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To Cure Beef Ham
Divide the ham into three parts; rub on half-pint molasses; let it remain in this molasses a day and two nights, turning it over occasionally during the time. Rub on then one handful salt and put it back in the vessel with the molasses; turn it over, morning and night for ten days. Hang it up to dry for one week, then smoke a little. It is an excellent plan, after sufficiently smoked, to put each piece of beef in a bag, to protect from insects, and keep hanging till used.--Miss K. W.
This is a dry-cure for a "beef ham" — the round of a beef carcass, salted, smoked and hung at room temperature for weeks or months. As written it cannot be reproduced safely in a modern kitchen, and the reasons are worth spelling out.
- No measured salt"One handful salt" for a piece of beef weighing several pounds is nowhere near a defined concentration. Safe dry-curing depends on salt reaching a known percentage of the meat's weight throughout, not just on the surface, and a handful cannot be verified against anything.
- No curing saltThis cure specifies no saltpetre or nitrite of any kind. Modern guidance is that meat held for weeks without nitrite at a controlled level, in the temperature range this method implies, carries a risk of Clostridium botulinum, which produces a toxin that smoking and drying do not destroy.
- Molasses is a hazard here, not a preservativeThe sugar in a half-pint of molasses feeds bacteria. In this cure the meat spends a day and two nights in sugar syrup before any salt goes on, and then ten more days in a mixture whose salt concentration is unknown, with no way to steer which organisms win.
- "Smoke a little" is not a processThere is no indication of temperature, duration or whether the smoke is cold or hot. Cold smoke below about 90F is a flavouring, not a kill step; the meat leaves the smokehouse as raw as it went in.
- Room-temperature hanging until usedThe instruction to keep the meat in a bag "till used" assumes an unheated smokehouse or cellar in winter, and a household that would eat through it in a season. A modern pantry sits at 65-70F year round, which is squarely in the danger zone for weeks-long storage of unmeasured cured meat.
- The insect bag tells you the conditionsThe bag was to keep insects off meat hanging in the open. That detail is a fair description of the storage environment the method was designed for, and it is not one that maps onto a present-day kitchen.
- If you want to cure beefUse a current recipe that specifies salt as a percentage of green weight, a measured cure containing sodium nitrite, and a controlled temperature and humidity for the drying phase.
"Beef ham" in Southern household books means the round or hip of beef treated by the same molasses-and-salt method the family already used on pork — the word ham here describes the cut and the technique rather than the animal. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia women, many of whom appear only as initials, is full of these recipes; "Miss K. W." is one of them. Molasses cures of this kind turn up in the region's household books, valued for the dark surface and sweetness they gave. What the recipe assumes and does not say — a killing frost, a dirt-floored smokehouse, a household eating steadily through the meat — is the whole of its food safety, and none of it survives the move indoors.