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Old-Fashioned Boiled Dinner
6 pounds corned-beef brisket I cabbage 3 white turnips 4 carrots 6 potatoes 6 beets Vinegar Put the meat into the pot over a brisk fire with enough cold water to cover it. Bring it rapidly just to the boiling-point, then remove the scum, set the pot back on the fire and simmer until tender (about three hours). About three-fourths of an hour before serving, skim the liquid free from fat. Put a portion of this liquor into another kettle with the cabbage which has been cleaned and cut into sections, the turnips, carrots and parsnips prepared and cut into uniform pieces, and boil until tender.
A New England boiled dinner is mostly a matter of timing: one pot of corned beef going slowly, a second pot of vegetables cooked in a ladleful of its liquor so they taste of the meat without turning to mush.
- The hinge: never let it boilBring the beef just to a boil, skim, then hold it at a bare simmer with the surface barely trembling. A rolling boil for three hours squeezes the muscle fibres and gives you stringy, dry brisket no matter how long you cook it.
- "Brisk fire," "set the pot back"On a wood or coal range, the area over the firebox was hottest and the far part of the top cooler, so setting a pot back reduced the heat. Read it as high heat to bring it up, then the lowest setting that keeps a bare simmer.
- Corned beef todayModern supermarket corned beef comes wet-cured in sealed bags and is generally less salty than a barrel-cured brisket of the period. Soaking overnight, as older books advise, is usually unnecessary; a rinse is enough. Taste the cooking liquid before you use it for the vegetables and dilute with water if it is sharp.
- Which cutA 6 lb brisket may be flat cut or point cut. Flat slices neatly; point has more fat and shreds. Either works, but count on roughly 3 to 3 1/2 hours and test with a fork rather than the clock.
- Cooking the beets apartBeets bleed and will dye the whole pot pink. Cook them in their own water, unpeeled with an inch of stem left on, then slip the skins off and dress them with the vinegar the ingredient list calls for.
- Vegetable timingThree-quarters of an hour is generous for everything at once. Root vegetables in 2-inch pieces want 20 to 25 minutes; cabbage wedges want 10 to 12 and should go in last, or they collapse into threads.
- Skimming the fatEasier than the book makes it sound: lift a ladle of liquor into a bowl or fat separator and let it settle a minute rather than chasing the fat around a hot pot.
- Yield and servingThe ingredient counts (six potatoes, six beets) suggest about six servings, though six pounds of brisket will stretch further. Slice the meat across the grain, arrange the vegetables around it, and pass a little of the strained broth plus mustard or horseradish. Leftovers are the basis of red flannel hash.
The boiled dinner is the plain end of New England cooking, built on the two things a nineteenth-century household could count on through winter: a barrel of salt beef and a cellar of root vegetables. "Corned" refers to the coarse grains, or corns, of salt used to cure the meat, not to maize. Its familiar sequel was red flannel hash, the chopped remnants fried with beets, the name generally taken from the reddish colour the beets give the dish.