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Meats: Beefsteak
Corned Beef and Cabbage.
Wash and, if very salt, soak in cold water for an hour a piece of corned beef weighing 5 or 6 pounds.
Put in a kettle with cold water to cover, place on stove, heat slowly, taking off scum as it rises to the top of the water. Cook slowly for three or four hours, or till very tender.
Take out the meat, and in the liquor cook a cabbage which has been prepared according to directions given in chapter on vegetables; also some potatoes that have been washed and pared. If beets are to be used, cook them in boiling water in a kettle by themselves. When cabbage and potatoes are tender, take out with skimmer and serve with the meat. Save the fat that rises to the top.
Fillet of Beef.
Trim into shape, lard the upper side, dredge with salt, pepper, and flour. Put several pieces of pork in the pan under the meat, bake in a hot oven twenty or thirty minutes.
Serve with mushroom sauce. Or brush the fillet with beaten egg, sprinkle seasoned and buttered crumbs all over it, and bake thirty minutes. Or stuff the incisions left by the removal of the veins and tendons with any stuffing or forcemeat. Dredge with salt and flour, and bake. -MARY J. LINCOLN.
Two separate dishes sit under one heading here: a long, slow boiled dinner and a fast roast of the most expensive cut on the animal. Both are workable today with a few translations.
- Simmer, never boilThe hinge of the corned beef is heat control. Bring it up slowly and hold the water at a bare shiver, around 180-190F, for the whole three to four hours. A rolling boil squeezes the muscle fibres and gives you stringy, dry meat no matter how long you cook it.
- Soaking and saltModern supermarket corned beef is generally brined less aggressively than a nineteenth-century barrel piece, so the hour-long soak is often unnecessary. Soak only if the meat seems very salty, and change the water once.
- Cut and timingA 5-6 lb piece is most likely a flat cut, or a small whole brisket. Three hours is a minimum and four is more typical; the test is a skewer sliding out with no resistance, not the clock.
- Cabbage and potatoes in the liquorAdd the potatoes first, they need 20-25 minutes, and the cabbage wedges for the last 12-15. Cooking both in the beef broth is the point of the dish. The cross-reference to the vegetable chapter presumably covers trimming and cutting up the cabbage; this page does not say.
- Why the beets go in a separate potBeets bleed. Cooked in the beef liquor they would stain the cabbage and potatoes magenta. Their own pot, in plain boiling water, keeps everything looking like itself.
- "Save the fat that rises"Chilled overnight, the skimmed fat sets into a firm cap of beef dripping, excellent for frying the leftovers into hash. This instruction is a thrift habit from a period when no rendered fat was thrown away.
- Fillet of beef means whole tenderloinNot a steak. A trimmed centre-cut tenderloin, 3-5 lb, tied at intervals so it roasts evenly. Larding is threading strips of pork fat through the lean meat with a larding needle; barding, tying sheets of fatback or bacon over the top, does much the same job with less equipment. The pork pieces set in the pan beneath are there for the same reason: this cut has almost no fat of its own.
- Hot oven, and a thermometerThe book gives no temperatures; a "hot oven" is conventionally read today as somewhere around 400-450F. Twenty to thirty minutes at that heat gives rare to medium-rare on a moderate fillet, but the only reliable gauge is an instant-read thermometer in the thickest part: 125F for rare, 130-135F for medium-rare. Rest it 10-15 minutes before carving.
- YieldThe corned beef dinner feeds eight to ten with vegetables and leaves hash for the next day. A whole fillet serves eight to ten as a roast.
Mary J. Lincoln (Mary Johnson Bailey Lincoln) was the first principal of the Boston Cooking School and wrote Mrs. Lincoln's Boston Cook Book (1884); Fannie Farmer, who headed the school some years later, built her far more famous book on the same foundations. The two recipes set side by side here show the range a late-Victorian household cook was expected to cover: a boiled dinner descended from the salt-beef economy of the barrel and the ship's hold, in which one pot of liquor cooked the meat and then the vegetables and then became stock, and a larded fillet with mushroom sauce lifted straight from French service. Corning takes its name from the "corns" of coarse salt used to cure the beef, a preservation method that long predated refrigeration and survived it because people had come to like the taste. Its association with Irish-American tables is largely a nineteenth-century urban development: brisket was cheap in American cities, and it stood in for the bacon that would have been eaten at home in Ireland.