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Pickle for Corning Meat
Four pounds coarse salt, 8 quarts water, 2 pounds brown sugar, 1 ounce saltpetre. Stir till dissolved, boil and skim. Let cool before pouring over meat.
Turn the meat every day for a week.
During the summer this may be boiled with an addition of a cup of salt and sugar. A plate or flat stone should be used to keep the meat beneath the pickle.
Apply the above recipe to each 100 pounds. of meat. Repeat the application 3 times for hams and shoulders, and twice for bacon, rubbing in well. The meat should be cured in 3 weeks.
This is a nitrate brine cure written for a farm cellar and a winter slaughter, and it belongs to a food-safety world that no longer exists. The notes below explain what the numbers mean and why the method cannot be followed as printed.
- The saltpetre is the problemSaltpetre is potassium nitrate, a curing salt that must be converted by bacteria into nitrite before it inhibits Clostridium botulinum. One ounce per batch of brine for 100 pounds of meat, with the application repeated two or three times, is hard to distribute evenly; the concentration reaching any given piece is unknown. Modern curing uses pre-blended nitrite salts precisely because guessing at nitrate levels can produce both under-cured meat and over-doses.
- No temperature anywhereCuring brines must be held cold, in the range of 36-40F, for the entire cure. The recipe gives none, and its aside about boiling the pickle in summer suggests the meat was expected to sit at whatever temperature the cellar happened to be. Three weeks of raw pork in salt water at ambient temperature is a spoilage risk, not a reliable cure.
- The brine will not cover the meatEight quarts of pickle to 100 pounds of meat is roughly two gallons for the better part of a hog. Submersion curing needs enough liquid to cover completely, and the instruction about a plate or flat stone shows the writer knew meat floats. The proportions here only make sense if the brine was topped up or the meat cured in small batches, and the recipe never says which.
- "Repeat the application" is not a measurementRubbing the mix in three times for hams and twice for bacon is a fixed count regardless of the size or thickness of the piece, and the stated three weeks is the only timing given. Safe curing today is done by weight: a fixed percentage of salt and cure per pound of meat, with a fixed time per inch of thickness.
- Old units, for readingCoarse salt means a flaked or rock salt sold by weight, not by volume, and it is not interchangeable cup-for-cup with modern table salt. Eight quarts is two gallons -- about 7.6 litres if US quarts are meant, about 9 litres if imperial; the recipe does not say which.
- If you want corned beefUse a current curing recipe with weighed quantities of curing salt, a stated brine strength and refrigerated holding temperatures. The principle in this entry is sound; the execution is a century out of date.
Corning has nothing to do with maize: the "corns" are the coarse grains of salt that were rubbed into or dissolved around meat to preserve it, a usage that goes back to Old English corn for any small hard particle. Brines of this type were the backbone of the North American farm year, mixed in autumn when the hog was killed and drawn on through the winter, and the brown sugar in the formula softens the harshness of the salt, though it is sometimes also said to feed the bacteria that convert saltpetre into the nitrite that actually cures. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company as a promotional volume for its flour, and its readership was substantially rural Canadian; a book otherwise full of cakes and pastry nonetheless stops to explain how to put down a hundred pounds of pork. Instructions like these dropped out of household cookbooks over the following decades as refrigeration, commercial packing and eventually regulation of nitrate use moved curing out of the farmhouse cellar.