Hunter Beef

Until this century, beef in the American South was, like mutton, a luxury. Where salt pork was a staple of the poor, salt beef, sanctified by its Englishness, was a centerpiece for the rich. The method for preserving a thirty-pound beef haunch, called “hunting beef” or “spiced beef” in seventeenth-century England, was the same as that for a pork haunch: by salt, saltpeter, and spices from the medieval trade routes—cloves, nutmeg, allspice. By the eighteenth century, raw or Barbados sugar wa