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To Cure Beef for Drying
This recipe keeps the meat moist, so that it has none of that toughness dried beef mostly has when a little old. To every twenty-eight or thirty pounds, allow one tablespoonful saltpetre, one quart fine salt, mixed with molasses until the color is about that of light brown sugar; rub the pieces of meat with the mixture, and when done, let all stick to it that will. Pack in a keg or half-barrel, that the pickle may cover the meat, and let it remain forty-eight hours; at the end of that time, enough pickle will be formed to cover it. Take it out and hang in a suitable place for drying. Allow all the mixture to adhere to the meat that will.--Mrs. A. M. D.
This is a nineteenth-century dry-cure for air-dried beef, and it is one of the recipes on this site that belongs to reading rather than cooking. The problems are structural, not a matter of adjusting quantities.
- The saltpetre dose is unmeasurableOne tablespoon of potassium nitrate to "twenty-eight or thirty pounds" of meat gives no reliable ingoing concentration: the cure is rubbed on by hand and the pickle that forms around the pieces is of unknown strength and volume. Modern curing salts are sold at a fixed nitrite percentage precisely so the dose per pound of meat can be calculated; a rubbed-on scatter of raw saltpetre cannot be.
- Nitrate is not nitriteSaltpetre works only after bacteria in the meat slowly convert nitrate to nitrite, which is what actually inhibits Clostridium botulinum. That conversion depends on temperature, time and the microflora present, none of which this recipe controls. A cure can look and smell correct while carrying no protective nitrite at all.
- No temperature is given anywhereForty-eight hours in the pickle is safe only if the keg sits close to refrigeration temperature. Nineteenth-century Virginia households cured in winter, in unheated outbuildings, and the recipe assumes that season without stating it. At room temperature the meat spoils inside the cure.
- "A suitable place for drying" is the whole problemAir-drying beef safely requires controlled temperature, humidity and airflow over weeks, with the weight loss tracked to confirm the water activity has fallen far enough to stop bacterial growth. The original leaves every one of those variables to the reader's judgment and the local climate.
- Forty-eight hours is a short cureEven taken on its own terms, two days is enough for meaningful penetration only on thin pieces. Thicker cuts go to the drying rack with an under-cured interior, which is where the pathogen risk in dried meats sits.
- The molasses adds fermentable sugarThe recipe uses colour ("about that of light brown sugar") simply to gauge how much molasses to work into the salt, and credits the result with keeping the meat moist. But the sugar also feeds surface organisms during the slow drying phase. Commercial cures balance sugar against salt concentration and nitrite level; this one does not.
- If you want dried beefUse a current, tested recipe that specifies cure #1 or #2 by weight per pound of meat, a curing temperature, and a target weight loss. Nothing here can be corrected by scaling.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, many identified only by initials, belongs to a period when most rural households still put up their own meat and a cookbook was expected to cover the smokehouse alongside the kitchen. Dried beef was the leaner counterpart to bacon and ham: cheaper cuts salted, hung and shaved thin for creamed dishes and breakfasts. Mrs. A. M. D.'s selling point is texture rather than safety, the claim being that molasses in a cure slows the case-hardening that leaves older dried beef stringy. What the recipe never mentions is season, because it did not need to. Curing happened after the first hard frost and before spring, something the book's readers could be expected to take for granted; the omission is a good reminder of how much of this book's practical knowledge lived outside its text.