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To Cook Corned Beef
Put the beef on in boiling water, and when done, do not remove it from the pot, but let it remain in the same water until cold-this makes it juicy and delightful.
TO COOK A CORNED ROUND OF BEEF.
Wash it well when taken from the brine. Secure it well in a piece of heavy cloth, or a thick coarse towel. Let the meat cook six or seven hours. Do not remove the cloth until next day-it is nice to place in a round mould, as it gives it a good shape. When the meat is thoroughly cold, trim and cut in thin slices across the grain.
Nice with salad dressing.
Two related methods: a plain boiled piece, and a whole corned round pressed and served cold. Both assume a cook who bought or salted her own beef in brine and knew roughly how long a joint of that size took.
- The hinge: cool it in its own liquorThe first method has the meat finish cooling submerged, so the fibers reabsorb salted liquid instead of squeezing it out; the second simply leaves the joint wrapped until next day. Either way, cool it in the refrigerator, not on the back of the stove overnight — cooked meat sitting for hours at room temperature is the one part of this that modern practice rejects outright.
- Simmer, do not boil"Put the beef on in boiling water" is fine for the initial plunge, but hold it thereafter at a bare shiver, around 180-190F. A rolling boil for hours shreds the muscle and makes corned beef stringy rather than sliceable.
- "When done"For a modern 3-5 lb corned brisket or flat, reckon about 50 minutes per pound — roughly 2½ to 4 hours — and test with a skewer, which should slide out with no resistance. The six or seven hours in the second recipe belongs to a whole corned round, a much larger joint than any supermarket cuts today.
- A corned roundThe round is the upper hind leg, sold now as top or bottom round and almost never corned. A large flat-cut brisket or a corned bottom round from a butcher who brines to order is the practical substitute; adjust time to weight.
- Washing from the brineHome-salted beef could be a good deal saltier than modern commercial cure. Rinse any corned beef, and if it was home-salted or tastes fiercely salty at the edge, soak it in cold water for an hour or two and change the water once before cooking.
- The cloth and the mouldWrapping in a heavy cloth and cooling in a round mould is old-fashioned pressed beef: the cloth holds the joint compact while the gelatin sets, so the cold slices hold together. Unbleached muslin or several layers of cheesecloth work; a straight-sided bowl with a plate and a weight on top does for the mould.
- SlicingAcross the grain and thin, as written, and only when fully cold — warm corned beef falls apart under the knife. Chill it thoroughly before trimming.
- Serving"Nice with salad dressing" means boiled dressing or mayonnaise of the period, served as a cold supper or luncheon meat. A 4 lb piece yields roughly 8 to 10 servings sliced cold.
"Corned" has nothing to do with corn the grain: it refers to the coarse grains, or corns, of salt used to cure the beef, a usage already old in English by the time this book was printed. Before mechanical refrigeration was general in American homes, a barrel of brined beef in the cellar was ordinary winter provisioning, and cookbooks of the period assume the reader takes meat "from the brine" rather than from a shop. The second half of this entry — cloth-wrapped, pressed in a mould, chilled, sliced thin — is the pressed beef of the cold supper table, closely related to English pressed brisket and to the delicatessen corned beef that later became identified with Irish-American cooking in the United States, though the salting technique itself was common across Northern Europe and had no particular national home.