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To Dry Beef and Tongue
The best pieces are the brisket, the round and rib pieces that are used for roasting. Put about the middle of February in brine. Rub first with salt, and let them lie for a fortnight, then throw them in brine and let them lay there three weeks, take them out and wipe dry: rub them over with bran and hang in a cool place and dark, not letting them touch anything. Should there come a wet season, put them in the sun to dry a little.--Mrs. R.
This is a dry-cured, air-dried meat process with no measured salt, no cure, no brine strength and no temperature control at any stage. It is worth reading as a record of how a Virginia household preserved beef before refrigeration, but it cannot be followed.
- The brine is undefined"Throw them in brine" gives no salt concentration, and the initial salt rub is unmeasured. Curing safety depends entirely on salt reaching a known concentration throughout the muscle within a known time; without that figure the process is guesswork on a piece of meat weighing several pounds.
- No nitrite, and no way to knowNineteenth-century brines relied on saltpetre, either added deliberately or present as an impurity in bay salt. This recipe names none, so there is no assurance of the nitrite that suppresses Clostridium botulinum in a large, salted, unrefrigerated piece of meat. Meat cured to modern standards uses a weighed nitrite cure at a specified rate.
- Five weeks at cellar temperatureA fortnight in salt plus three weeks in brine, held in whatever a February Virginia larder happened to be, spans temperatures where spoilage organisms can outpace salt penetration. Modern curing specifies refrigeration below 40F for the whole cure.
- Air-drying is the real hazardThe meat is then hung dry in a cool dark place, and the recipe gives no cooking step. Safe dry-cured beef depends on a controlled loss of water — a target weight loss, monitored humidity — none of which appears here. "Put them in the sun to dry a little" during a wet spell is the opposite of controlled: it warms the surface while the interior stays damp.
- February is doing the work of a thermostatThe date is probably not decoration: curing in the coldest weeks would help the meat salt through before spring warmth arrived. A modern kitchen has no equivalent seasonal margin of error, and the recipe assumes a space that stays reliably cool and dark, which most readers do not have.
- The bran coatingRubbing with bran most likely served as a barrier against flies and surface moisture, a role also filled by muslin bags and cloth wraps. It is not an antimicrobial treatment and does nothing about what is happening inside the muscle.
- If you want dried beefUse a current recipe with weighed cure, stated salt percentage and stated holding temperatures, or buy it cured.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia women — hence the terse attribution to "Mrs. R." — belongs to a moment when a household still preserved its own beef but was beginning to buy some of it. Dried beef and dried tongue seem to have sat at the more genteel end of home curing: unlike bacon and hams, produced in quantity in Southern smokehouses, they were sliced thin and served cold. The cuts named are telling — brisket and the round, the dense, lean pieces that dry well, plus the rib pieces that would otherwise have gone to roasting. February appears in a great many nineteenth-century curing directions for the plain reason that killing and salting were winter work, timed so the meat was through the brine before the weather turned. In the following decades commercial packers were selling chipped dried beef ready-prepared, and directions like this one became far less common in household books.