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Salting Meat
Full instructions for salting the various joints are given under the different headings, nevertheless it may be useful to present in a concise form general instructions for the process. The meat should always be brought in as soon as the animal is killed, the kernels, sinews, and pipes should be at once removed, and the blood and moisture wiped away. Then, if liked, it may be allowed to hang for a few days in cool weather to become tender; in hot weather it should be immediately salted. Exceedingly hot and exceedingly cold weather are equally unfavorable for salting meat. A handful of common salt should first be sprinkled over the meat, then it should be allowed to lie on a dish in a cool place for twenty-four hours, and after-wards the brine should be drained from it, the moisture wiped off, and the salting process continued. The great art of salting meat consists in rubbing the salt thoroughly and equally into every part, between the muscles and under the flaps, and into the places from which the kernels were taken; the holes in which the butcher's skewers were pushed ought also to be filled with salt. The meat should be turned every day, and rubbed in the brine which flows from it. It ought to be examined too, and if any mouldiness gathers on any portion of it, that part should be cut off, and the place rubbed with salt. The quantity of salt used must be regulated by the weight of the joint, which should be rubbed plentifully in every part with the salt-mixture, and afterwards well covered with it. The salt should be heated and pounded before being used. Bay salt is more expensive, but gives a better flavour to meat than common salt; saltpetre reddens it, but makes it hard and dry, therefore, as little should be used as possible. A little sugar makes the meat mellow. An ounce of saltpetre will be sufficient for four pounds of sugar and salt, and one pound of sugar may be put with four pounds of salt. Sometimes a minced onion and a spoonful of pounded herbs are mixed with the salt--they help to make the meat savoury. Meat which is salted dry will lose in weight, whereas if it is pickled, that is, if it is immersed completely in liquid brine, it will gain slightly in weight, and keep longer. Pickle which is once made can be used again and again if boiled up occasionally and if fresh salt is put in to make up for loss. The meat should be kept under the pickle, and if necessary a board should be laid upon it to ensure this. The tub, too, in which the meat is cured should be kept covered with a lid or with a blanket folded into two or three thicknesses. Pickle made in the following proportions will be found excellent and very strong. Three pounds of bay salt, two ounces of saltpetre, half a pound of sugar, and two gallons of water. Boil half an hour, skim, and cool. When the pickle is boiled up with additional salt, it should be carefully skimmed each time, as the portion which would make it spoil will rise in scum, and can be removed. A piece of meat can be kept two or three weeks in this pickle in cool weather. When it has been kept in pickle for this time, it should be soaked in water for an hour or two before being cooked or it will be too salt. Pork needs to remain in pickle longer in proportion to its weight than beef, on account of the greater firmness of its flesh.
This is a working method for curing meat at home in a house with a cold larder and a butcher's carcass at the back door. It cannot be followed safely now, and the reasons are worth understanding rather than working around.
- No measured cure, no measured saltThe quantity of dry salt is left to "be regulated by the weight of the joint," and the saltpetre is given only as a ratio to the sugar and salt mixture, not to the meat. Curing safety depends on the weight of nitrate or nitrite per weight of meat, and this text gives no way to calculate it. Modern curing recipes specify cure percentages to the gram for exactly this reason.
- Saltpetre out of rangeSaltpetre is potassium nitrate. Here it appears at an ounce per four pounds of sugar and salt with no upper limit tied to the meat itself, and the author's own advice is simply to use "as little as possible." Uncontrolled nitrate in a cure is a genuine toxicity concern, and nitrate cures are now sold pre-blended and pre-diluted precisely so the dose cannot be guessed at.
- No temperature control anywhereThe method relies on "cool weather" and "a cool place," and even acknowledges that hot weather changes everything. A brine cure over two to three weeks with the meat sitting in the range between roughly 40F and 140F for any length of time is the classic setup for spoilage organisms and, in an anaerobic brine, for Clostridium botulinum. Curing today is done at a measured refrigerated temperature.
- Reused pickleThe text recommends boiling up the old brine, skimming it and topping up the salt, but the salinity after each cycle is unknown, and the brine has been in contact with successive pieces of raw meat. Reused brine of unmeasured strength cannot be relied on to inhibit anything.
- "Cut off the mouldy part"The instruction to trim away mould and rub the spot with salt treats visible spoilage as a surface problem. Mould on curing meat may be harmless surface flora or may indicate that the cure has failed through the joint; there is no way to tell by looking, and the text offers no test.
- Hanging fresh meat firstThe suggestion to hang unrefrigerated meat for a few days to tenderise before salting is dry-ageing under conditions no one now controls. Commercial dry-ageing happens in rooms with regulated temperature, humidity and airflow.
- Vocabulary, for reading"Kernels" are the glands or lymph nodes, "pipes" the large vessels and gullet, and the flaps are the loose belly and flank edges of a joint. "Bay salt" is coarse solar-evaporated sea salt, its name often linked to the Bay of Biscay though the derivation is not settled, and "common salt" the finer refined kind.
- If you want to cure meatUse a current recipe with weights of meat, salt, sugar and commercial curing salt given in grams, and a stated curing temperature.
Before mechanical refrigeration, salt was the household's main defence against the calendar, and a book of this kind still assumed a reader who might take delivery of a whole side of pork or a large joint of beef and be responsible for it herself. Behind such entries lies the older pattern of autumn slaughter, when animals that could not be fed through winter were killed and the meat put down in tubs to last until spring; the warning that "exceedingly hot and exceedingly cold weather are equally unfavorable" is really a note that only the milder seasons gave a larder the steady coolness the process needed. Bay salt, praised here for flavour, was coarse salt made by solar evaporation of seawater; its name is commonly traced in English usage to imports from the Bay of Biscay, though the derivation is not certain, and its mineral impurities are a plausible source of the flavour difference the author noticed. Saltpetre had long been used to redden cured meat, and the observation that it "reddens it, but makes it hard and dry" matches what cooks reported, arrived at by long trial rather than by chemistry. What dates the entry most is not any single ingredient but the confidence that a careful cook could judge quantity and temperature by hand and eye.