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Pickle for Corned Beef and Hams
Nine pounds of salt, six gallons water, one ounce of saltpetre, one ounce pearlash, one pound of brown sugar, one quart of molasses; boil, skim, pour it on hot or cold, to one hundred pounds of meat.
This is a curing brine, not a table pickle, and it belongs to a period when meat was salted in a cold cellar through the winter and the results were judged by nose and luck. The chemistry and the missing instructions both put it outside what can be recommended today.
- No temperature and no timeThe recipe never says how cold the meat must be kept, nor how many days or weeks it sits in the brine. Nitrate curing depends entirely on holding the meat below about 40F for the whole immersion; above that, the interior of a 100 lb batch of hams spoils faster than the salt can penetrate, and Clostridium botulinum is among the risks in a low-oxygen, low-acid brine.
- Saltpetre is not measurable this wayOne ounce of potassium nitrate dispersed in six gallons of water and applied to 100 lb of mixed cuts gives no reliable concentration in any individual ham. Modern curing uses weighed nitrite or nitrate premixes calculated against the weight of the meat precisely because uneven uptake means some pieces get too little to protect them and others too much.
- PearlashPearlash is crude potassium carbonate, leached from wood ash. It was sold as a leavening alkali and a general household chemical, and the grade sold for household use was not a food-purity product. It has no role in a cure that any current method recognises.
- Pouring it on hot"Pour it on hot or cold" is the instruction that should give a modern cook most pause. Brine poured on hot takes the mass hours to cool, carrying the meat slowly down through the range where bacteria multiply fastest, which is the opposite of what a cure needs.
- ScaleOne hundred pounds of meat and six gallons of brine is a farm-cellar quantity. Even scaled down proportionally it will not give a cure of known strength, because how much salt and nitrate any individual piece takes up from a brine is not controlled by the recipe.
- If you want corned beef or hamUse a current recipe that weighs curing salt against the weight of the meat and specifies refrigeration temperature and days per inch of thickness. Read this page as a record of how it was once done.
Barrel-cured beef and pork were the backbone of the American winter larder well into the twentieth century, and general household books commonly carried a brine formula in their miscellaneous pages, filed alongside furniture polish and ink. "Corned" refers to the coarse grains, or corns, of salt used on the meat rather than to any grain. The other ingredients each had a job the period understood empirically: molasses and brown sugar to soften the harshness of the salt, saltpetre to fix the pink colour and check spoilage, and pearlash, a potash alkali leached from wood ashes, whose role in the brine is not spelled out and has often been explained as a corrective to acidity. Pearlash largely disappeared from kitchens as manufactured baking soda and baking powder took over in the later nineteenth century, so its appearance here suggests an older formula carried forward rather than anything new.