Home › Recipes › Pickle for Spiced Beef
Pickle for Spiced Beef
3 gallons of water. 3 ounces of saltpetre. 3 pounds of salt. 8 ounces of brown sugar. 4 ounces of bruised black pepper corns. 4 ounces of mixed spices-allspice, cloves and mace. 8 bay leaves.
Tie the spices, pepper and bay leaves loosely in a cotton cloth and throw them into the ten-gallon keg. Make the brine as directed for corned beef and pour it hot upon the spices.
The addition of half a head of garlic, or an ounce of coriander seeds, or one or two onions, or aromatic garden herbs can be made to the spiced pickle above at option. Hotel cooking is the cosmopolitan occupation and what may be offensive to one set of people often changes to the one thing most essential for another. The coriander seed addition is, however, generally acceptable. Spiced sheep's tongues, calves' and pigs' feet and other cold meats can be pickled as well as beef in the spiced brine-a method much surer, safer and better for the usual haste of hotel work than dry salting or pickling, which requires daily attention, turning and rubbing-and doesn't get it?
This is a curing brine, not a marinade, and it belongs to a nineteenth-century hotel kitchen where meat sat in a keg in a cold cellar for days or weeks. Several things about it fall outside what current food-safety practice allows.
- The saltpetre is far out of rangeThe saltpetre is unmeasured against any weight of meat -- Three ounces of potassium nitrate in three gallons of water is roughly 7,500 ppm of saltpetre by weight of water, about 4,600 ppm expressed as nitrate ion. That is not directly comparable to modern curing limits, which are set as ingoing nitrite equivalents of roughly 120-200 ppm in the finished meat, but the recipe gives no meat weight at all, so there is no way to work out a dose. Plain saltpetre is no longer the recommended cure for home use.
- No time, no temperature, no meat weightThe recipe never says how long the beef stays in the keg, how cold the keg must be kept, or how much meat the three gallons are meant to cover. Safe curing depends entirely on those three numbers. Without them there is no way to judge whether the brine has penetrated before spoilage organisms take hold.
- It depends on a recipe that isn't here"Make the brine as directed for corned beef" points to another entry in the book. Even with that page in hand, the instruction assumes a cellar temperature and a working routine that no longer exists in a domestic kitchen.
- The mixed meats compound the problemSheep's tongues, calves' feet and pigs' feet are all listed as suitable. Long submersion of such cuts in a brine of unknown strength at an unstated temperature is the situation nitrate curing is meant to guard against, which is why the dose needs to be controlled rather than guessed.
- A ten-gallon kegThe recipe specifies a ten-gallon keg, presumably wooden, and a vessel of that kind cannot be sanitised to a modern standard.
- What the author is actually arguingThe closing complaint about dry salting "which requires daily attention, turning and rubbing-and doesn't get it" is a manager's point, not a cook's: wet brining was chosen because understaffed hotel kitchens would not do the daily work a dry cure demands. Read it as evidence about the trade rather than as a technique to follow.
- If you want spiced beefUse a current recipe with a measured commercial cure, a stated meat weight, a refrigeration temperature and a stated number of days.
Spiced beef is an old English and Irish winter preparation, generally traced to the practice of putting down beef in late autumn with salt, saltpetre and whatever aromatics a household could afford, then serving it cold and sliced thin through the Christmas season. Jessup Whitehead wrote for American hotel and restaurant cooks in the late nineteenth century, and the entry shows it: the quantities are keg-sized, the spices are tied loosely in a cotton cloth, and the aside about garlic and coriander is a working chef's note on feeding a mixed clientele in a large city. Saltpetre itself was a standard grocery item then, valued because it fixed the red colour of cured meat and, though nobody yet understood the chemistry, held off spoilage; the nitrate converts to nitrite in the brine, which is what actually does the work. The understanding of dose came much later, and with it the end of the open bag of saltpetre on the kitchen shelf.