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To Cook Corned Beef-Tongue, Etc
If the beef has been in brine long or has been dried, it must be soaked in cold water twelve hours before boiling. If freshly cured it is unnecessary. The beef should be put on in a large pot of water early in the morning and simmer for hours. Set the pot at the back of the range or stove, where it will gently boil during the preparation of dinner. When it first commences to boil, take off the scum. After it is thoroughly done, take off the boiler or pot. Set away with the beef under the liquor to remain until next day, when it will be found juicy and tender. With a sharp knife carefully trim, and garnish with scraped horseradish and curled parsley.--Mrs. S. T.
A method rather than a formula: the whole point is a long gentle simmer followed by a night in its own liquor. Two things need translating for a modern kitchen — what "simmer for hours" actually means in time, and where that overnight rest should happen.
- Never let it boil hardA rolling boil squeezes the muscle fibers and gives you stringy, dry corned beef no matter how long it cooks. Keep the water at a bare tremble, around 180-190F, which is roughly the effect "set the pot at the back of the range" would have had on a wood or coal stove.
- TimingFigure 50 minutes to the pound for a brisket flat, or 3 to 4 hours for a 4 lb piece. A tongue of 3 to 4 lb takes about the same. Done means a skewer slides in and out of the thickest part with no resistance, not a clock reading.
- The overnight rest belongs in the refrigeratorCooling in the cooking liquor is genuinely good advice — the meat reabsorbs brine and slices cleanly instead of crumbling. But a large pot of cooked meat left out at room temperature sits for hours in the range where Clostridium perfringens multiplies. Cool it quickly in a sink of cold water, then refrigerate the whole pot, meat still submerged, overnight.
- SoakingModern supermarket corned beef is wet-cured and mildly salted; it needs no soaking at all. The twelve-hour soak applies to home-cured or long-brined meat, and to dried or salt-dried beef, which was often months in the barrel.
- SkimmingThe gray scum that rises as the water first heats is coagulated protein and brine residue. Take it off before it breaks up and clouds the liquor, since that liquor is where the meat will spend the night.
- Tongue needs peelingThe recipe's "carefully trim" glosses over the step: a cooked tongue must be skinned while still warm, when the tough outer membrane peels away in sheets. Once cold it clings and has to be cut off with loss.
- ServingThe overnight rest in the liquor points to a cold dish, sliced thin across the grain, of the kind kept for the sideboard or supper table rather than served hot from the pot. A 4 lb piece will feed eight to ten as a cold cut. Scraped horseradish means fresh root, not the jarred cream.
Corned beef takes its name from the "corns" — coarse grains — of salt used to cure it, an English usage that predates the Irish-American association most readers now bring to the phrase. In a Virginia household of the 1870s, salting and brining beef and tongue was ordinary winter economy rather than a specialty: a barrel of brined beef kept through the months when no fresh meat could be held, and a cold boiled tongue was a standard sideboard dish for breakfast, supper and company. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered contributions from named and initialed housekeepers in Virginia and her sister states, which is why this entry closes with "Mrs. S. T." rather than a byline. The instruction to set the pot at the back of the range is a fingerprint of the coal and wood cookstove, whose cooler rear plates gave a reliable low heat with no dial to set while the rest of dinner went forward.