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Pickle for Beef
To a patent pail of water, three pounds coarse salt, 1 ounce of saltpetre, 1 pound of brown sugar. Boil and skim. Pour over the meat when cold. For ham pickle add one ounce more saltpetre and a heaping tablespoonful ground black pepper.
This is a curing brine, not a cooking recipe, and it is the kind of preservation formula that cannot be followed safely from an old text. The problems are specific and structural.
- The vessel sets the whole formula, and it is undefinedA "patent pail" was a household bucket of unstated capacity. Every safety margin in a cure depends on the ratio of nitrate and salt to water and meat weight, and here the water volume, the meat weight and the curing time are all left out.
- Saltpetre is not a modern curing saltSaltpetre is potassium nitrate. It works slowly, by bacterial conversion to nitrite, which means the protective nitrite level in the meat rises and falls unpredictably over the cure. Modern curing salts are pre-measured nitrite (or nitrite plus nitrate) precisely so the effective dose is known; an ounce of saltpetre in an unknown volume of water is not a dose.
- Nitrate out of range cuts both waysToo little and the brine does not inhibit Clostridium botulinum in the anaerobic interior of a large piece of meat. Too much is a toxicity concern in its own right. Without a stated water volume there is no way to know which side of the line this sits on, and the ham version doubles the saltpetre with no other change.
- No temperature is given anywhereA wet cure of this kind needs to be held steadily under refrigeration, roughly 36-40F. The instruction is simply to pour the brine over the meat when cold and leave it. At cellar or room temperature, spoilage organisms outpace salt penetration into the deep muscle.
- No curing time, no pumping, no overhaulLarge cuts and hams need the brine renewed or the meat repacked periodically, and thick hams were often injected along the bone. None of that appears here, and deep-seated bone taint was a recognised failure of hams that cured too slowly.
- The sugar and pepper are not preservativesThe sugar and pepper are not the preserving agents -- The brown sugar softens the harshness of the salt and feeds the bacteria that reduce nitrate; the ground black pepper in the ham version is flavour and, traditionally, an insect deterrent on the exposed surface. The salt and nitrate are what the preservation rests on.
- If you want to cure beef or hamUse a current recipe that states meat weight, water volume, a measured commercial cure, brine temperature and days per inch of thickness. This entry is worth reading as a document, not as a procedure.
Wet-curing brines like this one were a fixture of American household books through the nineteenth century, when a family that killed a beef or a hog in cold weather had to convert most of it into something that would keep until spring. The four components are the standard set: coarse salt to draw water out and raise osmotic pressure, brown sugar to temper the salt and keep the meat from becoming brick-hard, saltpetre for the pink colour and the antimicrobial effect it was long valued for without being understood, and boiling-and-skimming to drive off the scum thrown up by unrefined salt and sugar of the period. The instruction to measure by "a patent pail" is a good marker of how these books worked: they assumed a shared kitchen inventory, so a bucket was a unit.