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Pickle for Corning Beef
3 gallons water 6¾ pounds salt 1 ounce pearlash 2½ pounds sugar 1 pint molasses This pickle is sufficient for fifty pounds of beef. When salt and sugar are thoroughly dissolved lay in the beef. It will be ready for use in twelve or fourteen days, but can remain in the pickle five or six weeks without injury.
This is a bulk winter brine from the era of cellar butchering, and it cannot be reproduced safely in a modern kitchen. The points below explain what fails rather than how to fix it.
- No cure, no nitriteThe brine relies on salt and sugar alone. Salt at a high enough concentration is what held such cures, but the salt quantity in this text is unreadable, so no protective concentration can be demonstrated; meat held submerged for two to six weeks under an unverifiable salt level is the kind of low-oxygen setting in which Clostridium botulinum can grow. Modern corning recipes specify a measured quantity of curing salt (sodium nitrite) for that reason.
- Pearlash is not a curing agentPearlash is potassium carbonate, the alkali leached from wood ashes and once used as a leavener. The recipe gives no reason for it; it was commonly said to soften the brine and keep the meat from hardening. It has no antimicrobial function. Modern potassium carbonate is sold both as an industrial chemical and as a food-grade additive, and the two should not be confused.
- No temperature anywhereThe instruction assumes an unheated cellar or barn in a northern winter; no holding temperature is given. In warmer conditions fifty pounds of beef sitting in brine for a fortnight can spoil before the salt penetrates. Without a stated holding temperature the timing means nothing.
- Brine strength cannot be verifiedThe salt figure in the surviving text is not a usable number, so the actual salinity of this brine is unknown. Curing is a matter of concentration, not approximation, and there is no way to check whether this one reaches a protective level.
- ScaleThe quantity is pitched at fifty pounds of beef and three gallons of water, a household laying in meat for the season. Nothing about the proportions was designed to be divided down for a single brisket.
- If you want corned beefUse a current recipe with weighed curing salt, a stated brine percentage and refrigeration throughout.
"Corning" has nothing to do with maize: corn in older English meant a grain or granule of anything, and to corn meat was to bury it in coarse grains of salt. Brines of this kind were the ordinary autumn work of a farm household, done when the weather turned cold enough to hold a barrel of meat until spring, and the recipe's fifty-pound yield reflects that scale rather than any notion of a Sunday dinner. The molasses and sugar are there to offset the harshness of a heavy salt cure; the pearlash, potassium carbonate leached from wood ashes, was a common early-American kitchen alkali that turns up in gingerbread and biscuit recipes of the same period. That Mrs. Fryer still printed such a formula in a loose-leaf collection aimed at urban cooks says something about how recently home curing had been universal.