Two Years or More
Put three gallons of cold spring water into a large pan or copper, and with it two pounds of bay salt, six pounds of common salt, two pounds of moist sugar, and three ounces of saltpetre. Let the pickle boil for half an hour, and skim carefully, then pour it into a deep earthen pan with a closely-fitting lid. When cold, it is ready for the meat. A small ham may lie in this pickle two weeks, a large one three weeks, a tongue ten or twelve days, and beef, according to its size and the degree of saltness desired. When the pickle has been used two or three times boil it up and skim carefully: this operation should be occasionally repeated. The pickle will require to be boiled oftener in hot weather than in cold. Every time it is boiled add to it two pounds of common salt, two pints of water, two ounces of sugar, and half an ounce of saltpetre.
This is a reusable curing brine of the sort kept in a cool larder or cellar year after year. It cannot be reproduced safely in a modern kitchen, and the reasons are worth spelling out.
- Saltpetre with no ratio to the meatThree ounces of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) is dissolved into the bath, not measured against the weight of what is cured. Because meat takes up nitrate unevenly and the brine is topped up indefinitely, there is no way to know what dose any given ham or tongue actually receives. Modern curing is deliberately calculated per pound of meat for exactly this reason.
- No temperature is given anywhereA large ham sits in this pickle for three weeks. Whether that is safe depends on the brine staying cold throughout, and the recipe never mentions temperature at all; it presumably assumed a cool larder in an unheated house. The instruction to boil the pickle oftener "in hot weather" than in cold suggests the brine was expected to go off in warmth.
- The brine is reused for yearsEach cycle adds meat juices, blood and protein to the liquid. A half-hour boil with skimming will kill vegetative bacteria but not spores, and although the recipe prescribes fixed additions of salt, water, sugar and saltpetre every time it is boiled, those additions take no account of what the meat has drawn out, so the working strength of the pickle cannot be known. A cure whose strength cannot be measured is not a cure you can rely on.
- Nitrate, not nitriteSaltpetre works only after bacteria in the brine slowly reduce it to nitrite. That conversion depends on a mature, microbially active brine — the very thing repeated boiling disrupts. The result is unpredictable protection against Clostridium botulinum in a large, slowly penetrated cut like a ham.
- If you want to cure at homeUse a current recipe with weighed curing salt, a stated brine strength, a stated refrigeration temperature and a time based on the thickness of the meat. Nothing here should be adapted.
- Reading the ingredientsFor the historical record: bay salt is coarse sun-evaporated sea salt, moist sugar is unrefined soft brown sugar, and "copper" means the large fixed boiling vessel built into a Victorian scullery, not a copper pan.
In nineteenth-century usage a "pickle" was commonly the liquid rather than the thing pickled — a standing brine kept in a lidded earthenware crock in the larder, into which hams, ox tongues and joints of beef went as the household needed them. It belongs with the general principles of cookery rather than with any single dish because it was infrastructure: a well-run kitchen was expected to have one going. The periodic boiling, skimming and replenishing described here is the same logic as a perpetual stockpot, and it worked well enough in a cold, unheated back kitchen, before the practice was displaced by measured cures and commercial bacon. Saltpetre had by then been used in meat preservation for centuries; the chemistry behind it — nitrate reduced to nitrite by bacteria — is generally said not to have been understood until around the end of the nineteenth century, well after recipes like this one had settled into their final form.