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Preserved Beef
Mrs. Carter.
For preserving one hundred pounds beef: Six pounds salt, twc ounces salt-petre, two tablespoons soda, two pounds sugar, four gallons water; mix well together; sprinkle the bottom of the barrel with salt; put in the beef with very little salt between each layer; pour over the brine and put on a weight to keep all well covered.
This is a barrel-curing brine from the era before household refrigeration, and it cannot be followed safely now. The points below explain what is missing rather than how to fix it; anyone wanting to cure beef at home should work from a current, tested recipe with weighed cure and monitored temperatures.
- No temperature anywhereBrine curing only works when the meat is held cold — in the low 30s to high 30s Fahrenheit — for the whole cure. A barrel in a nineteenth-century cellar in December did that; a barrel anywhere else does not. Without a stated holding temperature this recipe gives no protection against spoilage organisms growing faster than the salt penetrates.
- No cure timeThe instructions stop at "put on a weight." A 100 lb barrel of beef in pieces needs weeks, with the time set by the thickness of the cuts, and the brine needs checking and often reboiling partway through. A cure with no duration and no inspection schedule is not a cure.
- Saltpetre is not a modern curing agentTwo ounces of potassium nitrate across 100 lb of beef works out to roughly 1,200 ppm, far above anything a modern cure would use. Nitrate does nothing by itself; it has to be reduced to nitrite by bacteria in the brine, which is slow and unpredictable. Commercial and home curing now use pre-measured nitrite blends precisely because the older method cannot be dosed reliably.
- The sodaTwo tablespoons of soda are called for with no explanation; soda was commonly said to keep a brine from turning sour, but the recipe does not say so, and the amount is given only as a tablespoon measure.
- ScaleOne hundred pounds of beef is a barrel-scale winter batch, not a project. Even the ingredient list is unhelpfully vague by modern standards — "two tablespoons soda" and "very little salt between each layer" are not quantities you can verify.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in the 1870s from recipes contributed by named local women, and Mrs. Carter's entry is a good example of what such a book was for: not dinner-party cooking but the annual work of laying in food. Salt beef in a barrel was the standard way of carrying a slaughtered animal through the year, and the same brine, with the same saltpetre, produced what English and Irish kitchens called corned beef — "corn" meaning the coarse grains of salt, not maize. Sugar and molasses appear in salt-beef brines well before this period, so the sugar and the soda here need not mark it as a later refinement. Within a generation of this book's publication, mechanical refrigeration and commercial packing houses had made the household beef barrel largely obsolete, which is why recipes like this one survive mainly in print.