This is the final entry in a successful project to reproduce a traditional spiced beef round from a 150-year-old recipe.

Spiced Round! The little dots are spiced fat, which taste like little flavor pockets.

After getting the recipe right, finding the beef, threading lard strips through it for hours, and locating a suitable container for five pounds of meat and 1 gallon of brine, the Spiced Round of Nashville Yesteryear was ready for its bath.

The original 1880s recipe coated the beast with pepper and saltpeter, then dunked it in a pretty caustic solution (1 ounce of cure for 2 gallons of water) for three weeks, maybe four.

The New, Improved, Ultra Modern Reformulated Brine: no saltpeter, just pink curing salt, and just five days of curing! Five days in brine and the spiced round is cured and ready to cook. You could start now, or even a week from now, have enough time between now and Christmas to make one. Or even do it twice.

After the five day bath, I cut off the cheesecloth sleeve (available from Butcher’s Supply), then slipped the beef into another sleeve (dampen the cloth first) and tied it very tightly at the ends. The recipe calls for boiling 15 to 20  minute per pound for a total of 75 minutes for my 5-pound roast. I used a pressure cooker for 25 minutes instead–I’m an apostle of pressure cooking.

After cooking, the beef cools in the water. Then the meat gets a little fridge time until it’s cold.

The slicing is no time to slouch–it’s still top round, so it’s chewy. And now its loaded with spices, which are nicest in small doses, less nice in a big chewy mouthful. Thin slicing is pretty critical to enjoying Spiced Round, so get a cooperative store or a friend with a meat slicer to slice it very thin.

With a very sharp knife and a lot of patience, you could probably do it by hand, but really, slice it as thinly as you can.

I didn’t know what to expect from Spiced Round, and really liked it. It’s good rolled around a twig of cheese, or not rolled around cheese, or just eaten with your fingers, standing in the open refrigerator door.  Spicy mustard brings out the best in it, to my taste, but maybe Durkee’s Sauce would be equally good. Next up for experimentation is a reuben made with it.

My Spiced Round had unspiced regions in the center where the spiced fat didn’t make it. If I make Spiced Round again, I’ll try to use a larding needle to thread lard strips all the way through the meat.

Spiced Round on rye with horseradish mustard

Traditional German-Nashvillian Spiced Round of Beef

The headnote in the Germantown Cookbook says this recipe for spiced round was made in the 1880s at the Christopher Power place on West Cedar Street.

Brine

1 gallon water

1/4 ounce pink curing salt

20 ounces salt

10 ounces sugar

Beef

1 pound slab bacon or salt meat

2 teaspoons cinnamon

1 tablespoon ground allspice

2 teaspoons ground cloves

1 tablespoon pepper

5 pounds beef round, 3 to 4 inches thick

For the brine, combine the water, curing salt, salt and sugar in a stockpot. Bring to a boil, stirring to help the salt and sugar dissolve. Let cool completely.

Cut any rind off the salt meat. Cut away any big areas of muscle. Cut the fat into slivers about 1/4-inch or less. Combine the cinnamon, allspice, cloves and pepper on a plate or waxed paper. Roll the fat slivers in the spice mixture.

With a sharpening steel, poke holes about 1/2 inch apart in the beef round. Poke, push or thread the fat strips into the meat.

Dampen a cheesecloth sleeve and slip the round into it. Tie it tightly to keep the fat slivers from working their way out. Pour the brine into a nonreactive container like a big (big!) glass or ceramic bowl. Top with a plate and weight it down with glass jars filled with water to hold the meat under the liquid. Refrigerate for five days.

Unwrap the meat, then rewrap it in a clean cheesecloth sleeve. Combine it with cold water to cover in a large stockpot. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to a simmer, and cook for 15 to 20 minutes per pound. Let the meat cool in the water. Chill the meat in the refrigerator until thoroughly cold. Unwrap it and slice it very thin across the grain. Makes 5 pounds.

The third installment in a project to prepare authentic spiced round of beef from a 150-year-old recipe

Other people helped to update a Spiced Round recipe for a smaller piece of beef and advise on painstakingly threading slivers of spiced fat into the beef.

To cure the beef, I had to go deep into the dark, scary parts of the basement. To dig out a family heirloom. That I hoped was still there. And not broken.

Seventeen years ago my grandmother upped sticks from her farm in remote Sumner County to move to Florida. She called months later and asked that I return to the farmhouse and retrieve two 5-gallon ceramic crocks from underneath the house. They belonged to her grandmother or great-grandmother and she didn’t want to lose them.

How often do you get possession of a great-great-great grandmother’s piece of kitchen gear? Into her crawl space I went and retrieved the crocks and brought them to my house. I moved them when we moved. When we rented out our house, I put the crocks way back into our crawl space. You know, in case our tenants had light fingers as regards century-old, outdated food prep items.

I can’t even describe how dirty the crock was. But an initial bath revealed that it wasn’t cracked, and the glaze inside was intact.

I scrubbed inside and out, then filled the crock with a 10 percent bleach solution. Three days later, it honestly looked, felt and smelled spotless and good as new.

The dirt-covered family heirloom crock, scrubbed and clean

That all turned out to be a red herring, because the beef and brine unexpectedly fit into that 2-gallon crock in the top photo, which I use for making kosher pickles. I have a lot of crocks for a person under the age of 75 and living in a major metropolitan area. If you need a crock, I’m your girl.

The meat is weighted down with a plate. Glass jars filled with water hold down the plate and keep the beef submerged. The whole thing goes into the refrigerator for just 5 or 6 days, by Peter Brown’s calculation.

Five days instead of three weeks of curing as the original recipe indicated. At least one part of the recipe was easy.

Under the jars and the plate, the spiced round is transforming in the brine.

Part 2 in a quest to make a traditional German-Nashvillian spiced round of beef from a 150-year-old recipe

It takes a lot of old-timey equipment, old-style beef butchery, and a pretty good grasp of chemistry to make spiced round.

With all the chemistry kindly worked out for me by spice-and-seasonings company A.C. Legg, finding the right hunk of beef and doing unnatural things with it were the next steps.

Peter Brown at A.C. Legg cautioned that the beef had to be pristine, not the water-injected toasts usually for sale in grocery meat departments.  My beef came from Osborne’s Bi-Rite on Belmont Boulevard in Nashville–Brenda, the butcher, ordered the whole top round. We debated whether to trim off the fat–a Victorian homemaker would have so much knowledge about this. I made the decision to trim it. With her expertise, it was easier for Brenda to trim the fat than for me to trim it after brining. But maybe that would make it dry. Where’s the ghost of Christmas kitchens past when you need her?

The original recipe called for 10 pounds of round. I opted for a more modest 5-pound roast.

I also bought salt meat, which is uncured, unsmoked bacon. Sometimes it’s labeled “side meat.” I cut the fat away from the meat and cut into slivers, then rolled the fat slivers in a mixture of pepper, cloves, allspice and cinnamon.

Those fat strips go into the meat. But how, you ask?  And the anwer would be, “Surgery.”

Using a sharpening steel, I poked holes in the meat every 1/4 to 1/2 inch. (Sharpening steel, that long piece of metal that comes with the knife set.)

Then the spiced fat strips are pushed into the holes in a process known as “larding.” If you’ve ever considered a career in neurosurgery, start by pushing lard strips into holes in a 5-pound hunk of meat. The holes are smaller than they look, and they begin closing the instant the sharpening steel is removed. The strips are soft, so it’s like pushing a rope. I developed a technique of pushing them in with the sharp probe of a probe thermometer.

You have a lot of time to think when you’re threading lard strips into 5 pounds of beef. I watched a great nature program on TV. I listened to a backlog of podcasts. Eventually it occured to me that maybe frozen lard strips would go in more smoothly. And a larding needle would also be a good solution.

Paging Dr. Kitchen to surgery: An old probe from a probe thermometer helps push spiced fat into the beef

While the beef surgery was underway, the brine ingredients–salt, pink salt for curing, sugar and water–were boiling and chilled.

Late in the evening, the beef was finally larded. I worried that the strips didn’t extend all the way to the center of the meat. I worried that trimming the fat from the roast would mean a dry texture. But mostly, I was relieved that the larding was done.

Now to find a big non-metal container for holding the meat in its slightly corrosive brine.