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Scalloped Corned Beef
2 cups cooked corned beef cut into cubes 1 cup medium white sauce Butter 1 stalk celery 2 slices onion Bread-crums Cook chopped celery and onions in the sauce. Put the corned-beef in a shallow baking-dish and add the sauce. Sprinkle with bread-crums moistened with melted butter. Brown in a hot oven.
A tidy way to use up the last of a boiled corned-beef brisket, from a period when leftover meat was expected to reappear in a baking dish. The recipe assumes you already know how to build a white sauce and how hot "hot" is.
- Medium white sauceOne cup means 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, and 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon. Thinner than that and the dish will be soupy under the crumbs; thicker and it turns pasty as it bakes.
- Oven temperature"Hot oven" in period usage generally means somewhere in the range of 400-450F; the recipe itself gives no figure. The filling is already cooked, so the only job is heating through and browning the top -- 15 to 20 minutes should be enough.
- Cook the vegetables properlyTwo slices of onion and one celery stalk, chopped fine, need to soften in the sauce over low heat for 8-10 minutes. Raw onion added straight to the dish stays crunchy and sharp under a short bake.
- Bread-crumsSoft crumbs torn from day-old bread, not dry commercial crumbs, which absorb the butter and burn at this temperature. Toss about 1/2 cup with 1 to 2 tablespoons melted butter.
- SaltCorned beef carries all the salt the dish needs. Season the white sauce lightly or not at all, and taste before it goes in the oven.
- On the corned beefMost likely the remains of a boiled salt-cured cut such as brisket, trimmed and cubed; deli-sliced corned beef is wetter and more finely textured, and tends to shred in the sauce. Cut cubes about half an inch.
- YieldAbout three cups of filling, enough for two to three as a main course or three to four with sides, in a dish of roughly one quart. Use a shallow pan so there is a good ratio of browned crumb to filling.
Scalloped dishes -- meat or fish or vegetables layered with sauce and crumbs and browned -- were a mainstay of American leftover cookery from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and general cookbooks of the period carry many of them. The name is usually traced to the scallop shell once used as a baking vessel for such mixtures, though the derivation is not settled. Corned beef was a household staple because the salt cure kept a large cut of brisket usable for days: it could be boiled whole, served hot with cabbage and root vegetables, then eaten cold, then hashed or scalloped. Recipes like this one belong to the economy of a kitchen with little or no refrigeration, where a later appearance of a piece of meat was often planned rather than improvised.