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To Corn Beef Tongues and Beef
One tablespoonful saltpetre to each tongue or piece of beef; rub this in first, then a plenty of salt. Pack down in salt; after it has remained ten or twelve days, put this, with a few pods of red pepper cut up fine, in a brine of only salt and water, which has been boiled, strained, and cooled, and strong enough to bear an egg. Wash a rock clean and place on the beef or tongues, to keep them under the brine. This will keep an indefinite length of time. Fit for use in two weeks.--Mrs. S. T.
This is a nitrate cure carried out at whatever temperature the cellar happened to be, with the curing salt measured by the tongue rather than by weight. Both of those facts put it outside what can be safely reproduced.
- The saltpetre dose is the central problemSaltpetre is potassium nitrate. A level tablespoon weighs roughly 15-18 grams, and here it is applied to a single tongue or an unspecified "piece of beef" — potentially several times over the nitrate levels permitted in cured meat today, depending on how large the piece is. Nitrate and nitrite quantities in modern curing are calculated against the weight of the meat for good reason: excess is genuinely toxic, and the margin is not wide.
- No temperature is given anywhereTen or twelve days in dry salt, then two weeks or more in brine, all at unstated ambient temperature. A cure of this kind is only safe held near 36-40F throughout; a warm pantry lets spoilage and pathogenic organisms establish themselves in the interior of a large piece of beef faster than the salt can penetrate it.
- "Strong enough to bear an egg" is not a measurementThe floating-egg test indicates a brine somewhere around 10 percent salinity, but it varies with water temperature, egg age and how much air is in the egg. Modern curing brines are made to a stated percentage by weight because the salt concentration is the thing actually holding the meat safe.
- An open crock kept for "an indefinite length of time""An indefinite length of time" -- Low-acid, ambient-temperature cured meat is the environment in which Clostridium botulinum is a recognised concern, though a brine at this salinity is itself inhibitory. Controlled nitrite levels are what suppress the organism in commercial curing, and here the nitrate is unmeasured and the temperature unmanaged.
- The washed rockA washed stone was a common weight for keeping meat below the brine, and it works, but porous stone cannot be sanitised. Any modern equivalent would be a food-grade weight or a filled glass jar.
- If you want corned beefUse a current recipe with the cure weighed against the meat, a stated brine percentage and refrigerated curing throughout. The red pepper pods and the general method are perfectly reasonable; the chemistry as written is not.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions signed with initials like this one, belongs to a period when many households with a cellar or springhouse put down their own beef in autumn. "Corned" has nothing to do with maize: it refers to the coarse grains, or corns, of salt rubbed into the meat, a usage older than the American colonies. Saltpetre appears in a great many such recipes because it does two things at once — it slows spoilage and it fixes the pink color that keeps cured beef from turning the drab grey of plain salt beef. Plenty of nineteenth-century receipts did give saltpetre by the ounce; this one measures by the piece, so the dose depended on habit and on the size of the meat in hand. The shift to precisely measured nitrite cures over the following century is one of the clearer cases of food science replacing a genuinely dangerous domestic tradition rather than merely tidying it up.