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Boiled Beef and Turnips
The brisket or breast of beef is nicest for boiling. Keep sufficiently covered in water, boiling three hours, or until tender. Peel and slice half a dozen turnips and put with beef, boiling until soft enough to mash with a spoon, which will require about thirty minutes. Dress with one teacup of milk, pepper and salt to the taste.
Stew together a short time and put in bottom of dish with beef on the top.--Mrs. P. W.
A plain one-pot boiled dinner that depends almost entirely on holding the water below a rolling boil. The recipe assumes fresh brisket, not corned.
- Use fresh, not corned, brisketNineteenth-century Virginia kitchens kept both, and this recipe calls for plain beef with salt added at the end. A cured or corned brisket would make the turnips and their milk sauce aggressively salty.
- Simmer, do not boilThe recipe says "boiling," but three hours at a true rolling boil will squeeze a brisket dry and stringy. Bring it up to a boil, skim the grey foam that rises in the first ten minutes, then hold it at a bare shiver -- in modern terms roughly 180-190F -- for three hours or until a fork slides out without resistance.
- Quantity of beefNo weight is given. A 3 to 4 lb piece of brisket suits the three-hour timing and matches six turnips; anything much larger will need four hours or more.
- TeacupA nineteenth-century teacup is smaller than a modern 8 oz measuring cup, generally reckoned somewhere between a half and three-quarters of one. Add the milk gradually to the mashed turnips and stop when the texture is right.
- TurnipsSix turnips means six full-sized roots rather than the small salad type; the recipe gives no size or slice thickness. Thirty minutes in the beef broth, as written, will take sliced turnips to mashing softness; drain them well before mashing or the mash will be watery.
- Season at the endPepper and salt go into the mashed turnips, as written, rather than into the pot at the start.
- Resting and carvingLet the brisket sit in its broth off the heat for fifteen minutes before slicing, and cut across the grain. The broth itself is worth keeping for soup.
- YieldA 3 to 4 lb brisket with six turnips serves six to eight.
Boiled beef with root vegetables is among the plainest kinds of English-derived American cooking, requiring nothing but a pot and a fire, and it survived in Southern household books long after ranges and ovens were common because brisket is a tough, cheap cut that rewards long wet heat. Turnips carried the same practical logic: they stored through winter in a cellar or clamp and grew easily in Virginia soil. Mashing them with milk rather than serving them sliced softens their sharpness and stretches them further. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered contributions from named and initialed housekeepers across the state, which is why this one arrives as a brief personal method from "Mrs. P. W." rather than a standardized formula with weights and times.