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An Old-Fashioned Boiled Dinner
Wash 6 pounds of corned beef and put into a kettle with plenty of water. Boil until tender, but not long enough to fall to pieces. It will take about four hours for it to boil. Cut 1 small cabbage into quarters; scrape 4 carrots and 2 parsnips; pare 4 turnips and cut into halves; and peel 10 potatoes. An hour before dinner skim the fat from the beef liquor, and turn part of it into another kettle. Into this kettle pour some boiling water and put in the carrots, turnips, and 4 beets. Cook the cabbage in separate vessel. Put the potatoes in the kettle with the meat about half an hour before dinner. When all are cooked tender, dish the meat on a large platter and place around it the vegetables. A nice hash should be made with the remains of the boiled dinner.
A New England boiled dinner works on a simple principle: the beef flavors the liquor, and the liquor flavors the vegetables. The only real skills are heat control and staging the vegetables so nothing turns to mush.
- Simmer, never boilDespite the wording, corned beef should be held at a bare simmer around 180-190F. A rolling boil squeezes the muscle fibers tight and shreds the outside of the brisket while the center is still firm.
- Time and cutFour hours suits a 6 lb whole piece; the recipe says only "corned beef" and never specifies the cut. A smaller flat-cut piece of 3-4 lb, the size commonly found in supermarkets, will be fork-tender in roughly 2.5 to 3 hours. Test with a skewer rather than by the clock.
- SaltinessCommercial corned beef today is brined to a fairly consistent strength, but it is still salty enough that the cooking liquor needs no seasoning at all. If your beef came from a butcher's own brine, taste the water after an hour and change part of it if it is aggressive.
- The second kettleSkimming the fat and dividing the liquor is the key step. The root vegetables -- carrots, turnips and beets -- go into that second kettle with boiling water added, so they take on beef flavor without absorbing the full salt of the pot. The recipe has you scrape parsnips but never says which kettle they go into.
- Beets need their own potBeets bleed, and will dye everything they touch pink. Whole beets run from about 45 minutes for small young ones to well over an hour for large. Cook them apart in a little of the liquor, leave the skins on and the roots untrimmed, and slip the skins off after -- though note the recipe itself puts the beets in the second kettle with the other roots.
- Why the cabbage goes aloneCabbage releases sulfur compounds that will settle over the whole dinner if cooked in the main kettle. Quarters take 12-15 minutes in salted water or a ladle of the skimmed liquor, no longer.
- PotatoesHalf an hour is right for medium potatoes left whole. Ten potatoes for a 6 lb brisket assumes small ones; if yours are large, five or six halved will do.
- YieldAs written this feeds eight generously, with meat and vegetables left for the hash -- which is the point. Chopped and fried in a little fat, the leftovers with their beets become red flannel hash.