Meats
All meats are better in winter for being kept several weeks, and it is well, in summer, to keep them as long as you can with out danger of their being tainted. If it is not in your power to keep meat in an ice-house, in summer, keep it in a cool dark cellar, wrapped around with wet cloths, on top of which lay boughs of elderberry. The evaporation from the cloth will keep the meat cool and the elderberry will keep off insects.
If you should unfortunately be obliged to use stale meat or poultry, rub it in and out with soda, before washing it. Tough meats and poultry are rendered more tender by putting a little vinegar or a few slices of lemon in the water in which they are boiled. The use of an acid will save time and fuel in cooking them and will render them more tender and digestible. If possible, keep the meat so clean that it will not be necessary to wash it, as water extracts the juices. When it is frozen, lay it in cold water to thaw, and then cook quickly, to prevent its losing its moisture and sweetness. In roasting or boiling, use but little salt at first, as it hardens meat to do otherwise. In roasting, baste frequently, to prevent the meat from hardening on the outside, and try to preserve the juices. If possible, roast the meat on a spit before a large, open fire, after using salt, pepper, butter or lard, and dredging with flour. Where an open fire-place cannot be obtained, however, the meat may be well roasted in a stove or range. Mutton, pork, shote and veal should be well done, but beef should be cooked rare. In boiling, put on salt meat in cold water, but fresh meat in hot. Remember also that salt meat requires more water and a longer time to cook than fresh. Boil slowly, removing the scum that rises when it begins to simmer. Keep a tea-kettle of boiling water at hand to replenish the water in the pot, as it boils away. Do not let the meat boil too hard or too long, as this will toughen it and extract the juices. Add salt to fresh meat, just before it is done.
Lardering beef, veal, and poultry is a great improvement, keeping it moist whilst cooking and adding richness to the flavor. Lardering consists in introducing slips of clear fat bacon or salt pork, into the surface of meat, by means of a pin, sharp at one end and cleft into four divisions at the other. This pin may be obtained at any hardware store. As the housekeeper is sometimes hurried in preparing a dish, it will save time and trouble for her to keep on hand a bottle of meat-flavoring compounded of the following ingredients. 2 chopped onions. 3 pods of red pepper (chopped). 2 tablespoonfuls brown sugar. 1 tablespoonful celery seed. 1 tablespoonful ground mustard. 1 teaspoonful turmeric. 1 teaspoonful black pepper. 1 teaspoonful salt. Put all in a quart bottle and fill it up with cider vinegar. A tablespoonful of this mixed in a stew, steak, or gravy, will impart not only a fine flavor, but a rich color. Keeping this mixture on hand will obviate the necessity of the housekeeper looking through various spice boxes and packages to get together the requisite ingredients for flavoring, and will thus save her time and trouble.
This is a preface to a meat chapter rather than a single dish: general handling advice from a pre-refrigeration kitchen, closing with a bottled flavoring compound. The advice on holding and rescuing meat cannot be followed today, and the reasons are worth spelling out.
- Weeks of holding in a cellarThe instruction to keep meat "several weeks" in winter and as long as possible in summer assumes a cold larder, hanging carcasses, and a household that judged spoilage by smell. A damp cloth in a cellar holds meat somewhere in the 50-65F range, squarely in the zone where Salmonella, Staphylococcus aureus and Clostridium perfringens multiply. Dry-aging today is done on primals at 34-38F with controlled humidity and airflow, not on cut meat in a basement.
- Soda on stale meatRubbing tainted meat "in and out with soda" at best masks spoilage odours; it does nothing to the bacteria and nothing at all to heat-stable toxins such as staphylococcal enterotoxin, which survives cooking. This is the single line on the page that must not be acted on.
- Elder boughsElder leaf and stem contain cyanogenic glycosides, and the foliage has a long folk reputation as an insect repellent. Laid on top of a wrapped joint as a repellent it was never intended as food, but no part of the elder plant other than ripe cooked berries and the flowers should go near anything that is eaten.
- The flavoring bottleThat last item is a straightforward spiced cider vinegar and is the one part of the page that stands on its own. Two chopped onions, three chopped hot peppers and the spices packed into a quart bottle topped with vinegar; the acid does the preserving. Give it a week or two before use and keep it refrigerated once opened, since the onion adds low-acid solids to the jar.
- Pods of red pepper"Pods" means cayenne-type chillies, not bell peppers (the recipe has them chopped). Three of them in a quart is warm rather than fierce. The teaspoon of turmeric is presumably there for colour; the text says only that the finished mixture gives a rich colour.
- ShoteA shote (shoat) is a young weaned pig, a few months old, in the size range now sold as roaster pork. The category has no supermarket equivalent.
- Larding pinA larding needle is still made, though it is no longer stocked at hardware stores. Chilled or part-frozen fat strips thread far more easily than room-temperature ones.
- What still holdsStarting salt meat in cold water and fresh meat in hot, skimming at the first simmer, and an acid in the pot for tough cuts are all still commonly taught. Cook pork thoroughly, as the text says, but for current temperatures and holding times consult a present-day source rather than this one.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered contributions from Virginia housekeepers at a moment when the domestic economy of the state had been thoroughly upended, and its practical advice reflects a world without mechanical refrigeration: ice-houses for those who could afford them, a cool cellar for everyone else, and a working knowledge of how long a joint could safely be held. The passage sits on a technological seam. It still describes spit-roasting before a large open fire as the ideal, then concedes that "where an open fire-place cannot be obtained" the cast-iron range will serve well enough, which by the 1870s was true of many American kitchens. The closing flavoring bottle belongs to the same era's enthusiasm for bottled sauces and store-cupboard shortcuts, generally traced in the English-speaking kitchen to the commercial success of Worcestershire and mushroom ketchup earlier in the century; here the housekeeper simply makes her own, and the reasoning offered for it, that it saves her rummaging through spice boxes, is a small reminder of how much of this book was written for women doing the work themselves.