Home › Cookery › To Corn Beef (One tablespoonful saltpetre)
To Corn Beef (One tablespoonful saltpetre)
One tablespoonful saltpetre to each piece of beef, well rubbed in. Then rub in as much salt as it will take. Let it stand ten or twelve days, and then put it in strong brine. Will be ready for use in a week.--Mrs. Col. A. F
This is a nineteenth-century dry-cure followed by a brine, and it is one of the recipes in this book that cannot be reproduced safely. The problems are in the quantities and in what the original leaves unsaid.
- Saltpetre with no weight to measure againstA tablespoon of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) is specified per "piece of beef" — a piece that might be three pounds or twenty. Curing salts are dosed by weight of meat precisely because nitrate and nitrite are toxic above a narrow range, and a tablespoon on a small brisket is far outside it.
- Saltpetre is not modern curing saltPotassium nitrate works only after bacteria in the meat reduce it to nitrite, which is slow and unpredictable. Present-day curing relies on measured nitrite blends for exactly this reason, and straight saltpetre is no longer the recommended route for home curing.
- No temperature anywhereThe beef stands ten or twelve days, then a week more in brine, with no indication of how cold. A cure of this length is safe only at refrigeration temperature throughout; at a Virginia larder's ambient warmth the interior of the meat spends days in the range where pathogens multiply.
- "Strong brine" is not a specificationPeriod cookbooks often gauged brine by whether an egg or a potato would float in it. That test brackets a wide band of salinity, and the amount of salt is the only thing standing between a cure and a spoiled joint.
- The particular riskSlow-cured meat held at cellar temperature in an anaerobic brine is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum, which is why nitrite is used in curing at all; the permitted levels are capped in turn because nitrite itself is toxic in quantity. Spoilage organisms may also grow without any obvious warning smell in a heavily salted piece.
- If you want corned beefUse a current recipe with curing salt weighed against the weight of the meat and a stated refrigeration temperature. The result is closer to what Mrs. Col. A. F. intended than this text can now deliver.
"Corning" has nothing to do with maize: corn in older English simply meant a grain or granule, and corned beef is beef preserved with coarse grains of salt. Saltpetre was the standard companion to that salt in Anglo-American curing from at least the seventeenth century, valued both as a preservative and for keeping the meat a bright red rather than the grey-brown that plain salt gives — a colour effect later explained by the nitrite it slowly yields. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1877, gathered such contributions from named and initialled Virginia housekeepers, and its curing entries are brief to the point of terseness. The brevity is the point: it is a reminder, not an instruction, and everything a modern reader needs to know — weights, salinity, temperature — is precisely what the writer took for granted.