Boiled Beef
The flank is one of the best pieces for boiling.
Select a five-pound piece; wipe; remove membrane, shape, stuff, tie, and skewer. Cover with cloth; place in kettle; cover with boiling water; bring to the boiling point, and cook just below the boiling point, five or six hours, or until tender. Simmered beef would be a more correct term than boiled beef, but it is ordinarily known as boiled beef.
Season with salt one half hour before serving. Reserve liquor for making gravies and soups.
Boiled beef should have a rich, highly seasoned gravy served with it.
A five-pound flank, stuffed and rolled, then held at a bare simmer for most of an afternoon. The instruction that matters is in the middle of the paragraph: the water must never actually boil, or the meat tightens and dries even as it sits in liquid.
- Hold it at 180-185FHold it at a bare simmer, roughly 185-200F -- "just below the boiling point" means an occasional lazy bubble, not a rolling one. A thermometer in the water makes this trivial; on a modern burner the lowest setting on the smallest ring is usually right.
- The cutBeef flank as sold today is usually the thin flank steak, too lean for this. Ask for a flank or navel end piece with fat and membrane intact, or substitute a rolled brisket, boned short rib plate, or chuck roll of about 5 lb.
- Stuffing is assumed, not givenThe recipe says "stuff" with no filling. A common period filling is a bread stuffing of stale crumbs, melted butter, chopped onion, salt, pepper and sage or savory, moistened with a little stock. Spread it on the opened flank, roll, and tie at 1-inch intervals.
- The clothWrapping in cloth keeps the roll together and the stuffing in; cheesecloth or clean muslin, tied at both ends, does the job. It also makes lifting a 5 lb roll out of hot liquid possible without it falling apart.
- TimingFive or six hours is generous even for a stuffed roll. Check at three hours and then every 30 minutes; a skewer should slide in with almost no resistance. Overcooked simmered beef shreds rather than slices.
- SaltingThe book's late salting probably reflects the old belief that salt draws out juices. Salting the water from the start, or dry-salting the meat the day before, seasons it through and does no harm. If you follow the original, use enough salt in the last half hour to season the whole roll, which needs more than seems reasonable.
- The liquorSkim the fat, strain, and reduce it hard before using it for gravy: unreduced boiling-beef liquor is thin. It keeps 3-4 days refrigerated or freezes well.
- YieldA 5 lb stuffed roll serves 8 to 10, and is better sliced cold the next day than reheated.
Boiled beef was a staple of the nineteenth-century English and American kitchen for the same reason it was a staple of the poorer French one: it produced two dishes from one pot, a joint of meat and a broth for the next day's soup or gravy. Lowney's, published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company as a general household cook book with its own confectionery chapters, was aimed at a cook working with a coal or early gas range where a long low simmer at the back of the stove cost almost nothing. The author's aside about terminology - that "simmered beef would be a more correct term" - was a familiar complaint among the domestic-science writers of the period, who were then busy attaching measured temperatures and standardised cups to what had been kitchen custom.