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Pressed Beef
Take any number of pounds of the brisket of beef, as lean as can be obtained, and nicely salted. The beef may be bought salted of the butcher, or it may be salted at home. To do this, dissolve a quarter of an ounce of saltpetre in a little water, and mix with it two pounds of common salt and half a pound of moist sugar. Rub this pickle into the meat every morning for eight days, and turn it over each day. Take it from the pan, drain, and bone it. The butcher will do this if desired. Put it into a saucepan with as much lukewarm water as will quite cover it, and put with it an onion stuck with two cloves, a large carrot, and a bay-leaf. Let the water boil up once, skim carefully, then draw the saucepan quite to the side of the fire, and simmer the meat as gently as possible till it is done enough. Lift the saucepan quite away from the fire, and leave the meat in the liquor for half an hour. Take it out carefully, drain it, place it between two flat dishes, and put a heavy weight on the top. Let it remain until the next day. Take off the weight, and glaze the beef. The easiest way of doing this is to buy a quarter of a pound of glaze of the grocer. This is sold in skins like sausages, and may be bought for 8d. or 9d. Peel the skin from an inch of this glaze, and put it into a jar with a table-spoonful of cold water. Place the jar in a saucepan with about two inches of boiling water, and let it steam until the glaze is dissolved. The water in the saucepan must not be allowed to flow over into the jar. Take an ordinary gum brush which has been soaked in hot water to make it soft, and with it cover the surface of the meat entirely with the dissolved glaze. It ought to be laid lightly on rather than brushed on, so as not to show the marks of the brush. When one coating of glaze is quite stiff, give the beef a second one, and, if liked, a third. Place the joint on a dish, garnish with parsley, and it is ready for serving. Time to simmer, half an hour per pound from the time the water boils after the meat is put in. Probable cost, 9d. or 10d. per pound.
This is two recipes stacked on one another: a home dry-cure and a long gentle simmer with a glazed finish. The cure is the problem, and it is not a fixable one at this level of detail.
- The cure has no meat weight"Any number of pounds of the brisket" is rubbed with a fixed quantity of saltpetre, salt and sugar. Curing salts are dosed by the weight of the meat, so the same quarter-ounce of saltpetre could be a reasonable dose on a large joint and a serious overdose on a small one. There is no way to read a safe concentration out of the text.
- Saltpetre is not modern cureSaltpetre is potassium nitrate. Modern curing uses precisely blended nitrite or nitrate mixes at legally limited levels, because nitrate loading is the part of curing that carries real toxicity risk, and it is exactly the part this recipe leaves open.
- No temperature for eight days of curingRubbing and turning the joint every morning for eight days assumes the cold larder the book took for granted. Held at modern room temperature, a large joint would sit for over a week at temperatures where spoilage organisms can outpace the slow inward diffusion of salt. Without a stated holding temperature the cure cannot be judged.
- Cured meat and Clostridium botulinumNitrate and nitrite are used in cured meat partly to suppress C. botulinum in the anaerobic interior of a dense joint. Here the joint is later simmered, which reduces that particular risk, but an unmeasured cure held at an unstated temperature still leaves nothing to check. If you want pressed beef, use a current recipe with cure weights, meat weights and temperatures given as numbers.
- Buying it salted does not rescue the methodCassell's offers the shortcut of buying the beef already salted, and the simmering, weighting and glazing that follow are ordinary cookery. But the recipe as printed is the whole sequence, and the home-cure half is the half that fails.
- What the glaze actually isCommercial "glaze" sold in sausage skins was reduced meat stock set hard with its own gelatine, dissolved over water and painted on cold meat. The skin-wrapped form has gone, but reduced meat glaze is still sold; a heavily reduced stock or a gelatine-set aspic does the same job.
- Prices and pence"8d. or 9d." is eight or nine old pence, and the "probable cost" of 9d. to 10d. per pound is the book's estimate for the finished dish rather than a butcher's price for brisket. Such costings are a useful index of what a dish was for socially, not a guide to shopping.
Pressed beef belonged to the cold larder of a Victorian household, where a boned, cured, weighted joint could be sliced thin for breakfast, supper or luncheon over several days without further cooking. Brisket was chosen because it is cheap, coarse-grained and full of connective tissue: long slow simmering turns that tissue to gelatine, and pressing under a weight overnight sets the whole joint into a firm block that carves cleanly. Saltpetre appears here for the reason it appears in many nineteenth-century cured-meat recipes, to fix the pink colour and check spoilage, and the quantity is given precisely as a quarter of an ounce. The bought glaze is a small piece of period detail worth noticing: Cassell's assumes a grocer selling reduced meat stock by the skin, for kitchens that wanted the professional look of a glazed cold joint without keeping a stockpot going for it.