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Hunters' Beef
(A Pioneer American Recipe) "Select a fine fat round weighing about 25 pounds.
Take 3 ounces saltpeter, 3 of brown sugar, 1 ounce cloves, 1/2 ounce allspice, a large nutmeg and a quart of salt. Put them all together, very fine. Take the bone out. Rub it well with this mixture on both sides. Put some of it in the bottom of a tub just large enough to hold the beef. Lay it in and stew the remainder on top. Rub it very well every day for 2 weeks and spread the mixture over it; at the end of this time wash the beef, bind it with tape to keep it round and compact, filling the hole where the bone was with a piece of fat. Lay it in a pan of convenient size, strew a little suet over the top and pour in a pint of water. Cover the pan with a coarse crust and a thick paper over that. It will take five hours baking; when cold take off tape. It is a delicious relish at twelve o'clock or for supper eaten with vinegar, mustard, oil or salad. Skim the grease from the gravy and bottle it, for it makes an excellent seasoning for any made dish." This generous round of beef that takes 2 weeks to prepare is perfect provision for a permanent camp; as handy as pemmican for quick substantial snacking.
This is a saltpetre dry-cure carried out at room temperature over two weeks, and both the curing salt dose and the holding conditions fall well outside anything considered safe now. The notes below explain the specific failures rather than offering a corrected method.
- The saltpetre dose is far out of rangeThree ounces of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) rubbed into 25 pounds of beef works out to roughly 7,000 parts per million of nitrate in the meat, and the rub is applied to the surface so the outer inch takes far more than that. Modern curing practice limits nitrate/nitrite to a small fraction of this figure, and there is no way to judge uptake by rubbing and eye.
- Two weeks at unmeasured temperatureThe recipe names no holding temperature. A boned round sitting in a tub for fourteen days in a warm room is exactly the condition in which spoilage organisms and foodborne pathogens can get ahead of an uneven, surface-applied cure; the daily rubbing that the text relies on does nothing to control this.
- A boned, rolled joint is the worst caseTaking the bone out and packing the cavity with fat moves surface bacteria into the centre of a thick, dense roll. Whole-muscle joints are relatively forgiving; a stuffed and bound one needs measured brine, controlled temperature and a verified internal cook temperature, none of which appear here.
- The crust is a seal, not a pastryThe "coarse crust" is a flour-and-water huff paste laid over the pan to trap steam, and it was discarded. Under it the meat effectively steams; the recipe gives no internal temperature and no way to know one was reached in the centre of a 25-pound roll.
- ScaleTwenty-five pounds is a very large piece of round, well beyond a normal retail cut. Nothing about the quantities here scales down cleanly, because the cure is given as a lump amount for one joint rather than as a rate per pound.
- If you want spiced beefUse a current recipe with weighed curing salt, a stated refrigeration temperature and a target internal temperature. The spice profile in this text -- clove, allspice, nutmeg, brown sugar -- can be read as a flavour guide and nothing more.