spiced beef

jackyann

Hello all, wanted to ask the wise ones here about spiced beef.
I have often made it at Xmas, haven't for a couple of years, but had lost my recipe.
I went on to Delia on-line (whose recipe I know I had used) and the BBC. Nothing.

I'm not looking for a recipe, as I got my sister to send hers.

But it set me thinking - has there been some sort of health scare? You do marinade it for 2 weeks in total before cooking, and I wondered if there was a problem I was unaware of.
Haven't poisoned guests before, but would hate to be offering something that I shouldn't.
Thanks in advance.

foreign_correspondent

I don't know but I doubt it, what is it marinaded in?

ciderwithrosie_2

Have you tried looking for 'pastrami' recipes as that's more or less the same thing. Just they may have renamed 'spiced beef' to follow fashion.

suki1964

Possibly because saltpeter can be hard to get hold off as it's also used in explosives??

jackyann

suki1964 wrote: »

Possibly because saltpeter can be hard to get hold off as it's also used in explosives??

LOL!

But saltpetre can be omitted - it only helps with the colour - I have mostly done it with ordinary salt.
A kindly, long retired butcher did give me saltpetre in the past, but for at least 10 years I did it with plain salt, and I know my sister does.

However, you may be right, if the decision was made at tech or bureaucrat level rather than asking a cook.

The marinade is basically salt, and spices.
Will try pastrami, however, I think that the renaming "fashion" may be the other way round as I remember spiced beef from childhood gatherings, in the depths of the English countryside. My first taste of pastrami was in the 60s when I went to London and went to the old Petticoat Lane Sunday market. I can still recall the taste.

Farway

You can still buy salt petre

http://www.amazon.co.uk/SALT-PETRE-CURING-BEEF-RECEPIES/dp/B002AK60IE