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Jewish Smoked Beef
Like the sausages of the preceding paragraph, Jewish smoked beef is to be bought of the Jew butchers. To cook it, drop the meat into boiling water, let it boil for ten minutes, take off any scum that rises to the surface, add cold water enough to reduce the liquid to mere scalding heat, then bring it gently to the boil, and simmer until the lean on the meat feels quite tender when probed with a sharp skewer. Lift the meat on a drainer, and serve hot or cold, and garnish to taste with vegetables or otherwise.
This is a method rather than a formula: what to do with a piece of cured, smoked beef bought ready-made. The nearest things on sale now are smoked brisket, beef navel (the cut behind pastrami) or a whole uncooked salt beef from a kosher or deli counter.
- The hinge: keep it below a rolling boilAfter the first ten minutes, the liquid should never bubble hard again. Cured brisket and navel toughen and shred at a full boil; a bare simmer with the surface barely trembling is what makes the lean tender.
- "Mere scalding heat"Hot enough to steam but not to bubble, below a simmer. The book gives no temperature. The cold water added after the initial boil is there to drop the pot into that range quickly.
- Why boil ten minutes firstThe hard initial boil sets and lifts the surface scum. If the meat is very heavily salted, an overnight soak in cold water before cooking is a common older practice and does the same job more gently.
- TimingNo time is given because it depends entirely on the cut. Something in the region of 30-60 minutes per pound at a simmer is the usual reckoning for brisket or navel. The skewer test in the recipe is the reliable one: it should slide into the lean with no resistance.
- "Lift the meat on a drainer"A drainer is a perforated plate or a flat skimmer; a spider or a wide slotted spoon does the same. Lift the piece intact rather than forking it, or a long-cooked brisket will fall apart in the pot.
- Serving hot or coldHot, slice thickly across the grain and serve with the vegetables cooked in the broth. Cold, press the meat under a weighted plate as it cools and it will slice thin and clean for sandwiches.
- YieldA 4 lb piece serves eight hot with vegetables, or considerably more sliced cold.
- The cooking liquidTaste it before you keep it. Cured smoked beef can leave a broth far too salty for soup, though diluted heavily it makes a good base for a barley or lentil pot.
Cassell's is a London book, and its advice to buy smoked beef "of the Jew butchers" reflects a real supply chain: by the later nineteenth century the East End and other Jewish quarters had butchers selling cured beef products that most English shops did not stock. Because pork was excluded, Jewish cookery developed beef equivalents of the smoked and cured pork foods everyone else relied on \acon and ham, beef sausages and wurst in place of pork ones. Cassell's, characteristically, gives no cure or smoke instructions at all; the reader is simply told where to buy the thing and how to boil it, which may suggest the product could be bought over a counter in a large city, though silence about curing can hardly prove how familiar it was. The editorial note above the text is the publisher's, not the original author's; the phrasing in the recipe was unremarkable in print at the time and is left as printed.