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Hunter's Beef, or Spiced Round
To a round of beef weighing twenty-four pounds, take. 3 ounces saltpetre. 3 ounces coarsest sugar. 1 ounce cloves. 1 nutmeg. 1/2 ounce allspice. 3 handfuls salt.
Beat all into the finest powder; allow the beef to hang three or four days; remove the bone, then rub the spices well into it, continuing to do so every two or three days, for two or three weeks.
When to be dressed, dip it in cold water, to take off the loose spices, bind it up tightly and put into a pan with a teacupful water at the bottom. Sprinkle the top of the meat with suet, cover it over with a thick batter, and brown paper over it. Bake five hours.--Mrs. T. C.
This is a dry-cure recipe, not a roast with a spice rub, and the curing half of it falls outside anything that can be done safely in a modern kitchen. The problems are specific and they are not fixable by adjusting the oven.
- The saltpetre is far out of rangeThree ounces of saltpetre (potassium nitrate, about 85 g) to twenty-four pounds of beef works out to roughly 7,800 parts per million of potassium nitrate in the cure mixture, far above modern ingoing limits for nitrate and nitrite, even allowing that this is a surface rub and that some of it is washed off before baking. The limits exist because nitrite is acutely toxic in quantity. No reduction of this figure is offered here; a current, tested cure formula should be used instead.
- Three weeks at room temperatureThree weeks at an unstated temperature -- The meat hangs three or four days, then sits under a rubbed-on spice mixture for two or three weeks, with no temperature given anywhere. A dry cure of that length only works within a narrow cold range, and the recipe assumes cold-larder conditions it never states. Attempted at modern room temperature it invites spoilage organisms in the deep muscle, well ahead of any cure penetrating.
- "Three handfuls salt" is not a measurementSalt is the actual preservative here, and the recipe never quantifies it. A cure needs the salt weighed as a percentage of the meat, because the whole scheme depends on the salt reaching the centre of a very thick piece of beef before bacteria do. A handful cannot be checked, scaled, or repeated.
- The joint is too thick for the method to be verifiedA twenty-four-pound round is a solid mass many inches thick. There is no way to confirm that cure has reached the middle, and the surface rubbing every two or three days does nothing for the interior. Commercial and modern home practice for pieces this size uses pumped brine or injection precisely because surface rubbing does not penetrate reliably.
- The bake will not correct the cureFive hours in a covered pan with a cup of water and a batter crust is a long, gentle braise, which is the right treatment for a cured round. It is not a rescue. Excess nitrate and nitrite are not destroyed by heat, and baking cannot undo spoilage that has already taken place during the weeks of curing.
- If you want the dishSpiced beef is still made commercially and by butchers, and there are modern recipes that specify cure weights, a refrigerated cure at 36-40F, and a measured curing salt. Use one of those rather than this.
Hunter's beef, or spiced round, is an English country-house preparation that crossed to the American South largely intact: a whole round of beef dry-cured with saltpetre, sugar and warm spices, then baked slowly under a flour-and-water crust that served as a disposable sealing jacket, with brown paper over it to keep the crust from scorching. The saltpetre did two jobs, preserving the meat and fixing its colour to the bright pink that distinguished a spiced round from a plain roast. In Housekeeping in Old Virginia (published 1878 or 1879, the date is given variously), a book assembled from the contributed receipts of some 250 Virginia housewives and credited here to "Mrs. T. C.", the receipt itself says nothing of the occasion, though a joint of this size is traditionally associated with the Christmas and New Year table, where a cured round could be set out cold, sliced thin, and returned to for a week or more of visitors. The name is generally traced to the idea of a keeping joint fit to carry out on a hunt or serve to a returning hunting party, though the association is traditional rather than documented, and by the nineteenth century "hunter's beef" and "spiced beef" were used more or less interchangeably in English and American cookbooks.