Home › The World's Kitchen › Spiced Beef
Spiced Beef
Procure a fifteen-pound piece of beef from round, sharply rub all over with half pound granulated sugar, then place in an earthen basin for twelve hours. Mix on plate a tablespoon each thyme, ground all-spice and grated nutmeg, half teaspoon each of ground ginger, powdered mace, cinnamon, powdered cloves and bay leaf, a teaspoon ground black pepper and an ounce saltpetre. Thoroughly rub beef with mixture, replace in basin and let stand for twelve hours longer. Rub in a pound common salt, replace in basin, cover with cloth and let infuse for six days, being careful to sharply rub it twice daily. Soak it in cold water for two hours, place in a narrow saucepan with enough water to cover, add two sliced each carrots and onions, four branches celery, two beans garlic and a bunch parsley. Cover pan, let boil for five minutes and set in oven for four and a half hours, turning beef once in a while. Remove to a table and let cool off in pan, take up beef, wrap in a cloth and place in ice box. This excellent spiced beef cut in thin slices is always served cold with pickles and parsley greens.
EXTRACT OF MEAT (MEAT GLAZE), GLACE DE VIANDE Place in a six-gallon stock pot one heavy knuckle of veal, eight pounds fresh shin of beef, any raw chicken bones on hand, three carrots, four onions, six leeks, six branches celery, a bunch each parsley and chervil, fill up pot with cold water, set on fire and let very slowly boil (12 hours at least) until water reaches level of ingredients, being careful to skim fat off surface quite frequently. Strain through a cheesecloth into a narrow saucepan, let gently reduce on fire to one-third, then strain again into a smaller saucepan and let reduce on fire until it obtains colour and thickness of demi-glace, skimming and stirring quite frequently meanwhile. Pour extract into a stone jar and let it cool off, tightly cover jar, and be careful to keep it always covered in a cool place. The above extract is of vast importance for strengthening soup, sauces, gravies, etc.
Two recipes share this page: a six-day dry-cured spiced beef, and a classic glace de viande. The cure cannot be reproduced as written, for the reasons below; the meat glaze is simply a long reduction and is still exactly how professional kitchens build one.
- Why the cure fails: saltpetre out of rangeAn ounce of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) rubbed into fifteen pounds of beef works out to roughly 4,000 parts per million of saltpetre by weight of meat, close to double the maximum a modern dry cure permits, though how much a surface rub actually drives into the interior is not knowable from the text. The quantity here is not a safe modern dose, and nitrate excess is a genuine toxicity issue, not a matter of flavour.
- Why the cure fails: no temperature is givenThe beef sits in an earthen basin under a cloth for a total of seven days, rubbed twice daily. Nothing in the text specifies a cold room, an ice box, or any temperature at all. A seven-day cure on a large solid muscle held at ambient kitchen temperature is exactly the condition that allows spoilage and pathogen growth inside the meat, where the surface rub has not penetrated. If you want spiced beef, use a current recipe with measured cure salt and a stated refrigeration temperature.
- "Common salt"Plain coarse salt without iodine or anti-caking agents — what would now be sold as pickling or kosher salt. It is distinguished from the saltpetre, which was bought separately at the chemist.
- "Two beans garlic"Two cloves. "Beans" is most likely Filippini's rendering of the French gousse (d'ail), and the same construction turns up throughout the book. "Four branches celery" likewise means four ribs.
- Earthen basinA glazed stoneware or earthenware bowl, chosen because it does not react with salt and acid and because it stayed cool in a larder. Glass or food-grade plastic is the modern equivalent for any brining work.
- The meat glaze: scale and yieldSix gallons of stock reduced to the thickness of demi-glace yields perhaps a pint or less of glaze — a reduction of well over twenty to one. At household scale, four to six quarts of strong unsalted stock gives a useful half-cup of glaze. Never salt the stock before reducing; the concentration multiplies with the volume loss.
- Reducing without scorchingMove to progressively smaller pans as the volume drops, as the original directs, and keep skimming. Once the liquid is syrupy it catches instantly on the pan bottom, so the last stage wants low heat and near-constant attention. Cooled glaze sets to a firm rubbery block and keeps for weeks refrigerated, or indefinitely frozen in cubes — the "cool place" and stone jar of 1906 were doing the work a freezer now does.
- ChervilStill sold fresh in some markets, faintly anise-scented and heat-sensitive. In a twelve-hour stock its aroma is long gone; parsley stems alone will serve if chervil is unavailable.
The International Cook Book is generally attributed to Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its habits of speech — "beans" of garlic, "branches" of celery, "sharply rub" — betray a Continental professional writing English as a second language for American households. Spiced beef itself belongs to the older British and Irish tradition of preserving a large cut of round with sugar, salt, saltpetre and a heavy hand of warm spices: allspice, mace, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg. The salt and the saltpetre did the preserving; the spices, once expensive, signalled a festive joint, and the saltpetre kept the interior red rather than the grey of plain salt beef. In Cork it survives as a Christmas dish, sold ready-cured by butchers and boiled at home, and the pairing here with pickles and cold parsley is the sort of cold sideboard presentation often associated with the period. The glace de viande that follows is the other half of the same economy: nothing edible left the kitchen, and bones, knuckles and trimmings were boiled down into a concentrate that did the work now done by a jar of demi-glace or a stock cube.