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To Corn Beef (For every hundred pounds)
For every hundred pounds of beef, take: 6 pounds salt. 2 pounds brown sugar. 2 ounces saltpetre. 3 or 4 ounces soda. 1 ounce red pepper.
The whole to be dissolved in four gallons of water. The beet must be closely packed in a barrel, and the mixture poured over so as to cover it. Let it stand a week or ten days, or longer if the weather is cold; then pour off the brine, boil it, and skim off the blood. Let it cool, and pour back on the beef. Warranted to keep.--Mrs. Dr. S.
This is a nineteenth-century barrel-curing formula for a whole side of beef, and it depends on a cold cellar, a wooden barrel and a household that would eat its way through a hundred pounds of meat over the winter. Several parts of it fall outside what is now considered safe curing practice.
- The saltpetre is out of rangeTwo ounces of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) to a hundred pounds of beef works out to roughly 1,200 parts per million of nitrate if fully absorbed, well above the limits set for immersion-cured meats today. Nineteenth-century cooks had no way to measure uptake, and the recipe gives no cure calculation at all.
- No temperature is specifiedThe whole method rests on "the weather" being cold. Curing brine must be held at refrigeration temperature throughout, and a hundred pounds of beef sitting in an unrefrigerated barrel for ten days or more is exactly the condition modern curing guidance exists to prevent.
- Reboiling and returning the brinePouring off the brine, boiling it, skimming the blood and returning it once cool is a practical way to stop a barrel going ropy, but the meat sits out of the brine at room temperature while it happens.
- The brine will not cover the meatThe brine may not cover the meat -- Four gallons of liquid over a hundred pounds of packed beef is a tight quantity, and the recipe's own instruction to pour it over "so as to cover" assumes the upper pieces are weighted below the surface. Meat above the brine line is the classic spoilage point in barrel curing.
- The soda is a period touchThree or four ounces of "soda" is most likely bicarbonate, though the period term is used loosely, and it was probably intended to keep the brine from souring. It forms no part of any current cure.
- ScaleA hundred pounds of beef is a large share of a carcass. Even reduced proportionally, the method's problems are the temperature and the nitrate, not the quantity.
- If you want corned beefUse a current, tested recipe with a measured commercial curing salt and refrigerated brining. Read this one as a document rather than as instructions.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housewives, and "Mrs. Dr. S." is one of hundreds of such credits scattered through the book. Corning has nothing to do with maize: the "corns" are the coarse grains of salt rubbed into or dissolved around the meat, a usage that goes back to Old English corn meaning any small hard particle. Saltpetre was the standard curing agent of the period, valued because it kept cured beef red rather than the grey of plain salt pork, and it was often to be had at the druggist as well as the grocer. A hundred-pound batch tells you what kind of household this was written for: one that killed its own beef, had a cool cellar and a barrel standing ready, and needed the meat to last until spring. "Warranted to keep" is the contributor's personal guarantee, the closest thing these books have to a review.