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A Boiled Dinner
Select a good piece of fresh beef, not too fat, rub over it sufficient salt to "corn" it, but not to make it very salt; let it stand two or three days, judging of the time by the size of the meat; then wash thoroughly in cold water, put in the pot, cover with cold water and boil gently till quite tender. Add such vegetables as are desired, judging the quantity by the strength of flavor desired in the thick soup to be made from the water in which the whole is boiled; when done dish beef and vegetables, and serve hot.
The cooking half of this is straightforward New England boiled dinner, but the recipe opens with a home cure that cannot be followed safely as printed.
- The cure has no quantities"Sufficient salt to 'corn' it" gives no weight of salt relative to the weight of meat, and no brine strength. Safe curing depends on reaching a known salt concentration throughout the piece, which a rubbed-on, eyeballed quantity on a thick joint will not do.
- No holding temperature is givenA large piece of beef sitting two or three days at whatever temperature the larder happened to be is the central problem. Salt-rubbed but under-cured meat held above refrigeration temperature is a growth medium for Clostridium perfringens and staphylococcal toxin, the latter of which is not destroyed by later boiling.
- No curing saltCommercial and modern home corned beef uses a measured nitrite cure, which is what suppresses Clostridium botulinum in the anaerobic interior of a salted joint. Plain salt at an unknown concentration does not substitute for it. Use a current, measured recipe for corned beef if you want to make one.
- "Corn" means the salt, not the grainTo corn meat is to preserve it with coarse grains, or corns, of salt. The word has nothing to do with maize. The brevity of the instruction suggests the writer expected the reader to already know the routine.
- What "boil gently" meansModern practice for a joint of this kind is to hold the liquid at a bare shiver rather than a rolling boil, which tends to tighten the muscle fibres and cloud the pot. The recipe's own wording, 'boil gently', points the same way without giving a temperature.
- The vegetables and the soupThe instruction to judge quantity "by the strength of flavor desired in the thick soup" tells you the cooking water was a second meal, not waste. The recipe names no vegetables; cabbage, carrot, turnip, onion and potato are the ones conventionally associated with the dish.
- YieldNo size is given for the joint; the recipe leaves it to the cook, telling you only to judge the curing time by the size of the meat.
The New England boiled dinner descends from the British one-pot boiling of salt beef with root vegetables, carried over by early settlers. Salt beef was a staple rather than a treat: before mechanical refrigeration, corning was one way a household kept a quantity of fresh-killed beef edible through the weeks after slaughter, and the brevity of the instruction here suggests the writer expected readers to know the routine already. The particular thrift of the recipe is in its last clause — the broth becomes the next day's thick soup, so a single fire and a single pot yield two meals. Corned beef and cabbage became attached to St. Patrick's Day among Irish-American communities in the United States, a pairing generally traced to American cities rather than to Ireland itself.