Collared Beef
Take six pounds of tender round, wipe it carefully. Stand an earthen dish of salt in the oven to heat. When hot, rub it into the meat; rest fifteen minutes and rub again and so on until the meat will imbibe no more. Place it in a jar, stand in a cold, dry cellar for one week, turning it every day. At the end of that time, take it out and rub it well with the following spices well mixed: (47) 1/2 teaspoonful of ground cloves 1/2 teaspoonful of ground allspice 1/4 teaspoonful of ground mace I 1/4 teaspoonful of ground cinnamon ½ teaspoonful of pepper Now put the meat into good shape and bind it with tape. Wrap a piece of cheese cloth around and sew tightly. Put it into a large kettle, cover with boiling water, and stand over the fire to cook, where it cannot possibly boil, for three hours. When done, put under a heavy weight, without removing cloth or tape, and let it remain over night. Serve cold cut in thin slices, garnished with lettuce or cress and Sauce Tartare.
This is a dry-cure preservation recipe rather than a cooked dish, and the cure is the part that cannot be reproduced safely. The notes below explain the vocabulary and why the method fails modern food-safety practice.
- The unmeasured cureThe salt is applied by rubbing until "the meat will imbibe no more," so neither the reader nor the writer knows how much salt the beef has actually taken up. Safe curing depends on a measured weight of salt relative to a measured weight of meat; a rub-to-refusal method gives no way to confirm the surface has reached a concentration that suppresses bacterial growth, and the interior of a six-pound round will be well below whatever the surface holds.
- A week at cellar temperatureThe beef sits in a jar for seven days in a "cold, dry cellar," a space that could be anywhere from just above freezing to 60F depending on the season and the house. A large piece of raw beef held for a week in that range, with no nitrite and no verified salt concentration, is an environment in which spoilage organisms and pathogens can develop, and some bacterial toxins are not destroyed by the later cooking.
- Deliberately sub-boiling cooking"Where it cannot possibly boil" for three hours describes a gentle poach, the standard treatment for a rolled and bound joint that would otherwise squeeze itself dry and split its casing. The instruction is sound in principle, but the recipe gives no temperature at all, and the meat then rests overnight under weight with no location or temperature specified, which may be a second extended hold in the range bacteria favour.
- No nitrite, no colour, no safeguardUnrefined nineteenth-century salt could carry nitrate as an impurity, and a number of collaring recipes of the period called for saltpetre explicitly. This one does not, which means the only preservative at work is an unknown quantity of plain salt. Anyone wanting a cured cold beef today should follow a current recipe with weighed salt, weighed cure and stated refrigeration temperatures.
- What "collared" means hereTo collar is to bone, roll and bind a piece of meat or fish into a tight cylinder so it slices cleanly when cold. The tape is narrow cotton binding tape, not adhesive; the cheesecloth wrap holds the shape through long simmering. The overnight weighting compresses the roll so the slices hold together.
- Spice quantitiesThe spice list as transcribed is garbled; the "I 1/4" before cinnamon is most likely a mangled 1/4. On that reading it totals about a tablespoon of mixed spice for six pounds of beef -- a surface rub for aroma, not a preservative measure.
- Sauce TartareThe accompaniment is a raw mayonnaise-based sauce with capers, gherkins and herbs, standard in the period for cold meat and fish. Use a current mayonnaise recipe or a commercial one if raw egg is a concern.
Collaring belongs to the long English tradition of cold larder cookery: a joint salted, spiced, rolled tight, boiled slowly and pressed, so that it could be sliced thin for days afterwards without further cooking. Collared beef, collared eel and collared pork appear in English household books from the seventeenth century onward, and the technique survived into American cookbooks well past 1900. Its appearance in a book of hot weather dishes is the whole point: before mechanical refrigeration was general in homes, the summer problem was not how to cook but how to avoid cooking, and a pressed, spiced joint made once and eaten cold across a week was the answer. The seven-day cellar cure that reads as reckless now was simply the ordinary arithmetic of a house with an icebox at best, and it is exactly the step that modern practice has replaced with weighed cures and measured refrigeration.