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To Corn Beef or Pork
50 pounds meat. 4 1/2 pounds salt. 1 1/2 pounds brown sugar. 1/2 pound saltpetre. 1 quart molasses.
Mix well, boil and skim. When milk-warm, pour it over the meat with a ladle. The beef must be soaked in clear water and wiped dry, before putting in the brine. It will be ready for use in a few weeks. Should the brine mould, skim and boil again. Keep the meat under the brine.--Mrs. P. W.
This is a barrel-cure for 50 pounds of meat, and it cannot be scaled down or followed safely as printed. The problems are in the quantities and in what the instructions leave out.
- The saltpetre is far out of rangeHalf a pound of potassium nitrate to 50 pounds of meat is 1 percent of the meat's weight, roughly 10,000 parts per million added to the cure. The meat will not absorb all of it from a brine, but the amount added is still many times what modern curing practice permits, and nitrate at that level is a genuine toxicity concern rather than merely a matter of flavor.
- No water is specifiedThe list gives salt, sugar, saltpetre and molasses, then says to boil and skim — but never states how much water makes up the brine. Without that figure the salt concentration is unknowable, and salt concentration is the only thing standing between the meat and spoilage bacteria.
- "Milk-warm" is the wrong temperatureMilk-warm means about blood heat, 95-100F. Pouring warm brine over raw meat holds it in the range where bacteria multiply fastest, precisely at the start of a cure that will run for weeks. Modern wet cures go on cold and stay cold, at refrigerator temperature throughout.
- No storage temperature at allThe recipe gives no indication of where or how cold the meat should be kept, presumably because a cool cellar or similar cold space was taken for granted. Meat left in brine at room temperature for "a few weeks" is an incubator, and the recipe gives no way to know whether the cure or the spoilage is winning.
- Mould on the brine is treated as routineSkimming and re-boiling a mouldy brine, then returning it to meat that has been sitting in it, was ordinary practice and is no longer acceptable. Surface mould signals that the brine has weakened or been contaminated; boiling kills organisms but does not remove the toxins some of them leave behind.
- ScaleFifty pounds of beef in a single vessel under brine is a barrel-sized job. Even setting the chemistry aside, few modern kitchens have a food-safe container of that size or the cold space to keep it in.
- If you want corned beefUse a current recipe with measured curing salt, a stated water volume and refrigerated curing. The proportions here belong to a different food-safety world.
"Corning" has nothing to do with maize: corn in older English means a grain or granule, and to corn meat was to pack it in coarse grains of salt. Recipes of this kind were a mainstay of the Southern household year — hogs killed at first frost, beef butchered when there was no way to keep it fresh, and both consigned to brine barrels meant to carry a family through to spring. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, many of them credited only by initials, as here with "Mrs. P. W." The saltpetre was there for color as much as preservation, fixing the pink-red cast that distinguishes corned beef from plain salt meat, and the molasses and brown sugar softened the harshness of so much salt. Nitrate was used in generous, unweighed quantities in nineteenth-century curing; the shift to precisely weighed curing salts came in the twentieth century.