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To Collar Beef
Take a flank of fresh beef, stew it with pepper, salt, allspice, saltpetre, thyme, and sage.
Then roll as hard as you can, and wind a string around it; then boil till done. It must be served up cold, cut in slices--Mrs. M.P.
This is a curing recipe disguised as a boiled beef roll, and the problem is the saltpetre.
- Saltpetre with no quantitySaltpetre is potassium nitrate, used here as a curing salt to keep the meat pink and inhibit spoilage organisms. The recipe gives no weight at all, and nitrate is an ingredient that has to be weighed: the curing quantity is a small fraction of the amount that would be harmful. There is no way to read a safe amount into "stew it with... saltpetre."
- Modern curing salts are not interchangeableWhat is sold today for home curing is a diluted nitrite or nitrate blend formulated to a fixed percentage precisely because pure saltpetre cannot be measured reliably by eye or spoon. Substituting one for the other by volume in an unmeasured nineteenth-century recipe does not fix the recipe.
- The cure has no time or temperatureMany period collaring recipes rub the meat with salt and saltpetre and leave it for some days in a cold larder before rolling and boiling. This version gives no standing time and no indication of how cold the meat is held, so nothing about the cure can be verified.
- Served cold, kept for daysA collar is a dish sliced cold over some days, which is the storage pattern the nitrate was supposed to protect. Cooked, rolled meat held at larder temperature without a controlled cure is a poor risk regardless of how thoroughly it was boiled.
- If you want the dishRolled, pressed cold beef is still made, and a current recipe with weighed curing salt and stated holding temperatures should be used instead.
- On the wording"Stew it with" here almost certainly means strew or rub the seasonings over the opened flank before rolling, not to stew the beef in liquid. Beef flank is the thin boneless cut from the belly.
Collaring is one of the oldest English methods for turning a cheap, thin, sinewy cut into something that slices neatly cold: the meat is seasoned, rolled tight, tied or bound in a cloth, and simmered long enough for the connective tissue to set the roll solid as it cools. Eel, pork and brawn were collared in the same way, and the technique appears in English household books well before the American ones borrowed it. Its presence in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), a compilation of contributed receipts credited to Virginia housewives identified by name or, as here, by initials, reflects a kitchen economy in which a sideboard dish that kept for several days and needed no reheating was worth more than a tender roast. Saltpetre was a routine larder item in that period, sold by the druggist and valued for the pink colour it gave cured meats; this receipt is one of the many that specify no quantity for it, though others of the period do give a weight.