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To Corn Beef
Mrs. A. M. Gibbs.
To each gallon of cold water, put one quart of rock salt, one ounce of salt-petre and four ounces of brown sugar, (it need not be boiled), as long as any salt remains undissolved, the meat will be sweet. If any scum should rise, scald and skim well; add more salt, salt-petre and sugar; as you put each piece of meat into the brine, rub over with salt. If the weather is hot, gash the meat to the bone, and put it in salt. Put a flat stone or some weight on the meat to keep it under the brine.
Or this: To every four gallons of water allow two pounds of brown sugar and six pounds of salt, boil about twenty minutes, taking off the scum ; the next day turn it on the meat packed in the pickling tub; pour off this brine; boil and strain every two months, adding three ounces of brown sugar and half a pound of common salt. It will keep good a year. Sprinkle the meat with salt the next day, wipe dry before turning the pickle over it. Let it entirely cover the meat; add four ounces salt-petre. Canvas lids are excellent for covering, as they admit the air and exclude flies. Mutton and beef may be kept sweet several weeks by simply rubbing well with dry salt and closely covering. Turn the pieces whenever the vessel is uncovered.
This is a nineteenth-century wet-cure for beef held in an open tub, and it depends on conditions a modern kitchen does not have: a cold cellar, daily attention, and a household willing to judge safety by smell. The chemistry and the storage method both fall outside current practice.
- The saltpetre is unmeasured against the meatCuring salts are dosed by weight of meat, not by volume of brine, precisely because nitrate and nitrite are toxic above a narrow range. "One ounce of salt-petre" per gallon of water, with the meat quantity never stated, gives no way to know what any given piece absorbs. The second method's "add four ounces salt-petre" to four gallons is equally untethered.
- Nitrate is not interchangeable with modern curePeriod saltpetre is potassium nitrate, which relies on bacterial conversion to nitrite over a long cure. Modern products such as pink curing salt are pre-mixed nitrite at a fixed low percentage and are dosed differently. Substituting one for the other by eye is how people get it badly wrong.
- No temperature is given, and temperature is the whole cureA wet cure must be held at refrigeration temperature throughout, or the interior of a thick cut spoils faster than the brine can penetrate it. The instruction to "gash the meat to the bone" in hot weather suggests the writer knew warm weather worked against the cure, though the text does not say so outright.
- Reused brineBoiling, straining and re-topping the same pickle every two months, then returning it to meat, recirculates spoilage organisms and leaves the salt concentration unknown. There is no way to verify strength without measurement.
- Open tub, canvas lidCanvas that "admits the air" also admits airborne contamination, and a weighted stone in a tub is not a sealed or sanitised environment. Any piece that floats above the brine line is exposed.
- Dry-salted mutton for "several weeks"The closing note — rub with dry salt, cover, keep some weeks — has no salt weight, no temperature and no endpoint. This is the least controlled instruction on the page.
- What to do insteadIf you want corned beef, use a current tested recipe with cure weighed against the weight of the brisket and the whole thing held under refrigeration.
Corning has nothing to do with maize: the name comes from the coarse grains or "corns" of rock salt rubbed into the meat, and it described the process long before it described a deli sandwich. Recipes like this one belonged to the household economy of the 1870s, when a family bought or slaughtered beef in quantity and had to make it last — the pickling tub in the cellar was the refrigerator, and the saltpetre was there as much for the red colour as for preservation, since salt alone turns cured beef a dull grey-brown. The Home Cook Book was a community compilation that is generally understood to have drawn heavily on the earlier Chicago Home Cook Book, and the entry offers two competing methods with no verdict between them: Mrs. Gibbs gave her brine, someone else gave theirs, and the reader was expected to have enough experience to choose. That expected experience is exactly what has since disappeared, and it is the reason the page reads as unsafe now rather than merely old-fashioned.