Important: Safety Warning
This page recommends preserving food with chemicals such as salicylic acid, borax, or formaldehyde. These substances are toxic when eaten, and their use in food is now prohibited.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Beef, Hunter's
INGREDIENTS. - For a round of beef weighing 25 lbs. allow 3 oz. of saltpetre, 3 oz. of coarse sugar, 1 oz. of cloves, 1 grated nutmeg, 1/2 oz. of allspice, 1 lb. of salt, 1/2 lb. of bay salt.
BEEF KIDNEY.
Hang the beef for 2 or 3 days, and remove the bone. Pound spices, salt, &c., in the above proportion, and let them be reduced to the finest powder. Put the beef into a pan, rub all the ingredients well into it, and turn and rub it every day for rather more than a fortnight. When it has been sufficiently long in pickle, wash the meat, bind it up securely with tape, and put it into a pan with 1/2 pint of water at the bottom; mince some suet, cover the top of the meat with it, and over the pan put a common crust of flour and water; bake for 6 hours, and when cold, remove the paste. Save the gravy that flows from it, as it adds greatly to the flavour of hashes, stews, &c. The beef may be glazed, and garnished with meat jelly.
TIME.-6 hours.
SEASONABLE all the year.
Note.-In salting or pickling beef or pork for family consumption, it not being generally required to be kept for a great length of time, a less quantity of salt and a larger quantity of other matters more adapted to retain mellowness in meat may be employed, which could not be adopted by the curer of the immense quantities of meat required to be preserved for victualling the shipping of this maritime country. Sugar, which is well known to possess the preserving principle in a very great degree, without the pungency and astringency of salt. salt, may be, and is, very generally used in the preserving of meat for family consumption.
Although it acts without corrugating or contracting the fibres of meat, as is the case in the action of salt, and, therefore, does not impair its mellowness, yet its use in sufficient quantities for preservative effect, without the addition of other antiseptics, would impart a flavour not agreeable to the taste of many persons. It may be used, however, together with salt, with the greatest advantage in imparting mildness and mellowness to cured meat, in a proportion of about one part by weight to four of the mixture; and, perhaps, now that sugar is so much lower in price thon it was in former years, one of the obstructions to its more frequent use is removed.
This is a dry-cure recipe, and the problem is the cure itself rather than the cooking. The proportions given are outside anything modern food-safety guidance permits, and the process depends on conditions a present-day kitchen does not have.
- The saltpetre is the reason to stopThree ounces of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) rubbed into 25 lb of beef is a ratio of roughly 7,000 parts per million by weight, though how much of a surface rub is actually taken up before the meat is washed is unknown. Current limits for ingoing nitrate in cured meat are in the low hundreds of ppm, and modern practice uses pre-mixed curing salts precisely because weighing raw nitrate by eye gives no control over how much ends up in any one slice.
- A fortnight at room temperatureA fortnight at unspecified temperature -- The beef is hung 2 or 3 days, then turned and rubbed daily for over two weeks in an open pan. The instruction carries no temperature at all, and an unrefrigerated cure of that length is exactly the window in which spoilage and toxin-forming bacteria can establish themselves before the salt has penetrated the centre of a large round.
- No measured brine, no measured temperatureThere is no stated cure strength, no target internal temperature, no pH and no water-activity check. Curing is a chemistry problem with a margin of error, and this recipe supplies none of the numbers needed to know whether the margin was met. If you want to cure beef at home, follow a current tested recipe with weighed nitrite cure and monitored temperatures.
- Bay saltBay salt was coarse sea salt made by solar evaporation, associated with the Atlantic coasts of France, Portugal and Spain, and valued for curing; the name is usually explained by the bays in which it was made, though that is traditional rather than documented. It has no exact modern shelf equivalent; coarse grey sea salt is the nearest thing, though the term is historical rather than a specification.
- A round of beefThe round is the whole upper hind leg. At 25 lb with the bone in, this is a joint sized for a large household with a butcher and a cold larder, not a domestic oven. Nothing about the quantity scales down cleanly, because the cure time was set by the thickness of the meat.
- The flour-and-water crust"A common crust of flour and water" is a huff paste, a stiff inedible lid sealed over the pan so the joint effectively steams in its own juices for six hours. It is discarded, not eaten. The technique itself survives, in salt-crust and paste-sealed cooking.
- The saved gravyBeeton's note that the liquor flowing from the joint improves hashes and stews is sound reasoning about a cured, spiced, gelatinous stock. The same principle applies to any braise finished under a tight lid.
Hunter's beef belongs to the same family as spiced beef and the Northern English "pressed" or "hunting" beef: a large joint dry-cured with salt, sugar and warm spices, slow-baked sealed in a pot, then pressed or bound and eaten cold in slices. The name is often said to come from its usefulness as a cold sideboard dish for shooting and hunting parties, though that derivation is traditional rather than documented; Cumberland and Westmorland versions still appear under the name. What makes this entry characteristic of Beeton is the long closing note, which is less a recipe than an argument: household curing, she says, need not follow the brutal salt-heavy methods of the naval victuallers who provisioned Britain's shipping, and sugar can carry part of the preservative work while keeping the meat mellow. The remark that sugar is "so much lower in price than it was in former years" seems to reflect the mid-Victorian fall in sugar prices that followed the equalisation of duties from 1846, when a former luxury became a pantry staple, and cooks began to reason about it as an ingredient rather than a treat.