Home › The Principles of Cookery › Beef, Boiled
Beef, Boiled
Put fresh beef into boiling water, bring it to a boil quickly, draw the pan back, and simmer gently till done, allowing fifteen minutes per pound, and fifteen minutes over. Salt beef should be put into lukewarm, not boiling water. Simmer from the time of boiling till it is served up. Skim the pot thoroughly, and turn the meat twice during the simmering. If vegetables are liked, carrots or turnips may be added, but they should only be put in long enough to get them properly cooked. The liquor will serve for pea soup, and is useful to the cook in various ways; the vegetables boiled in it will have greatly improved the flavour.
A method rather than a recipe, and the whole of it turns on the word simmer. Boiled beef that actually boils is stringy beef.
- Never let it boilAfter the initial hard boil, the water should sit at 180-185F, with the surface barely trembling and no rolling bubbles. A joint held at a true boil for two hours will tighten and shred rather than slice.
- Fresh into boiling, salt into lukewarmThe period reasoning was that a hot start sets the outside of fresh beef and holds the juices in (a rationale later cookery has abandoned), while salt beef needs a gentle rise so the cure draws out evenly instead of the meat seizing around its own salt. The instruction is worth following as written whatever the explanation.
- Soak the salt beef firstSalt beef of this period generally came out of a brine barrel much stronger than most modern cures. Modern salt beef or corned brisket is usually milder, but a few hours in cold water, changed once, is still worth it if the piece has been in brine more than a week.
- The timingFifteen minutes per pound plus fifteen over gives roughly an hour to an hour and a quarter for a 3-4 lb rolled joint of brisket, silverside or topside. Tougher, collagen-heavy cuts may want longer than the book's rule allows, and are best judged by whether the meat gives to a fork.
- Cut of meatThe recipe names no cut, but the method suits a boiling joint: brisket, silverside, shin or thick flank, tied into a compact shape. Lean modern roasting cuts do not repay this treatment and will come out dry.
- SkimmingSkim in the first ten minutes, when the grey protein scum rises, and again once or twice after. Skimmed liquor is clear and fit for soup; unskimmed liquor turns cloudy and tastes muddy.
- VegetablesCarrots and turnips added at the end of the cooking need about 20-30 minutes depending on size. Put them in at the start and they collapse into the broth.
- The liquorBroth from fresh beef is straightforwardly useful. Broth from salt beef is salty and should be tasted before it goes anywhere near a soup.
- ServingA 3-4 lb joint serves six to eight. Let it rest ten minutes out of the pot before carving, and cut across the grain.
Boiled beef was the practical centre of the English meat dinner for most of the nineteenth century cheaper than a roasting joint, forgiving of a poor cut, and producing a pot of liquor that fed the household for a second day. It is a rule to be learned rather than a dish to be copied: the distinction between fresh meat plunged into boiling water and salt meat started cold was standard instruction in Victorian kitchen manuals. The salt beef itself came from the domestic brine tub or the butcher's barrel, a preservation habit that faded through the twentieth century as household refrigeration spread, leaving corned brisket and the music-hall memory of boiled beef and carrots behind it.