Smoked Beef
To a piece of beef weighing about twelve or fourteen pounds, you rub in the following: 1 pint salt. 1 cup brown sugar. 1 cup molasses. 1/2 teaspoonful pounded saltpetre.
Rub this well on the beef and turn it several times. At the end of ten days drain it, rub bran on it, hang it up and smoke for several days.--Mrs. H. T.
This is a dry-cure and cold-smoke procedure from a period when every household had a smokehouse and a cool winter to work in. It cannot be reproduced safely from these directions, and the notes below explain where it fails rather than how to fix it.
- The saltpetre is unmeasured in any modern senseHalf a teaspoon of "pounded saltpetre" (potassium nitrate) across twelve to fourteen pounds of beef is a volume guess at a compound that is now regulated by weight and used only in precisely calculated concentrations. Curing salts today are sold pre-diluted specifically because eyeballing nitrate or nitrite is how people are poisoned.
- No temperature is given anywhereThe cure sits for ten days and the meat smokes for "several days," with no indication of ambient temperature at either stage. A recipe from this book would presumably have been worked in cool weather in an unheated smokehouse, but nothing in the text says so; the same schedule in a modern garage or a warm kitchen holds the beef for a week and a half in the range where Clostridium botulinum and other pathogens multiply.
- Cold smoke does not cookSmoking for several days at smokehouse temperatures adds surface preservation and flavour but never brings the interior to a safe temperature. The recipe gives no instruction to cook the meat afterwards, so any safeguard has to come from the cure itself, and this cure is not specified tightly enough to provide one.
- The salt is not calculated to the meatA pint of salt rubbed on the outside gives no control over how much actually penetrates a twelve-pound piece, or how deeply. Modern equilibrium curing works from a percentage of the meat's weight for exactly this reason.
- BranThe bran rubbed on before hanging is generally understood to have formed a dry crust that discouraged flies and insects during the smoke, rather than acting as a preservative in its own right; the recipe itself gives no reason for it.
- If you want smoked beefUse a current, tested curing recipe with weighed cure #1 or #2, stated meat weight, stated refrigeration temperature and stated smoking temperature.
Smoked and dried beef occupies a small corner of a book whose cured-meat recipes are overwhelmingly concerned with pork; in Virginia the smokehouse was built for hams and middlings, and beef went into it as an occasional second use of a structure and a fire already running. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named and initialled Virginia housewives, and recipes like this one from "Mrs. H. T." record household practice rather than instruction or owns a smokehouse. Saltpetre appears throughout the curing recipes of the period because nitrate both preserves and fixes the red colour of cured meat, though the chemistry behind that was not understood until well after this book was printed.