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Meat (With a cloth Allow handfuls)
with a cloth. Allow 3 handfuls of salt, ¼ lb. of coarse ground ginger, ½ lb. of nutmeg, and ½ lb. of allspice to each ham.
Open the shank by pushing in a bit of stick, and fill with some of the ingredients mentioned, mixed together. Tie the shank tightly with a cord to exclude the air, then rub the hams well with what remains of salt, spices, &c., and lay them in a tub. Rub them every 2 days with the pickle which will drop from them, and in 3 weeks they will have soaked it all up.
Then rub the outsides with a little oatmeal and hang them, well apart, in the kitchen. When dry cover them with bags to guard them from flies. To Cure a Ham. No. 2. (Beechwood.) Take 4 ozs. of saltpetre and rub it well all over the ham. Let it then remain in the pickle tub fill the following day, when you must pour the pickle boiling hot over it. Pickle to consist of ½ lb. of bay salt; ½ lb. of common salt; ½ lb. of very coarse brown sugar; and 1 qt. of very strong ale or porter. Boil them all together for ½ hour. The ham must be left in the tub for 3 weeks or a month, turned every day and the liquor rubbed over it; after that the ham should be smoked.
When wanted for dressing it should be put in water for 24 hours, and should not be boiled quickly.
To Cure Mutton Hams. (Mrs. Charles, Dee Bank by Murtle. 1877.) 4 lbs. of salt, ½ oz. of black pepper, ½ oz. of Jamaica ginger, a little cayenne pepper, ½ lb. of saltpetre, ¼ lb. of the coarsest brown sugar you can get, a little grated nutmeg. Rub the mutton hams over every second day for about 3 weeks with this mixture and then dry them.
This quantity is for 3 mutton hams. They must be cut quite thin like pork ham when brought to table.
To Keep Meat in Hot Weather. (Mrs. Thomas.) Prepare a strong brine of common salt and water, to 1 qt. of water nearly 1 lb. of salt. Boil 20 minutes. Skim well.
To test the strength of the brine throw in a raw egg in its shell, if it floats the brine is strong enough.
Let it get quite cold. Soak a clean cloth in the brine, wring the cloth out and wipe each joint of mutton or beef well with it; but before you wipe them, cut out the kernels or any parts likely to taint.
Between each joint wring out the cloth again, first in fresh water and then in the brine. Hang the joints up.
Next day a sort of slime or scum will have come out over the meat. Wipe this off first, and then, when you have dried the meat well, take another fresh cloth, well wrung out in the brine, and go over each joint again.
Do not, however, apply brine more than this twice or it will salt the meat; but daily wipe each joint of meat with clean cloth, and before roasting go over the meat with a clean cloth, wrung out in fresh water to take away all taste of salt. In hot weather a round will keep some time so rubbed, before roasting, and "eat most tender."
If meat turns green or is discoloured, cut the bit out before roasting, and put into the hole thus made a piece of dry bread.
Take the bread out when the meat is cooked and throw it away; the meat itself will be sweet. In the same way you also put a bit of bread into any fowl you are not sure is very fresh, before roasting, but take out the bread before you dish it.
This is a run of dry- and brine-curing methods from a Victorian country house, ending with advice on keeping meat through hot weather. Several of the practices here are not merely old-fashioned; they are outside any range a present-day cook should attempt, and the last section is actively dangerous.
- The saltpetre is far out of rangeThe mutton ham recipe calls for 1½ lb of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) across three hams — orders of magnitude above modern curing limits, which are measured in grams per kilogram of meat and regulated precisely because nitrate and nitrite are toxic in quantity. The Beechwood ham's 4 oz per ham is likewise unmeasurable against the weight of the meat. Cured meat today uses pre-blended curing salts at specified rates for exactly this reason.
- No weights, no temperatures, no controlNone of these methods states the weight of the ham, the temperature of the curing room, or the salt concentration in the finished meat. Safe curing depends on all three: salt uptake, water activity and cold storage together are what suppress Clostridium botulinum during the weeks a ham sits in a tub. A recipe that says only "3 weeks or a month" and "hang them in the kitchen" gives the cook nothing to work with.
- Hanging in a warm kitchenA Victorian kitchen with a range going was not a cold room, though houses of this kind would often have had cold larders as well, and the climate in north-east Scotland was on the cook's side. Reproducing the step in a centrally heated modern house means holding raw meat for weeks in the temperature band where pathogens multiply fastest.
- The first recipe is a fragmentThe page opens mid-sentence — "with a cloth" — so the beginning of ham No. 1, which presumably covered the initial salting and the state of the meat, is missing. The spice quantities that survive (half a pound each of nutmeg and allspice) are for a whole ham, but without the opening lines the method is incomplete on its face.
- "If meat turns green, cut the bit out"Green or grey discolouration and the "slime or scum" described here are bacterial growth. Excising the visible patch removes neither the bacteria that have spread through the surrounding tissue nor any toxins already produced, and the bread trick does nothing at all beyond absorbing odour. Meat that has gone this way should be discarded.
- The brine-wiping methodWiping joints with a strong salt cloth slows surface spoilage; it does not preserve. The salt never penetrates, the interior of the joint stays at ambient temperature, and the instruction to stop after two applications so as not to over-salt shows the method was always a compromise. Refrigeration replaced it entirely and for good reason.
- The egg-float testFloating a raw egg indicates roughly a saturated or near-saturated brine — a genuinely useful old gauge, and the one piece of technique here that still works. It tells you about salinity only, and nothing about whether the meat itself is safe.
- If you want to cure a hamUse a current recipe with weighed cure, a stated meat weight and a controlled temperature. These pages are worth reading as a record of how a large household managed its meat; they are not a working procedure.
Lady Clark of Tillypronie collected recipes from friends, neighbours and her own kitchens across the second half of the nineteenth century, and the attributions here — Beechwood, Mrs Charles of Dee Bank by Murtle, dated 1877 — are typical of how such a book was assembled: each household had its cure. Mutton hams are a traditional Scottish preparation, the hind leg of a sheep salted, spiced and dried, then sliced very thin at table in the manner of a ham — the recipe here specifies that they be "cut quite thin like pork ham". Saltpetre appears in two of these three cures because it fixes the red colour of cured meat and inhibits spoilage, effects understood empirically for centuries before the chemistry of nitrate reduction was worked out. The final section, on keeping meat in hot weather, is the honest measure of the period: a well-run country house before mechanical refrigeration was engaged in a continuous rearguard action against decay, and the advice to cut out the green part and stop the hole with bread records how far that action sometimes had to go.