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Corned Beef
Five pounds salt, three pounds of sugar, one ounce of saltpetre to one hundred pounds of beef. Take enough water to cover the beef, put salt, sugar and saltpetre in the water and let come to a boil; then pour over beef boiling hot.
This is a curing brine rather than a cooking recipe, and it is written for a scale and a set of conditions that no longer exist in a domestic kitchen. The specific problems are below.
- The water is unmeasuredEverything hinges on the concentration of salt and nitrate in the finished brine, and "enough water to cover the beef" fixes none of it. A hundred pounds of beef packed tight in a barrel takes far less water than the same beef loosely stacked, so the same five pounds of salt can give a brine that cures properly or one that does nothing but season the outside.
- Saltpetre is not a seasoningSaltpetre is potassium nitrate. Curing nitrate and nitrite are now sold as measured, dyed premixes precisely because the safe window is narrow and the powder is indistinguishable from salt by eye. One ounce spread over an unknown volume of water and an unknown weight of meat is not a dose anyone can verify.
- No temperature is given anywhereBrine curing depends on the meat staying cold — a few degrees above freezing — for the whole immersion, because the cure penetrates slowly and spoilage organisms do not. The original assumes a cold cellar or a cold-weather slaughter and says nothing, because for its original readers it did not have to.
- No cure timeBeef in brine needs days to weeks depending on thickness, and the recipe gives no period at all. Meat pulled early is salted on the surface and raw in the centre; meat left in an unrefrigerated barrel too long is simply spoiled.
- Boiling brine on raw meat is the worst casePouring the liquid over boiling hot sets the surface protein and drops the whole mass into the temperature range where bacteria multiply fastest, then holds it there while it cools. Whatever the original conditions of storage, the instruction on its own is not safe advice.
- ScaleThe proportions are for a hundred pounds of beef, barrel quantities rather than anything a domestic kitchen handles. Dividing down does not fix the problems above, it multiplies the measurement error.
- If you want corned beefUse a current recipe that gives brine volume, cure salt by weight, refrigeration temperature and immersion time as numbers. Those four figures are exactly what this entry omits.
"Corned" has nothing to do with maize: corn in older English meant a grain or particle of anything, and the coarse grains of rock salt used to preserve beef were the corns in question. Salt beef was one of the staple winter foods of the American household before mechanical refrigeration, and a recipe pitched at a hundred pounds points to barrel-scale packing rather than anything a modern kitchen would attempt. The sugar in the brine softens the harshness of the salt; the saltpetre, used in butchery for centuries before anyone understood why, fixes the pink colour and suppresses the organisms that cause the worst spoilage. Books of this period print such formulas in a line or two because the surrounding knowledge — the cold cellar, the weighted lid, the weeks of waiting, the smell of a brine gone wrong — was assumed in the reader.