Farming for Self-Sufficiency

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If you must try to cut up your steer yourself, this is the order in which you should tackle it:

Forequarter: Cut off the brisket, then the ribs, then the 'leg of mutton'.

Hindquarter: Cut off thin flank; then sirloin, aitchbone, shank, thick flank; then separate the topside out; then the silverside. You have left the thick rump of flank. Cut the best of this for steaks and boil the rest.

Of course all beef is eatable (even the bit the harness rubbed against!) and if you hack at it in complete ignorance you will still get a great number of good meals. But you will be roasting what you ought to grill, and grilling what you ought to boil and all the rest of it. Your ox is a very valuable animal. You could sell him nowadays for nearly three hundred dollars. Surely it is worth the expense of having a butcher attend to him, or sending him to the municipal slaughterhouse and then bribing one of the butchers there to cut him up properly for you? If you do this, go to any trouble that it takes to label each joint, and when you put the joints in the deep freeze label them in such a manner that the labels do not come off and you can really read them. Otherwise you might as well be hacking into a frozen mammoth. Everything that goes into the deep freeze has to go in a closed polythene bag.

The stewing meat, and I should classify a lot of it as this if I were you, is far better cut up in small pieces before you put it in the deep freeze in polythene bags of a size suitable for making one good stew for you.

Potting is another way of preserving beef:

1. Lay it in salt for three days.
2. Wash the salt off.
3. Season with a pinch of saltpetre, herbs and spices.
4. Put some suet and butter on top of it.
5. Leave it in a slow oven all night.
6. Pour off the fat.
7. Cut the beef up small and put, hot, into a pot.
8. Press down tight and pour on top of it clear strained fat—very hot.
9. Cover with greaseproof paper when cold.

It will keep for a couple of months.

Fresh beef should be well hung before eating. Ten days in cold weather is not too much. The older the animal the longer the hanging—a fortnight for a four-year-old, if you ever have one.

Veal should be eaten within three or four days of slaughter though. But veal should be left to the French. We cannot afford to waste potential beef animals in that wanton manner, except a few to get rennet out of.

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