No. 15

Brine

Saumure

Brine is used for the preservation of meats and at the same time to give them the taste of any preferred aroma; for this reason we select among the many ways that are employed in different countries, one that we are sure will answer for our present needs.

Boil in a large kettle twenty-five quarts of water, twenty-four pounds of salt, two pounds of saltpetre, three pounds of brown sugar and two ounces of carbonate of soda. Into a bag put a mixture weighting ten ounces, including thyme, bayleaf, sage, rosemary, juniper berries, savory, having more of each as desired, or less, if a certain taste displeases. After the salt is dissolved, leave the liquid to cool and then weight it with a salt weight; with this it should be twelve degrees.

To salt the meats, be careful to accomplish this when dry, by rubbing the meat with salt and a little saltpetre, and then let rest for twenty-four hours before putting it in brine. Strain the brine and cover all the salted parts and leave it in a cool place during the operation. The time needed for salting is according to the size of the pieces.

A ham weighing seventeen pounds requires twenty-five days; a breast weighing twelve pounds requires fifteen days; a shoulder weighing fifteen pounds requires twenty days.

These indications are for meats to be eaten unsmoked. In case they should be smoked leave them ten days longer. Soak for twelve hours in cold water and then hang them in a smoking room or else in a big chimney, having them smoke slowly with oak shavings mixed with thyme, bayleaf, sage, etc.

To Salt Hams.—Put into a large kettle one pound of salt, four ounces of saltpetre, six ounces of brown sugar, thyme, bayleaf, basil, two ounces of juniper berries, a quarter of an ounce of botanic calament, all tied up in a bag, and when the salt has dissolved by boiling, remove from the fire, let cool to settle the brine and then pour off the clear part. Burn some aromatic herbs in a barrel, put in the hams, pour the brine, already strained through a sieve, over, close the barrel and leave it for eighteen days; drain out the hams, hang them up for twelve days in a well-aired cool place, then hang them in the chimney for twenty days. Wrap them in sheets of paper and hang in a dry place.

For Winter Hams.—These hams can only be kept during the winter. Have two hundred pounds of small corn-fed hams; rub over well with salt, then put them into a barrel and leave them for three days in a very cool place. Three days later put them into another barrel, cover over with salt brine, having sufficient salt to allow a potato to float on the surface; the hams must be entirely immersed in the brine, cover with a board and a weight atop. Twelve days after change them into another barrel and pour the brine again over, this is so that they change positions and salt easier.

After another lapse of twelve days, drain and put them to soak in cold water for twelve hours; drain once more, leave to dry in the open air for eight days, then smoke them in a smoke house for two days with hickory wood.

← No. 14 Breasts of Pork Salted and Smoked, English B Elementary Methods No. 16 Clarified and Purified Butter →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a nineteenth-century curing cellar's working brine, and it is the one category of old recipe that cannot be brought forward. The problems are the nitrate dose, the absence of any measured temperature, and a salt concentration too weak for the length of time the meat sits in it.

The saltpetre is far out of rangeTwo pounds of potassium nitrate to twenty-five quarts of water, and four ounces in the ham brine, is many times the nitrate level permitted in cured meat today. Modern curing uses pre-mixed nitrite/nitrate salts at a few grams per kilogram of meat precisely because nitrate cannot be eyeballed at this scale.
"Twelve degrees" on a salt weightRanhofer names no scale; a French salt weight of the period was usually graduated in degrees Baumé, which would put this at roughly half-saturation, though the reading sits oddly beside the twenty-four pounds of salt called for. Either way the strength is set by a floating instrument rather than by weighed percentages against the weight of the meat, and brine held for twenty-five days without a verified cold temperature is the condition modern guidance warns against for the interior of a large bone-in ham, where Clostridium botulinum is the concern.
"A cool place" is not a temperatureEvery stage here — twenty-five days in brine, twelve days hanging, twenty days in a chimney — depends on an unheated stone cellar or larder in winter. There is no number anywhere in the text. Curing meat safely requires the brine and the meat to be held at a documented refrigeration temperature throughout, and nothing in this method allows that to be checked.
The floating-potato testIn the winter hams, saturation is judged by whether a potato floats. That indicates only that the brine is dense; it says nothing about whether the salt has penetrated the centre of a bone-in ham, which is where spoilage and toxin production begin.
Cold smoking with no temperatureSmoking with no temperature — Twenty days in a chimney, or two days over hickory, is smoking at whatever temperature the flue happens to give; the text never says. Smoke has some preservative effect but is not sufficient on its own; it is safe only on meat whose cure has already been verified, at a controlled temperature, and this text controls neither.
ScaleThe winter hams begin with two hundred pounds of pork and multiple barrels. Even setting the safety questions aside, this is a butcher's operation, not a domestic one.
Vanished ingredients"Botanic calament" is calamint (Clinopodium/Calamintha), a mint-family herb once common in kitchen gardens and now rare in trade. "Carbonate of soda" here is washing soda rather than bicarbonate; the recipe does not say what it is for, though soda was commonly added to soften hard water.
If you want cured hamUse a current, tested curing recipe with weighed cure salts, stated percentages and stated temperatures. Read this page as a record of how a large kitchen worked, not as a procedure.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) was Charles Ranhofer's summation of some thirty years as chef of Delmonico's in New York, and its "Elementary Methods" chapter assumes a brigade that butchered, cured and smoked in-house rather than buying in. Saumure is simply the French for brine, and Ranhofer's opening remark — that he has chosen one method from the many used in different countries — is a fair description of how curing formulas circulated in the period: as house traditions, adjusted by feel, with saltpetre added both as a preservative and for the pink colour it fixes in the meat. The nitrate connection to colour and to botulism control was understood only empirically then; the shift to precisely weighed nitrite cures came in the twentieth century, once the chemistry and the toxicity limits were worked out. The winter hams are the most revealing entry on the page: they "can only be kept during the winter" because the whole method depends on ambient cold, and a commercial kitchen without mechanical refrigeration had to schedule its curing around the calendar.