Corned Beef
Having a quarter of beef cut into proper size and shape for nice roasting pieces, put it in a barrel of weak brine and let it remain four days. Then make a brine that will bear an egg, to which add: 1/2 pound saltpetre. 3 pounds brown sugar.
Transfer the beef to this barrel, cover closely, and let it remain a week. Put a weight on the meat to insure its being kept under the brine. Beef thus prepared in January will keep well through the month of March, improving with the lapse of time. It is best served cold. A valuable receipt for country housekeepers.--Mrs. Wm. A. S.
This is a nineteenth-century winter curing method that depends on a cold cellar, an open barrel and a great deal of guesswork. The quantities and the chemistry are both outside what can be done safely in a modern kitchen, so the notes below explain the terms and the specific failures rather than offering a revised version.
- Saltpetre in this quantityHalf a pound of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) to an unspecified volume of brine gives no way to know the nitrate concentration in the finished meat. Modern curing works to limits set against the exact weight of the meat -- on the order of 150-200 parts per million for nitrite, with separate limits for nitrate -- whereas here nothing is weighed but the salt additives themselves. Excess nitrate and nitrite are genuinely toxic, and the margin is not wide.
- A brine that will bear an eggThis is the old test for a strong salt solution: a raw egg floats once the brine is dense enough, which corresponds to something on the order of ten per cent salt rather than to saturation. It is a crude gauge, and it tells you nothing about how quickly the brine will penetrate a thick roasting piece cut from a whole quarter.
- No temperature anywhereThe whole method rests on the unstated assumption of a January springhouse or cellar at close to freezing. Cured at modern room temperature, or in a barrel whose centre never chills, the interior of a large piece of beef sits for a week in the range where Clostridium botulinum and other spoilage organisms are active before the salt reaches the middle.
- The weak brine stageFour days in "weak brine" appears to be a preliminary stage before the strong cure. Weak brine does not suppress bacterial growth the way a full-strength cure does, which is one reason the method depended on being carried out in a cold month.
- An open barrelThe barrel -- The recipe says to cover it closely, but a wooden barrel cannot be thoroughly sanitised, and the January-to-March span implies the meat is fished out and eaten over two or three months while the brine is repeatedly disturbed. There is no provision for skimming, changing or testing the brine as it weakens.
- Terms worth knowingA quarter of beef is a whole forequarter or hindquarter, well over a hundred pounds. "Corned" refers to the coarse grains, or corns, of salt used in the cure, not to maize. "It is best served cold" means the cooked meat was cooled and sliced for the table, as corned beef still usually is; the recipe itself only says the quarter is cut into roasting pieces and does not say how it was cooked.
- If you want corned beefUse a current curing recipe that specifies the weight of the meat, a measured quantity of commercial curing salt, and a refrigerator temperature.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions signed with initials, and the closing line here -- "a valuable receipt for country housekeepers" -- marks it as a rural rather than a town receipt. Curing was seasonal work: an animal was killed in the cold months, and the calendar in this entry (January through March) is the whole technology, since the cellar did the refrigeration. Saltpetre was standard in such cures long before anyone understood why it worked; it was valued for keeping the meat red rather than grey, and the nitrate's action in inhibiting bacteria was not identified until the bacteriological work of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The brown sugar softens the harshness of the salt brine.