Home › The Principles of Cookery › Welsh Beef
Welsh Beef
A round of beef prepared in this way will keep for two months in cold weather, and constitute a good standing dish. If the quantity for which the recipe is written is too large, a small round weighing eighteen or twenty pounds may be taken, or a part of a round of the weight that is required, and cooked in the same way. Half a round might lie in the salt ten days or a fortnight, instead of three weeks. Take a round of beef weighing from twenty-five to thirty pounds, rub two ounces of saltpetre into it, and let it lie for an hour. Rub it well with a powder made of one pound of common salt, one ounce of white pepper, one ounce of moist sugar, one nutmeg, grated, a quarter of an ounce of pounded mace, and a quarter of an ounce of pounded cloves. Lay the meat in a pickling-pan, rub the ingredients into it, and turn and rub them every day for three weeks. Wash the meat in cold water, and let it dry. Skewer it into a round form, and bind with tape. Put it into an earthen pan with plenty of chopped suet under and over it, pour a cupful of water or stock round it, cover the vessel with a coarse paste of flour and water, and bake the beef in a moderate oven till tender. Pour off the gravy, and let the beef stand till cold. This gravy will, when strained, form an excellent foundation for soup. The beef will have a much better appearance if it is pressed under a heavy weight for some hours after being taken from the oven, and brushed over twice with liquid glaze. The glaze may be made of any strong, clear gravy boiled quickly until it thickens when dropped from the spoon; or a small quantity may be bought of the grocer, dissolved in the usual way, and used. Time to bake the beef, six to eight hours, or a quarter of an hour to the pound. Probable cost, beef, 10d. or 11d. per pound.
This is a dry-cure, not a roast with seasoning: the meat sits in salt and saltpetre for three weeks before it ever goes near the oven, and that curing stage is where the recipe parts company with modern practice. The notes below are for reading the page, not for working from it.
- Why it cannot be made as writtenA 25-30 lb round is rubbed with 2 oz of saltpetre and then held in the pickling-pan for three weeks at no stated temperature at all (the recipe's only mention of "cold weather" concerns keeping the finished joint). Nitrate curing depends on a known concentration held at a known temperature; neither is specified here, and a joint that thick cures from the outside in, so the interior can sit for days in the range where Clostridium botulinum and other pathogens are comfortable. Use a current, tested curing recipe if you want spiced cold beef.
- The saltpetre figureTwo ounces of potassium nitrate to roughly 12 kg of meat works out far above the nitrate levels permitted in commercial or home curing today, and the rub is applied by hand rather than distributed through a measured brine, so the dose is uneven by design.
- The keeping claim"Will keep for two months in cold weather" assumes an unheated stone larder in a British winter, a thing most readers no longer have. It is a statement about the house as much as about the beef.
- A round of beefThe whole round is the top of the hind leg, sold today broken into topside, silverside and thick flank. A butcher can supply a single 18-20 lb piece to order, but nothing at that weight is a retail cut now.
- Moist sugarUnrefined soft brown sugar, still damp from the refining process. Light muscovado is the nearest current equivalent; ordinary white sugar was the dearer, drier article.
- Moderate oven, and the pasteThe book gives no temperatures; "moderate" is a medium oven, conventionally glossed today as somewhere around 325-350F, but that is a modern approximation rather than anything stated here. The "coarse paste of flour and water" is not eaten -- it is a flour-and-water lid, sealed over the earthenware pan to trap steam.
- Liquid glazeMeat glaze, or glace de viande: strong stock reduced until it coats a spoon and sets to a sticky lacquer. That a little "may be bought of the grocer" and "dissolved in the usual way" indicates a ready-made concentrated glaze or meat extract was a shop article by this date.
- Cost10d. or 11d. a pound puts a 30 lb round at something over a guinea -- a serious outlay, which is why the recipe is framed as a standing dish to be sliced from for weeks.
Spiced dry-cured beef of this kind went by several regional names in Victorian cookery books -- "hunting beef," "Dutch beef," "Welsh beef" -- and the distinguishing marks are the sweet spices (nutmeg, mace, cloves) rubbed in with the salt and the long slow bake under suet rather than a boil. The purpose was cold-larder economy: a single joint, cured and baked once, that could be pressed, glazed and carved thin for breakfasts, suppers and shooting lunches over many weeks, with the strained baking gravy going straight into the soup pot. It demonstrates the whole sequence a large household was expected to command -- curing, larding with suet, sealing under a flour paste, pressing under weight, and finishing with glaze -- rather than anything anyone was likely to attempt in a small kitchen. The name is generally taken to point to Welsh cattle, long prized in the English market and driven east on the hoof to be fattened and slaughtered near the cities, though the label was applied loosely by the time this book appeared.