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Brine for Beef
9 quarts salt. 18 gallons water. 2 pounds brown sugar. 1/2 pound saltpetre. Boil and skim well. Let the beef get thoroughly cold, and let as much as possible of the blood be drained out before putting it in the brine. It may sometimes be necessary, in the course of a few months, that the brine be boiled and skimmed a second time.
This quantity will suffice for about half of an ordinary sized beef.--Mrs. A. C.
This is a nineteenth-century cellar cure, written for a household that killed its own beef in cold weather and kept the barrel in an unheated space. Several things about it fall outside what current food-safety practice allows, and the reasons are worth understanding even if the brine is never mixed.
- The saltpetre is the main problemHalf a pound of potassium nitrate in eighteen gallons of brine works out to roughly 3,000 parts per million in the liquid, and meat sitting in it for months takes up nitrate continuously. Modern curing regulations cap added nitrite and nitrate at a few hundred parts per million of the finished meat, with the cure weighed to the gram against the weight of the meat, not the weight of the water.
- No temperature is specified anywhereEverything about whether this cure succeeds or spoils depends on the brine staying near freezing for the whole period. The recipe says nothing about it; it was written for a cold cellar in a Virginia winter. Held at even cool room temperature, a barrel of meat in weak-topped brine is a growth medium.
- "Boil and skim a second time" is a spoilage signalBrine that needs reboiling has generally gone ropy or begun to ferment, and the scum is protein and bacterial sludge. Reboiling and returning the meat to it was the period remedy; it is not one now, and the instruction shows that these barrels were expected to go wrong sometimes.
- Clostridium botulinum is the specific riskClostridium botulinum is worth keeping in mind -- Salt-cured meat held anaerobically for months at uncontrolled temperature is a setting in which botulinum toxin can form. A brine of around twelve percent salt is itself inhibitory, but salt penetrates a two-hundred-pound barrel of meat slowly and unevenly, and the nitrate here is neither measured against the meat nor reliably converted to nitrite.
- The salt strength is actually reasonableNine quarts of coarse salt is roughly twenty pounds against about a hundred and fifty pounds of water — a strong brine in the region of twelve percent. The salt is not the flaw; the nitrate, the scale and the missing temperatures are.
- Scale and vesselEighteen gallons of brine and half a beef means a barrel of well over two hundred pounds. No domestic refrigerator will hold it, and there is no sensible way to reduce the recipe proportionally, since the nitrate dosing was never tied to meat weight in the first place.
- If you want corned beefUse a current recipe that weighs curing salt against the weight of the meat, specifies refrigeration at or below 40F, and gives a fixed number of days.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named and initialled Virginia housewives, was published at the tail end of the era when a household of any size butchered its own beef in late autumn and expected the results to last until spring. Brine barrels like this one are the ancestor of corned beef " "corned" from the coarse corns of salt rubbed into the meat " and the sugar and saltpetre serve distinct purposes: the sugar softens the harshness of the salt, while the saltpetre fixes the pink colour and, though nobody at the time knew the mechanism, held off spoilage organisms by breaking down to nitrite. Saltpetre was a common grocery item throughout the nineteenth century, sold for curing, fireworks and medicine alike, and this recipe measures it by the handful or half-pound with no reference to the weight of the meat, though many period cures are dosed per hundred pounds of beef. That the contributor expects the brine may need reboiling "in the course of a few months" tells you plainly how marginal the whole business was.