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Boiled Corned Beef with Vegetables
Select five or six pounds from the plate or the brisket; wash carefully in cold water, drain; place in kettle and cover with boiling water, let boil five minutes and - if very briny - drain, rinse off scum with hot water and again cover with boiling water; heat to boiling point and simmer until meat is tender (about six hours). Remove beef from liquor, keep covered in a warm place. Skim off some of the fat from liquor. Add carrots washed, scraped and cut in quarters. Let cook fifteen minutes, then add small white onions and turnips pared and cut in quarters, one head white cabbage cut in quarters (stalk cut out). Wash, pare and cut uniformsized potatoes in quarters, parboil five minutes, then drain and add to other ingredients. Cook beets in a separate vessel. When vegetables are soft, arrange meat in center of hot serving platter and surround with carrots, turnips, onions and cabbage. Sprinkle vegetables with finely chopped parsley, serve beets in separate dish. Pass horseradish, mustard and vinegar.
A New England boiled dinner in its standard form. The recipe is sound as written; most of what needs adjusting is timing and the assumption that your corned beef came from a butcher's brine barrel rather than a vacuum bag.
- The hinge: never let it boilAfter the initial five-minute boil, the pot should sit at a bare shiver, around 180-190F, with the surface barely moving. A rolling boil squeezes the muscle fibres and gives you stringy, dry brisket no matter how long you cook it.
- Plate versus brisket"Plate" is the belly cut below the ribs, fattier and looser-grained than brisket; it is rarely sold corned now. Modern supermarket corned beef is nearly always brisket, sold as flat cut (leaner, slices neatly) or point cut (fattier, more forgiving).
- Six hours is too long for today's meatSix hours may be longer than today's meat needs -- Barrel-corned beef was heavily salted and may have come from an older animal. A modern 5-lb brisket will usually simmer tender in roughly 3 to 4 hours. Test with a skewer from about two and a half hours on: it should slide in with no resistance.
- The de-salting stepThe instruction to boil five minutes, drain and re-cover applies to genuinely briny meat. Commercially cured brisket in a sealed bag is much milder; rinse it under cold water and skip the drain-and-refill, or you will pour away flavour you want in the vegetables.
- Vegetable order and actual timesQuartered carrots need about 20 minutes, turnips 20, small whole onions 20-25, cabbage wedges 12-15, and parboiled potatoes 15-20. Add them so everything finishes together rather than following the clock rigidly; cabbage in particular collapses fast.
- Beets apart, for a reasonBeets bleed. Cooked in the pot they turn the cabbage and potatoes pink. Boil them whole and unpeeled in plain water for 40-60 minutes depending on size, then slip the skins off under cold water.
- Skim, and use the liquorSkimming fat is easier if you let the pot stand off the heat five minutes so the fat rises and gathers. Whatever broth remains after the vegetables come out makes the base for a soup the next day, though taste it first for salt.
- CarvingCorned brisket must be sliced across the grain, thinly. The grain direction changes where the point overlaps the flat, so separate the two pieces before slicing if you have a whole packer cut.
- YieldFive to six pounds of raw corned beef serves eight to ten with the vegetables, and the leftovers are the point of making it: hash, or sandwiches on rye.
The boiled dinner is the plainest form of a very old economy: a large salt-cured piece of beef, kept through the cold months in a brine barrel, cooked in one pot with whatever root vegetables were still sound in the cellar. "Corned" refers to the coarse grains, or corns, of salt used to cure it, an English usage that predates any American association with Ireland. The dish became fixed in New England kitchens and travelled through the cookbooks of the late nineteenth century as an unremarkable weekday standby. The horseradish, mustard and vinegar passed at table are doing what condiments always did for boiled salt beef: cutting through fat and reintroducing the sharpness that six hours in water takes out.