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Smoked Beef
To each twelve pounds of beef rub in the following mixture: One pint of salt, a breakfast cupful of brown sugar, the same amount of molasses, and half a teaspoonful of pounded saltpeter. After rubbing it well into the beef, allow it to lie in the mixture, turning it over several times, for ten days, when drain, rub bran over it, and hang in the smoke-house to smoke for several days.
This is a dry cure followed by cold smoking, and it cannot be reproduced safely from the text as given. The points below explain what is missing and what the archaic measures mean, not how to proceed.
- The saltpetre is far below a working doseHalf a teaspoon of pounded saltpetre spread over twelve pounds of beef is a token amount, and rubbed on by hand it will be distributed unevenly. Modern curing relies on a measured nitrite salt weighed to the gram against the weight of the meat, because the margin between too little to inhibit Clostridium botulinum and too much to be safe to eat is narrow. "Pounded saltpeter" from a druggist was also of unknown purity.
- No temperature is given anywhereThe ten-day cure and the days in the smoke-house both assume a cold season and a cold building. A dry cure held above about 40F is simply meat sitting warm in sugar and salt; smoke at 80-100F is an incubator, not a preservative. Without controlled cure temperature and controlled smoke temperature there is no way to know whether the piece was ever safe.
- Cold smoke does not cook the beefNothing in this method brings the meat near a pathogen-kill temperature. The safety of the finished piece rests entirely on salt concentration, water activity and nitrite, none of which are specified or measurable here. If you want smoked or dried beef, use a current recipe with weighed cure and stated temperatures.
- "A pint of salt" is a volume, not a weightDepending on grain size a pint of salt can run anywhere from roughly 10 ounces (coarse flake) to nearly 20 ounces (fine), and period salt was coarser and often damp. Cure calculations are done by weight for exactly this reason, so the ratio the recipe intends cannot be recovered.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup in this period is larger than a teacup, generally taken as about 8 to 10 fluid ounces, so the sugar and molasses quantities here are approximate at best.
- The bran and the smoke-houseBran was rubbed over the drained meat before hanging, a practice found in farmhouse smoking; the reason usually given is that it dries and protects the surface, though the recipe itself does not say. A smoke-house is an outbuilding holding a smouldering hardwood fire at low temperature for days; a domestic grill or stovetop smoker is not a substitute and will not behave the same way.
- Twelve poundsThe cut is unnamed. Dried beef of this period was commonly made from the round, cured whole and later shaved paper-thin for creamed dried beef, which would account for the scale.
Smoked beef of this kind belongs to the American farmhouse larder rather than to the Waldorf's ranges, and its presence in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection is a reminder that the book was assembled as a general household reference as much as a record of hotel cooking. Salt, sugar and saltpetre cures for beef were standard practice through the nineteenth century, when a smokehouse was ordinary equipment and molasses did double duty as sweetener and colouring; the thin-shaved product that resulted is the ancestor of the packaged dried beef later used for creamed beef on toast. Saltpetre, potassium nitrate, had been used in curing for centuries before anyone understood that its effect came from bacterial conversion to nitrite, which is why recipes of this era can call for a vague pinch and offer no explanation of what it does.