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Boiled Dinner
Put meat on, after washing well, in enough boiling water to just cover the meat; as soon as it boils, set kettle on the stove where it will simmer or boil very slowly; boil until almost tender, put in vegetables in the following order: Cabbage cut in quarters, turnips of medium size cut in halves, and potatoes whole, or if large cut in two; peel potatoes and turnips, and allow to lie in cold water for half an hour before using. The meat should be well skimmed before adding vegetables; boil together until thoroughly done (adding a little salt before taking out of kettle), when there should be left only just enough water to prevent burning; take up vegetables in separate dishes, and lastly the meat; if there is any juice in kettle, pour it over cabbage. Boil cabbage an hour, white turnips and potatoes half an hour, ruta-bagas an hour and a half to two hours. A soup plate or saucer turned upside down, or a few iron table-spoons are useful to place in bottom of kettle to keep meat from burning. Parsnips may be substituted in place of cabbage and turnips, cooking them three-quarters of an hour.
This is the New England boiled dinner in its plainest form: one pot, one heat source, and vegetables added in order of how long they take. The instructions assume a cut of salted or corned beef, which the book takes for granted elsewhere.
- What meat is meantThe recipe never says. Nineteenth-century "boiled dinner" usually meant corned beef, a fresh beef brisket or shoulder, or a piece of salt pork. If you use a 3-4 lb piece, allow roughly 45-50 minutes per pound at a bare simmer before any vegetables go in.
- Soak salted meat firstIf you use commercially corned beef or salt pork, rinse it well and, for very salty pieces, soak an hour in cold water. The recipe's instruction to add salt only at the end makes sense only with fresh meat; corned beef will need none at all.
- Never let it boilThis is the hinge. "Simmer or boil very slowly" means bare shivering at the surface, around 180-190F. A rolling boil squeezes the muscle fibres tight and gives you stringy, dry meat no matter how long you cook it.
- The cabbage timing is too longAn hour on quartered cabbage was normal then and produces grey, sulphurous mush now. Quarters need 15-20 minutes in the simmering liquid. Turnip halves want 20-30 minutes and potatoes 20-25, so all three can go in together near the end rather than in stages.
- Rutabaga is the exception"Ruta-bagas" are the yellow swede; the book's hour and a half is closer to right for whole ones, but cut into 2-inch chunks they are done in 30-40 minutes. Add them well before the white turnips and potatoes.
- The cold-water soakPeeled potatoes and turnips are held in cold water chiefly to keep the cut surfaces from browning; period cooks also treated the soak as a way of freshening the vegetables. Half an hour is plenty; longer leaches starch.
- The upturned saucerAn improvised trivet, keeping the meat off the direct heat of a cast-iron kettle on a wood range. A modern heavy-bottomed pot on a low burner does not need one, though a small rack does no harm.
- Liquid levelReducing to "just enough water to prevent burning" concentrates the broth but risks scorching on a modern burner. Keep an inch of liquid, and spoon it over the cabbage as directed.
- YieldA 3-4 lb piece of meat with this quantity of vegetables would serve about six. Leftovers from a New England boiled dinner were commonly chopped and fried the next day as red flannel hash, though that dish depends on beets, which this recipe does not include.
The boiled dinner belongs to the salt-meat economy of the northern United States, where beef was corned in a barrel in autumn and drawn on through the winter alongside root vegetables and cabbage from the cellar. Nothing about it is fussy: the point is that one kettle over a slow fire produced meat, several vegetables and a broth with almost no attention, which mattered enormously on a wood-burning range. The book itself (Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, 1877, which grew out of the Centennial Buckeye Cook Book published in Marysville, Ohio, in 1876) treats the meat as the given, and the recipe's real work is teaching the cook the order and timing of what went in after it. The detail about propping the meat on an upturned saucer or a few iron spoons is the sort of practical note that separates these compiled community cookbooks from more literary ones.