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Corned Beef Brine
6 gallons of water (about 3 pailfuls.) 6 or 8 ounces of saltpetre--the large crystals kind. 1 pint of molasses or sugar. 10 pounds of salt. Set the water on the range in a boiler with the saltpetre in it to dissolve first, because sometimes when the brine is so strong with salt as to be what is called a saturated solution the saltpetre cannot melt in it but remains inoperative at the bottom. Then put in the molasses and the salt, let come to a boil and skim it. Pour into a clean ten-gallon keg. Two kegs of such brine are necessary to have for beef alone. It will keep good one or two months according to weather, but depending on how it is used. One is for dropping the course pieces of beef in from day to day as they are culled from the roasts and loins, the other is to change them over to when half corned and to use out of. But tongues and pork if pickled in the same kegs with the beef will spoil the brine very quickly. There ought to be other and smaller vessels of brine to receive them.
Corned beef is an American "stand-by," a permanent favorite, and too much care can not be taken to have it good. People tire of fish of poultry, game and ham, but not of roast beef nor corned beef, but whenever the hotel has to sell off its corned beef to get rid of it at a nominal price and buy the canned corned beef of the packing houses because it is better it is tolerably certain there is a screw loose, and somebody is remiss in their duty or lacking in skill and attention.
The packing house corned beef is good because it is made with good brine like that of the foregoing receipt, and because it is cooked almost to the softness of jelly. It is too soft however to be used hot. It generally has just the right pink color, neither too red like raw meat nor too colorless like boiled fresh beef, to make it look attractive on the table; this exact point can always be maintained by forethought and regard to the temperature of the brine. Six ounces of saltpeter will make the beef as red if kept at summer heat as eight ounces or more in cold weather. It takes about a week to corn beef sufficiently to begin using it.
This is a hotel-scale curing brine, and the problems with it are not matters of taste or conversion. The instructions are given here for reading, not for use.
- Saltpetre is unmeasured for its purposeSix to eight ounces of potassium nitrate in six gallons of water gives no control at all over how much nitrate or nitrite ends up in the meat, which depends on how long each piece sits, how thick it is, and how much bacterial reduction happens in the keg. Modern curing works to a fixed parts-per-million in the finished product using a premixed cure, precisely because a brine concentration tells you nothing about the dose in the beef.
- "Kept at summer heat" is the fatal line"Kept at summer heat" is the most alarming line -- Whitehead treats brine temperature as a colour control: warmer brine, redder beef, less saltpetre needed. Holding raw beef submerged in a keg at ambient summer temperature for a week or more invites spoilage and pathogen growth, which is why modern curing is done under refrigeration. The salt in this brine is strong enough to discourage Clostridium botulinum, so botulism is not the specific hazard here; the real problem is that the nitrate is measured into the brine rather than dosed to the meat, and nothing in the method verifies the result.
- A brine reused for one to two monthsThe keg is topped up daily with fresh trimmings culled from roasts and loins, and half-corned pieces are moved from one keg to the other. Salt concentration falls as meat draws it out and meat juices dilute it, so the brine gets progressively weaker and more heavily contaminated over weeks. There is no way to know, at any given day, whether it is still a curing brine or a broth.
- No temperature, no time, no test"about a week to corn beef sufficiently" covers pieces of wildly different thickness with no weight, no depth of cure and no way to confirm the cure has reached the centre. Salt penetration into whole muscle is roughly an inch a week under refrigeration, so "sufficiently" is left entirely to the cook's judgement.
- Tongues and pork in the same kegWhitehead's warning that tongue and pork "will spoil the brine very quickly" is an accurate observation, and he answers it by prescribing separate smaller vessels of brine for them. It is still management by watching for spoilage rather than by measurement.
- If you want corned beefUse a current recipe with a measured nitrite cure, a stated meat weight, and refrigeration below 40F throughout. Nothing in the passage above should be scaled down and attempted.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for the American hotel and restaurant trade in the 1880s and 90s, and this entry reads like what it is: a working note to a steward about what to do with the coarse pieces left after the roasts and loins have been cut. "Corned" is generally taken to refer to the corns, or coarse grains, of salt used in salting; the saltpetre is there for the pink colour, since nitrate reduced to nitrite in the brine fixes the meat pigment that would otherwise cook to grey. The most revealing part is not the formula but the complaint attached to it — that a hotel reduced to buying packing-house canned corned beef has "a screw loose" somewhere in its kitchen. Whitehead himself concedes the packers' product is better, and by the 1890s the Chicago packers were working to a fixed formula in a controlled room, so he is defending a craft that was already losing ground to industry.