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W. a. S to Spice a Round of Beef
Take three tablespoonfuls saltpetre, four tablespoonfuls brown sugar, with which rub your beef well. Two teacups of salt, one teacup of cloves, one teacup of allspice (the spice must be ground fine). Rub the beef with these ingredients. Put it into a tub as near the size of the beef as possible; turn it every day in the pickle it makes. In about four weeks it will be ready for use. For thirty pounds use two pounds beef suet. When cooked place sticks across the bottom of the pot to prevent its burning.--Mrs. R. L. P.
This is a four-week home cure for a large cut of beef, and it cannot be reproduced safely from the text as given. The points below explain what is missing and why the gaps matter.
- Saltpetre out of rangeThree tablespoonfuls of potassium nitrate is roughly 40-50 g, applied here to a piece of beef of unstated weight. Modern curing practice works in parts per million of nitrite or nitrate against a measured meat weight, using pre-diluted cure mixes precisely because pure saltpetre is easy to overdose. Nitrate excess is a genuine toxicity risk, not a matter of taste.
- No meat weight for the cureThe salt and spice quantities are absolute, but the size of the beef is never given beyond "a round" and "your beef." The only weight in the recipe, "thirty pounds," appears in the instruction about suet and may or may not indicate the intended size of the joint. Either way, a cure of fixed strength cannot be checked against a stated weight of meat.
- No temperature anywhereFour weeks in a tub, turned daily, presumes a cold cellar or other unheated store in winter. Current guidance is that curing meat be held under refrigeration throughout; at room temperature this is a month-long hold at unsafe temperatures. The original gives no temperature at all.
- Anaerobic risk in a deep tubA large cut sitting submerged in its own brine, in a vessel packed "as near the size of the beef as possible," is exactly the low-oxygen, low-acid environment in which Clostridium botulinum can grow if the cure is uneven or the salt is short. This is the reason cure concentration and temperature are both specified in current guidance.
- Teacup and tablespoon are unreliable hereNineteenth-century teacups were not standardised and are variously reckoned at anywhere from a half to three-quarters of a modern cup; period tablespoons likewise varied. For the spices the drift is harmless; for the saltpetre it is the whole problem.
- If you want spiced beefUse a current, tested recipe with weighed meat, a weighed commercial curing salt and a stated refrigeration temperature. Do not attempt to correct the proportions above by eye.
Spiced beef of this kind — a round rubbed with saltpetre, sugar, salt and a heavy hand of cloves and allspice, then left in its own drawn brine for weeks — belongs to an English and Anglo-Irish tradition of spiced keeping beef, and versions of it appear in Southern cookbooks as a cold-weather meat served in thin slices at Christmas and at cold suppers. Saltpetre was what kept such meat red rather than grey, and it could be bought from a druggist. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, many of them signed with initials only, as here with "Mrs. R. L. P."; its instructions assume a reader who already had the cellar, the tub and the winter to do it in. The sticks laid across the bottom of the pot hold the meat clear of the vessel's base, which in hearth cooking sat directly over the fire.