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Pickle of Brine
Pickle of brine is the name usually given in this country to the liquor in which substances used for food are soaked in order to give them certain flavors, or to assist in their preservation. These are commonly known to French cooks as marinades, under which heading some special recipes will be found. The butcher preserves meat in brine, which is described under that head. The preservation of vegetables and fruit is described under pickles, but the following recipes for the manufacture of pickling liquor used by cooks for various purposes will be found useful: (1.) FOR BEEF.--Dissolve nine quarts of salt in eighteen gallons of water, and add two pounds of coarse brown sugar and eight ounces of saltpeter. Boil and skim well. Let the beef get thoroughly cold and firm after killing, and let as much of the blood as possible drain out before putting it in the pickle. The brine should be boiled up and skimmed occasionally, then it will last for many months, and suffice at one time to pickle about half an ordinary ox. (2.) FOR HAMS.--For a large ham, allow eight ounces of bay salt, four ounces of common salt, and one ounce each of saltpeter and black pepper. Rub the ham well with this mixture every day for four days. At the end of that time pour eight ounces of treacle over the ham, rubbing it well in. Leave it for a month, rubbing and turning occasionally, after which soak the ham in cold water for twenty-four hours, then hang it up to dry. When cooked, the ham should be put in cold water and placed over a slow fire. (3.) FOR PORK.--Put in a boiler as much water as will well cover the pork. When it boils, mix in salt by degrees. To ascertain whether there is salt enough in the water, put an egg in, and when it floats, there is sufficient. Pour the brine in an earthenware jar and let it cool. It is then ready to pour over the pork. (4.) FOR TONGUE.--Crush eight ounces of common salt with two ounces of saltpeter, and mix them with one pound of treacle. When the tongue is prepared, rub it over with the above mixture. It should be kept in pickle for a fortnight, being turned and well rubbed occasionally. (5.) FOR MACKEREL.--For one pint of vinegar allow one-third teacupful of beer, three bay leaves, one-half ounce of ground allspice, one-fourth ounce each of salt and pepper, and one-third teaspoonful of cayenne pepper. Mix all these ingredients together, and pour them over the fish. A sufficient quantity of pickle should be made to cover the fish completely. (6.) FOR SALMON.--Mix with one quart of the cooking liquor of the fish three gills of vinegar, four blades of mace, four bay leaves, three pieces of whole ginger, one-fourth ounce each of black pepper and allspice, and a little salt. Boil the liquor for half an hour, then pour it over the fish, which should be laid in a deep dish or jar, and cover it with another dish to keep the air out.
These are curing brines, not seasoning marinades, and every one of them relies on a nineteenth-century assumption that a cellar or larder is cold enough to keep meat safe for weeks. Read them as a record of how a hotel butcher worked, not as working instructions.
- Saltpeter is unmeasurable hereThe beef brine puts eight ounces of saltpeter into eighteen gallons; the tongue cure puts two ounces directly onto one tongue's surface by hand. Nitrate and nitrite curing today is done to a fixed parts-per-million limit with a premixed cure, precisely because hand-rubbed saltpeter distributes unevenly and can be both too weak in the interior and far too strong at the surface.
- A month at unstated temperatureThe ham sits in cure for a month and the tongue for a fortnight with no temperature given at all. Curing depends on holding the meat cold enough throughout, and the recipe assumes a cold larder the modern reader may not have. Without that, the interior of a large ham can spend weeks at temperatures where spoilage organisms and pathogens grow.
- The egg-float test is not a measurementThe pork brine determines salt strength by floating an egg. Egg buoyancy varies with the age and size of the egg and the temperature of the water, so the test gives only a rough indication of salinity. Cure strength is the one variable in preserved pork that cannot be left to approximation.
- Reused brine kept for monthsThe beef pickle is intended to be boiled and skimmed periodically and to last "many months" while half an ox passes through it. Each carcass adds blood, protein and surface bacteria; periodic boiling reduces the load but does not make a reused brine safe by any current standard.
- The mackerel is not cooked or processedThe recipe gives no cooking step for the fish at all; vinegar, beer and spices are simply mixed and poured over it, with no measured acidity and no refrigeration instruction. Fish preserved this way in a covered vessel has been linked to botulism, and the parasite risk in raw mackerel is handled today by commercial freezing.
- "Cover it with another dish to keep the air out"The salmon is potted under a boiled, vinegared liquor with air excluded, but the vessel is not sealed or sterilised, the acidity is not measured to a known pH, and no storage temperature is given. Excluding oxygen without controlling acidity and temperature favours anaerobes.
- Archaic terms, for reading purposesTreacle is British dark cane syrup, close to molasses. Bay salt is coarse solar-evaporated sea salt, once valued for curing because it dissolved slowly. A gill is half a cup; a "teacupful" in this period is roughly three-quarters of a cup and is not a standardised measure. Blades of mace are the dried outer casing of nutmeg.
- If you want to cure meat or fishUse a current recipe from a source that specifies cure percentages, nitrite parts per million, holding temperatures and times, or buy the cured product. Nothing on this page should be scaled down and attempted.
Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) was as much a professional reference as a collection of dishes, and this entry shows it: curing and potting are treated as part of the house's own work, with the entry cross-referencing a separate 'butcher' heading. The note that these liquors are "commonly known to French cooks as marinades" reflects the book's habit of translating between the French brigade vocabulary that ruled American hotel kitchens and the plainer English of the household reader. The quantities give the scale away — eighteen gallons of brine sufficient for half an ox at one time is a hotel cellar's arithmetic, not a family's. Saltpeter (potassium nitrate) had been the standard meat preservative for centuries by this point, valued as much for the pink colour it fixed in cured beef and tongue as for its keeping power; the chemistry behind that colour, and the nitrite that actually does the work, was only beginning to be understood in the 1890s, which is why recipes of this era prescribe it largely by tradition.