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Cabbage with Corned Beef
Wash the meat in cold water, put it into a large kettle and cover with cold water; simmer gently two hours or fifteen minutes to a pound. In the meantime, remove the outside leaves from a hard head of cabbage, cut into quarters and soak in cold water one hour, then add to the meat; simmer one hour. When done, put the meat in the centre of a large dish and arrange the cabbage neatly around it. Serve with tomato catsup, mustard or horse-radish sauce.
A plain boiled dinner that hinges on two timings, both of which modern practice has changed. Read the first two points before you start.
- The meat needs far longerFifteen minutes to the pound will not make a corned cut (usually brisket) tender; it is tough and collagen-heavy and wants roughly 50 to 60 minutes per pound at a bare simmer. A 3 lb piece takes about three hours, and the test is a fork sliding in with no resistance, not the clock.
- The cabbage needs far lessAn hour of simmering reduces quartered cabbage to grey mush. Add it to the pot for the last 15 to 20 minutes, once the meat is already fork-tender, and pull it while the stem still has some bite.
- SaltCommercial corned beef today is wet-cured in a strong brine and can be very salty. Rinse it well under cold water and taste the cooking liquid after the first half hour; if it is aggressively salty, pour off some and top up with fresh water.
- Soaking the cabbageThe hour in cold water was most likely meant to drive out insects hiding between the leaves, which mattered with garden or market cabbage. With supermarket heads a rinse is enough, though a soak does no harm and crisps the leaves.
- Simmer, never boilA rolling boil squeezes the muscle fibres and gives stringy, dry meat however long you cook it. Keep the surface barely trembling, lid on, and skim the scum that rises in the first twenty minutes.
- Kettle"Kettle" here means a large lidded stockpot on the stovetop, not a tea kettle. Anything that holds the meat with two inches of water above it will do.
- Horse-radish sauceThe period version is grated horseradish loosened with cream or a little vinegar, not the thick jarred creamed style. Any sharp horseradish, mustard or ketchup serves the same purpose: cutting the fat and salt.
- Yield and the rest of the potA 3 to 4 lb piece with one cabbage feeds four to six. Potatoes, carrots and turnips can go in with the cabbage; halved potatoes want about 25 minutes, carrots and turnip chunks about 20.
"Corned" beef takes its name from the coarse grains, or corns, of salt used to cure it, a preservation method that long predated refrigeration and made beef a keeping meat for ships, armies and winter cellars. Cabbage was its natural partner because both were cheap, both stored well, and the cabbage could be cooked in the same pot in the same salty liquor with no extra fuel; the New England boiled dinner is the fuller version of the same idea, with root vegetables added. The pairing is strongly associated with Irish-American households, where corned beef stood in for the bacon that was the usual cure at home. The recipe is a reminder of how the period thought about cabbage: not as a dish in itself but as something that took its flavour from meat, served "neatly arranged" around the joint on a single large platter.