Beef, Collared
herbs, 1/2 teaspoonful of pounded allspice, INGREDIENTS.- 7 lbs. of the thin end of the flank of beef, 2 oz. of coarse sugar, 6 oz. of salt, 1 oz. of saltpetre, 1 large handful of parsley, minced, 1 dessertspoonful of minced sage, a bunch of savoury herbs, teaspoonful of pounded allspice; salt and pepper to taste. AVERAGE COST, 4d.
Choose fine tender beef, but not too fat; lay it in a dish, rub in the sugar, salt and saltpetre, and let it remain in the pickle for a week or ten days, turning and rubbing it every day. Then bone it, remove all the gristle and the coarse skin of the D E in carving ribs and shown here, C to D, and care should be taken to carve it evenly and in thin slices. It will be found a great assistance, in carving this joint well, if the knife be first inserted just above the bone at the bottom, and run sharply along between the bone and meat, and also to divide the meat from the bone in the same way at the side of the joint; the slices will then come away more readily. With the sirloin, very finely-scraped horseradish is usually served, and a little given, when liked, to each guest. Horseradish sauce is preferable, however, for serving on the plate, although the scraped horseradish may still be used as a garnish.
COLLARED BEEF. inside part, and sprinkle it thickly with parsley, herbs, spice and seasoning in the the above proportion, taking care that the former are finely minced, and the latter above ve proportion, taking care that the well pounded. Roll the meat up in a cloth as tightly as possible; bind it firmly with broad tape, and boil it gently for 6 hours.
Immediately on taking it out of the pot put it under a good weight, without undoing it, and let it remain until cold. This dish is a and looks better if glazed. very nice addition to the kreakfast-table TIME.-6 hours.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Note. During the time the beef is in pickle it should be kept cool, and regularly rubbed and turned every day. dish for 6 persons.- lbs. of rumpsteak, 2 oz.
This is a nitrate cure, and the quantity of saltpetre it calls for is far outside anything now considered acceptable in food. The notes below explain the specific problems rather than offering a revised method; for collared beef today, use a current recipe with measured cure percentages.
- The saltpetre is the problem1 oz of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) to 7 lbs of beef is roughly 8,900 ppm of saltpetre by weight of meat, equivalent to something like 5,500 ppm of nitrate if all of it were taken up; in practice some of a rubbed pickle drains away, so the figure absorbed is lower and cannot be known. Even so it is an order of magnitude or more above modern ingoing limits for cured meat, which run from about 150 ppm upwards depending on jurisdiction and cure type. This is not merely an old-fashioned excess.
- Why nitrate was used at allSaltpetre converts slowly to nitrite in the meat, which fixes the pink colour and suppresses Clostridium botulinum. That mechanism was not known when this recipe was written; the quantities here follow custom rather than measurement, and there was no means of checking how much nitrate the meat had taken up.
- "Kept cool" is not a temperatureThe beef sits in the pickle for seven to ten days. In 1861 that meant a stone larder or cellar, which might be anywhere from 40F to 60F depending on the season. Without a stated and controlled temperature, a week-long wet cure of this kind cannot be reproduced safely.
- Coarse sugar and coarse salt'Coarse sugar' means an unrefined, large-grained sugar, near what would now be sold as raw or demerara; 'coarse salt' refers to grain size rather than refinement, so coarse sea or kosher salt will serve. Neither is the difficulty here.
- The garbled textThis page has run together with the entry on carving a sirloin. The opening fragment ("joint well, if the knife be") and the passage from "D E in carving ribs" through "as a garnish" belong to that other article and have nothing to do with collared beef; the recipe resumes at "inside part, and sprinkle it thickly..."
- The thin end of the flankThis cut is no longer commonly sold under that name in either British or American butchery. The nearest equivalents are flank or the thin end of the brisket - a broad, flat, moderately fatty sheet of muscle that will roll without splitting.
- Average cost, 4d.The figure as printed is truncated; costs in this book are generally given per pound, so this is very likely 4d. per lb rather than 4d. for the whole seven pounds. Either way it marks flank as one of the cheaper cuts on the block.
To "collar" meat is to bone it, season the inner face, roll it into a tight cylinder and bind it - the verb is generally taken to derive from 'collar' in the sense of a band or roll, though the connection is traditional rather than documented, and the same technique gives collared eel, collared pork and the brawns of the same era. Collared beef belonged to the cold sideboard: the recipe itself recommends it as an addition to the breakfast table, where a weighted, pressed roll could be sliced thin day after day and would keep for a considerable time in a cool larder. That is the point of the long salt-and-saltpetre pickle followed by six hours of gentle boiling and overnight pressing. It is a preserving recipe dressed as a breakfast dish, from a period when a large household needed cooked meat that would not spoil between meals, and when the chemistry of nitrate curing was understood only by its results.