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Rule for Corned Beef
Take a very nice ten-pound roast of beef; add three coffee cups of salt; cook until tender-good when hot, and delicious when cold. Better if pressed when cold. It is to be boiled with the salt water, enough to cover it. Any less salt will greatly diminish its goodness.--Mrs. L. F. Hodges.
This is not corned beef in the cured, pink-sliced sense — it is a fresh roast simmered in heavy brine and eaten the same day or the next. Read it as boiled salt beef and it makes sense.
- The coffee cupA coffee cup in turn-of-the-century American recipes runs roughly three-quarters of a cup to a full cup. Three of them is roughly 2 to 3 cups of salt, which in a pot holding a 10 lb roast under water comes to a strong but not saturated brine.
- Which cutA "roast of beef" here means a large boiling cut, not a tender oven roast. Brisket, bottom round or chuck behaves as intended; a rib or tenderloin roast would be wasted and would go stringy in liquid.
- What matters mostKeep the water at a bare simmer, never a rolling boil. Ten pounds of muscle boiled hard tightens and turns fibrous no matter how long it cooks; held just below the boil it comes out sliceable. Expect several hours for a 10 lb piece -- likely four or more -- tested with a skewer that slides in without resistance.
- No pink colourCommercial corned beef gets its red colour and cured tang from sodium nitrite. Salt alone will not do that, so this meat comes out grey-brown throughout. That is correct for the recipe, not a fault.
- Pressing when coldLift the cooked meat out, set it in a deep dish or loaf tin, lay a plate on top and weight it with something heavy, then chill overnight in some of its liquid. The gelatin sets and binds the fibres, which is what makes it carve into thin cold slices.
- Salting to tasteThe note that less salt "greatly diminish its goodness" reflects a period preference for aggressively salted cold meat. If you cut the salt the beef will taste blander but is otherwise unharmed; the salt here is seasoning, not preservation.
- YieldTen pounds of raw boiling beef yields roughly 6 lb cooked, enough for a large hot meal with a substantial amount left to press and slice cold. Save the cooking liquid, diluted, for cooking cabbage or potatoes.
"Corned" beef takes its name from the coarse grains, or corns, of salt once rubbed into meat to keep it — nothing to do with maize. By 1900 the word covered a spectrum, from barrelled beef cured for weeks with saltpetre in the pickle to something like this, a quick heavy-brine boil producing salt beef for the table within a day. Contributed recipes of this kind, signed with a neighbour's name, are the backbone of community and household cookbooks of the period: they assume a cook who already knows how long to keep a pot at a simmer and needs only the proportions and the family verdict. The instruction to press the meat cold points to how it was really used — sliced thin for supper, for sandwiches and for the cold spread that let a household eat for several days off one long afternoon at the stove.