Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Spiced Beef
Spiced Beef
Remove the bones from a piece of thin flank of beef and soak for ten days in a covered crock containing a pickle composed of the following ingredients: Boil for twenty minutes two gallons of water, five pounds of salt, two pounds of coarse sugar and four ounces of saltpeter, with two ounces of black pepper and three ounces of mixed spice slightly bruised in a mortar and tied up in a muslin bag and a few bay leaves. Skim off the scum as it rises and let it stand until cold.
Fried Steak, American Style Tenderloin or porterhouse steak is to be selected for this, put it on a clean block, beat it well, but not hard enough to make it look ragged, sprinkle over pepper and salt and dredge with flour on both sides. Place in a hot fryingpan, cover and fry until done, turning frequently. Before it gets hard butter well and place on a hot dish, pepper again, and if desired pour over a tablespoonful of chili vinegar and a tablespoonful of made mustard, and pour the hot gravy over all. Sift powdered cracker over, and serve.
Two separate recipes have run together here — a ten-day cure for spiced beef and, from the word "Tenderloin" onward, an unrelated fried steak. The cure is the titled recipe, and it cannot be followed as printed.
- Saltpetre, and no way to gauge itFour ounces of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) in two gallons of brine is a nitrate load well above what any current curing guideline permits, and nitrate in a long cure converts to nitrite unevenly depending on the microflora in the crock. Modern curing uses pre-blended nitrite salts precisely because a home cook cannot measure or predict this.
- No temperature is given for ten daysThe whole safety of a wet cure rests on holding the meat below about 40F for the entire immersion. A covered crock left at room temperature for ten days is a spoilage and Clostridium botulinum risk, and the recipe never says where to put it.
- No finishing instruction at allThe text stops at the brine. There is no rinse, no simmer, no internal temperature, no indication of whether the beef is boiled, pressed or sliced cold. A cured flank that is never cooked to a safe temperature is not something to improvise. Use a current spiced-beef or corned-beef recipe with stated cure percentages and holding temperatures.
- Thin flankThe old butcher's term for the belly end of the flank, from the underside of the animal; the nearest modern American cuts are navel end brisket or plate. "Remove the bones" suggests the piece came in with rib ends still attached.
- Coarse sugar and mixed spiceCoarse sugar most likely means a coarse unrefined sugar; demerara or turbinado is a reasonable match. "Mixed spice" is not defined here; in a pickle of this kind it probably means a pickling blend on the lines of allspice, coriander, mustard seed, cloves and mace, though the same term was also used for a sweet baking mixture.
- The steak half of the pageThat second recipe is sound in outline. Beat the steak to relax it rather than to flatten it, fry covered in a heavy pan, and expect a well-done grey-brown steak — this is period American "fried steak," not a seared rare one. Chili vinegar is a pepper-infused vinegar; hot sauce cut with cider vinegar stands in. "Powdered cracker" is finely crushed soda cracker, sifted over as a thickener and garnish.
Spiced beef is an Anglo-Irish keeping dish: a thin, fatty cut held for a week or more in a sweetened, spiced, nitrate brine, then boiled and eaten cold in slices, and it survives in Cork as a Christmas tradition. Its presence in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 book is a reminder that a great hotel kitchen was still a preserving operation as much as a cooking one. The printed page here also shows how these compilations were assembled, with short entries running together, so that a brine recipe ends mid-thought and a fried steak begins without a break. The steak entry, with its chili vinegar, made mustard and dusting of cracker crumbs, is a good snapshot of what "American style" meant to a New York hotel at the turn of the century: plain frying, then a sharp condiment finish.