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Spiced Corned Beef
To ten pounds of beef take two cupfuls of salt, two cupfuls of molasses, two tablespoonfuls of saltpetre, one tablespoonful of pepper, one tablespoonful of cloves; rub well into the beef; turn every day and rub the mixture in; will be ready for use in ten days.
A little flour dredged over the top of a cake will keep the icing from running.
When sponge cake gets dry, it is very nice cut in thin slices and toasted.
When frying doughnuts, if a large slice of raw potato is put in the fat, it will prevent black specks from appearing on their surface. Hot bread can be cut smoothly with a hot knife.
Ginger cookies mixed with cold coffee instead of water, is an improvement.
Onion juice or extract, the easiest way to obtain this, is to cut the onion in half and press in a lemon squeezer. Do not pat or smooth down mashed potatoes, as it makes them heavy.
Turnips can be improved by adding one or two tablespoonfuls of sugar when cooking. Eggs covered when frying will cook more evenly.
Tarragon vinegar not only for salads, but for other household requirements, is preferred by most cooks.
To prepare garlic extract, pierce half a dozen cloves of garlic and cover them with two and one-half ounces of alcohol. This will grow stronger with age.
For breaded dishes, except fried oysters, stale and dried bread crumbs are preferred to cracker crumbs.
Use a bay leaf whole in cooking chicken or any meat. It gives it a delicious flavor.
This is a dry cure for beef, followed by a run of unrelated kitchen hints that the compositor packed into the same paragraph to fill the page. The cure itself cannot be reproduced safely, and the reasons are worth spelling out.
- The saltpetre is far out of rangeTwo tablespoonfuls of potassium nitrate is roughly 30 to 40 grams for ten pounds of meat — on the order of one percent of the meat's weight. Modern curing practice limits nitrate and nitrite to a few hundred parts per million, many times less, because nitrate converts to nitrite in the meat and nitrite in quantity is toxic. A recipe that specifies the nitrate by the tablespoon cannot be scaled or trusted.
- No temperature is givenA ten-day cure of this kind depends on the meat being held cold throughout, at about refrigerator temperature. The book assumes a cold cellar or a winter pantry and says nothing about it. At room temperature a ten-pound piece of beef sitting under salt and molasses for ten days is a spoilage problem, not a ham.
- The molasses feeds the wrong thingsSugar is normal in a cure, but combined with an unspecified holding temperature and no controlled nitrite level it gives surface organisms something to work with before the salt has penetrated to the centre of a thick cut.
- Penetration is not addressedRubbing a mixture on the outside of a ten-pound piece of beef does not tell you how thick it is or where the thickest point is. Commercial and modern home cures either pump brine, use a measured immersion brine, or specify maximum thickness for exactly this reason.
- If you want corned beefUse a current recipe with a weighed cure — nitrite is sold for home use in premixed form precisely so that the dose is not left to a spoon — and a refrigerated cure at a stated temperature.
- The hints that follow are separateFlour under icing, cold coffee in ginger cookies, an onion pressed in a lemon squeezer, a bay leaf left whole: these are unconnected filler items and have nothing to do with the beef. The garlic extract steeped in alcohol is a flavouring tincture; vodka behaves the same way.
- Stale crumbs over cracker crumbsThe preference noted here is a common one; dried bread crumbs are generally held to brown more evenly than cracker crumbs, which is why the exception made for oysters — where a cracker crust was traditional — stands out.
Corning has nothing to do with maize; the word comes from the coarse grains, or "corns," of salt rubbed into the meat, and the technique long predates refrigeration as the standard way of holding beef through a season. Saltpetre appears in these cures because cooks had observed for centuries that it kept the meat red rather than letting it turn the grey-brown of plain salt beef, though the chemistry u2014 nitrate reducing to nitrite, which fixes the pigment and suppresses Clostridium botulinum — was not understood until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the safe dose was not regulated in the United States until well after this book. The molasses, cloves and pepper mark this as the sweeter, spiced style of cure common in American and English households, closer to what a butcher would sell as spiced beef than to plain brisket.