Home › Vinegar, Pickles, and Pickling › Vinegar, Pickles, and Pickling: Beef
Vinegar, Pickles, and Pickling: Beef
Potted Beef.-Cut 3 pounds of lean beef into pieces weighing about of a pound each and sprinkle over them a mixture of pound of table salt and ounce of powdered saltpeter.
Let the beef lie in this pickle 2 or 3 days, turning the pieces occasionally.
Remove the meat from the pickle, place it in a stone jar or pan covered, if convenient, with a little beef gravy or just enough cold water to prevent burning. Put an earthenware plate over it and bake in a slow oven for about 4 hours, or until the meat is very tender and falls away from the bones. Remove the meat from the gravy. Shred or chop it fine, moisten it with the gravy and pound it in a marble mortar or otherwise with a little fresh butter to a very fine paste. Season to taste with pepper, allspice, nutmeg, mace, , or cloves. Or add, if desired, Cayenne, Tabasco, curry powder, or anchovies, mustard, or other condiment, according to taste. Press tightly in small crocks or jars, or in fruit jars.
When cold, pour over the tops of the jars melted lard or butter to a thickness of inch, and cover with a layer of cotton batting tied tightly on any cover that will exclude the air.
Pressed Beef. - Or select about 5 pounds of cheap beef that would otherwise be too tough to cook, including about of a pound of beef fat. Cover with a mixture of pound of salt and ounce of saltpeter and let stand for a couple of days turning it now and then, and rubbing brine into it. Rinse in clear water and boil until it falls from the bones, taking care that when boiled down, the gravy will be as thick as possible.
Remove the beef from the gravy with a skimmer and chop fine. Allow the gravy to cool. Take off the cake of fat, and dissolve ounce of gelatin in the gravy with gentle heat. Spice to taste. Stir in the chopped meat.
Pack in jars under a weight and pour melted lard or butter over the top to the depth of ¼ inch or more. If carefully preserved from the air, this will keep for a considerable time at ordinary temperatures, and may be sliced and eaten cold without further cooking.
Two related keeping-meats from the pickling chapter: both cure beef in salt and saltpeter, cook it down, and seal it under fat for storage at room temperature. That last step is the reason neither can be followed today.
- Sealing under lard is the fatal stepCooked, low-acid meat packed into a jar and capped with fat is an oxygen-free environment held at room temperature, which is precisely what Clostridium botulinum requires to grow and produce toxin. The spores survive the oven and the boiling pot; the fat seal protects them. Nothing in the method brings the sealed jar to a temperature that would destroy them.
- The saltpeter is unmeasurable hereSaltpeter is potassium nitrate, the ancestor of today's curing salts. Modern curing works to strictly limited nitrite/nitrate levels per pound of meat, and the quantities given in this text cannot be read with confidence, so there is no way to judge whether the cure falls inside or far outside the permitted range. Nitrate curing is not something to estimate.
- "Eaten cold without further cooking"The pressed beef is explicitly intended to be sliced from a jar that has sat at ordinary temperatures and eaten as it is. That instruction is the period's confidence in a fat seal, and it is not a confidence current food science shares. If you want potted or pressed beef, use a current recipe that keeps the product refrigerated and treats it as a fresh food with a few days' life.
- Gelatin then and nowThe recipe specifies only 'gelatin', which in this period could mean sheets or shreds needing soaking as well as granulated forms; modern powdered gelatin is measured in envelopes of about a quarter ounce. Whatever the form, it sets the loaf but contributes nothing preservative, which is worth knowing before trusting the keeping claim.
- Vessels and equipmentA "stone jar" is a glazed stoneware crock, and the earthenware plate laid over the meat is simply a lid to trap steam. The marble mortar was the standard tool for reducing cooked meat to paste; a food processor does the same work in seconds, which is the one genuinely obsolete piece of technique here.
- Cotton battingA layer of cotton wool tied over the crock is not an airtight closure, whatever the instruction to 'exclude the air' intends by it.
- An internal contradictionBoth recipes call for lean or cheap beef, yet neither lists a bone-in cut, and both then describe cooking until the meat 'falls away from the bones'. However the wording arose, it signals long, slow cooking of connective tissue rather than any particular cut.
Potting was the standard English answer to a glut of meat before mechanical refrigeration: cook it to shreds, pound it with butter and spice, and seal the surface with clarified fat, the same principle behind French confit and rillettes. Household manuals carried these formulas well into the twentieth century, and this one sits in a chapter on vinegar and pickling because salt, saltpeter and airtight sealing were all filed under the single heading of preservation. What the entry really records is the period's faith in the fat seal — visible, easy to check, and reassuringly solid. The recipes also show the domestic economy of the era plainly: five pounds of beef "too tough to cook" turned into something sliceable and genteel.