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SMOKED BEEF (American)
Put the beef in brine, and turn and rub it every day for ten days. Hang it in a chimney over a sawdust fire or a smothered wood fire, and let it remain for a fortnight. Rub it over in every part with black pepper, and hang it in a cool, dry, airy situation. When once it has been cut keep it covered with thick paper. When it is to be served, pare off the outside skin and shave it into thin chips. If very salt, soak it in boiling water for a few minutes. For half a pound of beef dissolve a small slice of butter or lard in a frying-pan, stir in the beef, pepper it well, and when it begins to fizz dredge a large tea-spoonful of flour upon it. Pour over it a quarter of a pint of boiling stock or water; stir until the sauce thickens, and serve very hot. If preferred, two or three fresh eggs may be broken into the pan with the beef and gravy, and the whole stirred briskly until the eggs are set.
Two recipes sit inside this entry: a home cure-and-cold-smoke for dried beef, and a quick pan dish made from the finished chips. The cure cannot be reproduced safely from these directions, and the reasons are specific.
- The brine is undefinedNo salt concentration, no curing salt, no quantity of anything is given, and the meat is held for ten days at whatever temperature the larder happened to be. A cure of unknown strength at unknown temperature has no reliable margin against spoilage organisms in the interior of a large muscle.
- Cold smoke for a fortnightA sawdust or "smothered" wood fire in a chimney produces smoke well below any cooking temperature. The beef is never heated to a safe internal temperature at any stage before slicing, so the cure alone is doing all the preservation work — and here it is unmeasured.
- Botulism and the missing nitriteCures of this kind commonly included saltpetre in the brine; this text does not mention it at all, let alone in a weighed amount. Salted meat held for weeks at uncontrolled temperature without a measured nitrite is exactly the case modern curing guidance exists to cover, and over-dosing saltpetre carries its own hazard.
- The pepper coating is not a preservativeRubbing the exterior with black pepper discourages flies and masks surface odour. It does nothing for the interior of the joint, and "a cool, dry, airy situation" describes no temperature that can be verified.
- If you want the dishBuy commercially cured and smoked dried beef, made to a controlled formulation, and use a current recipe for the curing if you intend to do it yourself. The frying-pan portion of this entry — chips, butter, flour, stock, optionally eggs stirred through — is ordinary cookery and describes what to do with that product.
- Archaic measures in the second halfA quarter of a pint is 5 fl oz in imperial terms, a scant ⅔ cup. "A large tea-spoonful" of flour is closer to a heaped modern teaspoon than a level one. The recipe gives no yield; half a pound of beef with two or three eggs would stretch to about two servings.
- The soaking step"If very salt, soak it in boiling water for a few minutes" is a desalting rinse, not cooking; commercial dried beef is usually mild enough now that a brief hot-water rinse is all it needs, if that.
Dried, chimney-smoked beef sliced into paper-thin chips and cooked in a pan was a familiar American breakfast dish in the nineteenth century, and the entry is labelled "American" accordingly. The technique belongs to the era when a household might hang its own meat in the kitchen chimney flue, where a banked or smothered fire gave weeks of cool smoke without flame. The same preparation, thickened with flour and milk rather than stock, survives in the United States as creamed chipped beef on toast, later issued in quantity to soldiers and given a well-known unofficial name. The egg variation at the end is closer to a scramble than a sauce, and turns a small quantity of intensely preserved meat into a hot breakfast.