Spiced Beef
Take eight or ten pounds of the thin flank, remove any gristle, skin or bones; rub it over with half ounce saltpetre, half ounce bay salt, then rub it well in with a mixture of spices, the the following proportions being used: 1 ounce black pepper. 1 ounce allspice. 1/2 ounce ground ginger. 1/4 ounce cloves. 1/8 ounce mace.
Use only as much as will suffice to rub the beef all over; then add three ounces common salt, and quarter of a pound coarse sugar. Let the beef remain a fortnight in this pickle, turning it and rubbing it every day: then take it out, cover it with the spices and chopped sweet herbs, roll it very tight, tie it with tape, put it into a pan with half-pint water, and half-pound suet.
Bake it after the bread has been drawn, for six hours; put a heavy weight upon it, and when cold take off the tape.
TO COOK A CORNED ROUND OF BEEF.
Wash it clean of the brine, sew it in a coarse towel and boil six to eight hours. Do not remove the towel until next day; it is nicer to put it in a round mould and gives it a good shape. When perfectly cold, trim nicely and cut it across the grain.--Mrs. P. W.
This is a two-week nitrate cure carried out at room temperature, followed by baking in the residual heat of a cooling bread oven. Both halves of that method are outside what can be done safely or even measurably in a modern kitchen, and the curing salt quantities are far above current limits.
- The saltpetre dose is out of rangeThe saltpetre dose is high -- Half an ounce of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) on eight pounds of beef is roughly 3,900 parts per million of saltpetre by weight of meat, about 2,400 ppm reckoned as nitrate, and less if the full ten pounds is used. That is above the ingoing nitrate limits permitted in commercial curing today. Doses of this order are common in nineteenth-century recipes, where the cure was doing the work of refrigeration, and there is no way to scale it down reliably by eye.
- A fortnight at unspecified temperatureThe beef sits in its rub for fourteen days, turned daily, with no mention of a cold room, cellar or ice house because the writer assumed one. A flank cured at modern kitchen temperatures is a fourteen-day incubation for Clostridium botulinum and for spoilage organisms, and the surface rub gives no measured brine concentration to check against.
- Nothing here is a modern curing salt"Bay salt" was coarse solar-evaporated sea salt and "common salt" was ordinary table or dairy salt. Neither corresponds to Prague Powder #1 or #2, and substituting a modern cure into these proportions does not fix the timing or the temperature problem. If you want spiced beef, use a current recipe with weighed cure percentages and a refrigerated cure.
- "After the bread has been drawn"This is a falling oven: a brick oven emptied of its loaves, holding a substantial heat that drops steadily over the six hours. It is a temperature curve, not a setting, the recipe states no oven temperature, and it never brings the meat to any stated internal temperature.
- The rolled and weighted shapeRolling the flank tightly, tying it with tape (narrow cotton binding, not adhesive) and pressing it under a weight as it cools is what produces the dense, sliceable brick that spiced beef is prized for. The half-pound of suet in the pan would have basted and protected the outside during the long slow bake.
- The second recipe is a different thingThe corned round tacked on at the end assumes beef already sitting in a barrel of brine, which is why it begins by washing off the pickle. Boiling six to eight hours and leaving it in its cloth overnight is old practice for a very large piece of salt beef; a modern corned brisket of three to four pounds is done in three to four hours.
Spiced beef of this kind is an English and Irish Christmas tradition, and dishes of the sort appear in period cookbooks as "hunter's beef" or "Dutch beef" — a cut cured with saltpetre and aromatic spices, then rolled, pressed and served cold in thin slices. The spice list here, heavy on allspice, cloves and mace, echoes older English spicing traditions. Such a recipe was set down for a practical reason: a pressed spiced flank keeps for weeks, travels, and can be sliced for a sideboard or a picnic without further cooking, which mattered a great deal in a household without reliable cold storage. Saltpetre was used partly for preservation and partly for colour — it is what keeps cured beef red instead of grey — and its role in that reaction was understood empirically long before the chemistry of nitrite was worked out. The instruction to bake after the bread has been drawn is a reminder that oven heat was a scarce resource to be used in sequence, hottest dishes first, and the long slow tail of the fire went to things like this.