Meat

This is a curing brine, not a dish, and it is missing nearly everything a cure needs to be safe: the weight of meat, the cut, the holding temperature, and the number of days. The points below explain what the ingredients are and where the method breaks down.

• Saltpeter is potassium nitrateSold in period drugstores by the ounce for exactly this purpose. Nitrate works only after bacteria in the meat reduce it to nitrite, which is the compound that actually inhibits Clostridium botulinum and fixes the pink colour. That conversion depends on temperature, time and the resident bacterial population, none of which this recipe controls.
• The nitrate dose cannot be verifiedTwo ounces of nitrate in three gallons of water works out to several thousand parts per million in the brine (roughly 5,000 ppm against the water alone, about 3,400 ppm against the whole brine once salt and honey are counted), but what ends up in the meat depends entirely on how much brine the meat absorbs and how long it sits. Modern cures are calculated against the weight of the meat, not the weight of the water, precisely because immersion uptake is unpredictable. Without a meat weight there is no way to know whether the finished ham is under-cured or carrying an excessive nitrate load.
• Pouring the brine on hot is the central problemThree gallons of near-boiling liquid poured over cold raw meat cooks the outer surface, then takes many hours to fall out of the 40-140F range while the interior sits warm and unprotected. Salt penetrates slowly; bacterial growth does not. Nothing in the instruction brings the meat to a safe temperature at any point, before or after.
• No holding temperatureA cure like this would have depended on a cold cellar or springhouse steady in the high thirties to low forties Fahrenheit. The recipe never specifies one, and no holding period is given either. At room temperature the same brine will spoil the meat rather than preserve it.
• Honey adds fermentable sugarA quart of honey in a brine held warm is a substrate for yeast and lactic bacteria. In a cold crock, with a salt load close to saturation, that risk is much reduced; take either condition away and the brine can sour.
• The salt concentration is very strongEight pounds of salt to three gallons of water is roughly 24 percent by weight, close to a saturated brine and far heavier than most modern wet cures. That much salt requires a soaking-out step before the meat is edible, which the recipe does not mention.
• If you want to cure meatUse a current recipe that specifies a measured nitrite cure by weight of meat, a refrigerated holding temperature, and a defined number of days. Treat this page as a document rather than a set of instructions.