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Hunter's Round, or Spiced Beef
To a round of beef that weighs twenty-five pounds, take the following: 3 ounces saltpetre. 1 ounce cloves. 1 ounce nutmeg. 1 ounce allspice. 1 pint salt.
Let the round of beef hang in a cool, dry place twenty-four hours. Take out the bone, and fill the space with suet and spices mixed. Rub the above ingredients all over the round; put in a wooden box or tub, turn it over occasionally and rub a small quantity of salt on it. Let it remain three weeks. Then make a stiff paste of flour and water, cover the round with it and set in the oven. Bake three hours slowly. Remove the paste when cold, and trim neatly the rough outside, and slice horizontally. Served only when cold.--Mrs.
This is a three-week ambient cure carried out with an unmeasured amount of curing salt and no temperature control at any stage. The quantities and the method both fall outside anything now considered safe, and the notes below explain where.
- The saltpetre is far out of rangeThree ounces of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) worked into twenty-five pounds of beef is roughly 7,000-8,000 parts per million nitrate. Modern legal limits for added nitrate in cured meat are lower than this by an order of magnitude or more, and nitrate/nitrite curing salts are sold pre-diluted precisely because weighing pure saltpetre by eye is how people poison themselves. There is also no way to know how evenly a surface rub distributes into a twenty-five pound muscle.
- Three weeks at room temperatureThree weeks at an unspecified temperature -- The recipe gives "a cool, dry place" only for the initial twenty-four hour hang, and says nothing at all about where the tub sits for the three weeks that follow. A boned, stuffed round held for three weeks in a wooden tub at unknown temperature is a setting for Clostridium botulinum and for deep-tissue spoilage that the salt on the outside will not reach.
- Boning creates an interior the cure cannot reachRemoving the bone and packing the cavity with suet and spice puts unsalted fat and unsterilised dry spice in the anaerobic centre of the joint, then closes it. Nothing in the method draws cure into that space, and nothing brings the centre to a safe temperature before the three-week hold.
- The flour paste is a seal, not a cooking methodThe stiff flour-and-water crust is a huff paste, meant to hold in moisture during a long bake. It also insulates. Three hours in a slow oven for a twenty-five pound boned round will not bring the centre anywhere near a pasteurising temperature, and the recipe gives no oven reading and no test of doneness.
- Served cold, sliced thinServed cold -- The recipe directs that the joint be sliced and eaten cold, with no reheating step at any point. Whatever storage and handling follow, the meat was never properly cured or properly cooked to begin with.
- If you want spiced beefUse a current recipe with weighed curing salt expressed as a percentage of meat weight, refrigerated curing, and a target internal temperature. Do not attempt to scale or adjust the figures above.
- A note on the units, for readingA "round" is the whole upper hind leg, still sold whole to households that were feeding a large table. A pint of salt is a volume measure whose weight varies considerably with the grind, which is another reason the cure here cannot be reconstructed with any precision.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered contributions from named Virginia housewives, which is why so many entries trail off with a bare "Mrs." and an initial. Spiced beef of this kind is an English inheritance: a large joint dry-spiced with cloves, mace, nutmeg and allspice, held for weeks, then baked under a flour crust and served cold in slices. It belonged to the Christmas and New Year sideboard on both sides of the Atlantic, and in Ireland the same dish survives commercially as a seasonal item to this day. Saltpetre was the standard preservative and the agent that kept the meat red.