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Boiling Corned Beef
Make it a rule of the day's work, which very soon will become a habit, to set on the salt meat boiler the first thing in the morning--say, at 6 o'clock--and put in the corned beef at once. Fresh meats with all their juices in them should be dropped into boiling water, which immediately cooking the outside prevents them from oozing out into the water, but it is different with salt meats; they have had their moisture withdrawn by the brine and are comparatively dry and should be dropped into cold water in the boiler. It is supposed the salt in them draws in the water till it reaches cooking heat and closes the outside. Corned beef treated so cuts moist and full of juices. Make it a rule that corned beef shall boil 5 hours. Any late pieces or top pieces not thoroughly cooked should be allowed to continue boiling during dinner, for corned beef recooked next day to make it tenderer is never worth much--looks washed out and is flavorless.
Of all the beef bought for hotel tables only a third of the original weight arrives at the point of readiness to place on the guest's plate; only a fourth of the original weight actually reaches the table; probably only half of that, or one eighth of the raw weight is actually eaten; so that for one hundred pounds of beef that really becomes sustenance to the hotel boarder eight hundred pounds of raw beef must be purchased.
One-third of the raw weight is bone; one-third more is fat, skin, gristle, suet, discolorations, blood stains, roughness and some scraps wasted in cutting; the remaining one-third is clear meat in steaks and trimmed roasts.This one-third of clear meat loses at least a quarter of its weight in cooking, and if fat will lose a third, or even half. Of roast beef on the carving stand, after all these preceding losses, there is lost probably a fourth of the weight it has on leaving the fire. This weight is lost through bad carving, neglecting to clean the bones, gouging out choicer cuts for pet people and wasting much more, and through the flow of gravy and drying out by the heat, and finally by what is left over of the roasts not large enough or good enough to be used again. A pair of chickens that weigh 4 1/2 pounds in market will yield only 1 1/2 pounds of nett meat after cooking. A 14 pound turkey raw, with enough stuffing, pork, eggs, etc., to make up a total of 20 pounds original weight will only turn out a 10 pound galantine after cooking. If the beef costs only 8 cents per pound by the entire carcass, that which the hotel-keepers buy and the waiters carry in to the guests on the individual dishes will have cost in the neighborhood of 75 cents per pound, and what is actually eaten by the guest will have cost somebody about a dollar a pound, for some is left on the dishes entire and much more pulled about on the plates, culled over, hacked and left. It is true there is one offset to all this--however much more a hungry laboring man with only one dish might eat, the amount of any one kind of meat consumed by hotel boarders does not in an average way exceed two ounces for each person. But the proportion of waste is only the more enormous for that fact.
It would require a volume to discuss the matters just specified in all their bearings, but whosever business it may be it is not ours; we have enough to do with our cooking. It is among the purposes and expedients of high intelligent cookery to lessen some of the great wastes of the raw material and lead people away from clamoring for the very condensed essence of all that is dear and train their taste to the appreciation of made dishes that are more the products of skill than of cost, to the end that the price of living may be cheapened, and two persons may live well where one would starve at the present rate of reckless prodigality. It is accepted as a truth, while nobody understands, that French cookery is essentially economical, and yet those who think they try it never find it so, but quite the contrary. It is those who are supposed to practice it that are the wasters.
The art and science is as high and worthy as any other, but the supposed followers are degenerate and unworthy.
Good cookery--call it French or what you will--consists, for example, in taking the bones that constitute one-third of the weight of the beef as the hotel man buys it, and extracting all they will yield by boiling to make rich soups, and not only soups but stock to use in place of water to make a hundred common articles savory and nutritious, and in cooking the so-called rough pieces so well that they will be in greater demand than even the "choice cuts" of beef.
Underneath the long digression on hotel waste there is a real method here: salt meat goes into cold water, and it is cooked long and gently. Both instructions are sound, but the scale is a hotel's, not a household's.
- Start cold, and never rush itThis is the hinge. Salt-cured beef put into boiling water seizes and toughens; starting in cold water and bringing it up slowly lets the muscle relax as it heats. The author's reasoning about salt drawing water inward is folklore, but the practice is correct.
- "Boil" means barely simmerA hard boil at any point will squeeze the brisket into shoe leather. Bring it to the edge of a simmer and hold it there, around 180-190F, with the surface only shivering.
- Five hours is a hotel pieceThe time assumes far larger pieces than a household would cook, going in at six in the morning for a midday dinner; the recipe itself gives no weight. A supermarket corned beef brisket of 3-5 lb is done in about 3 to 3 1/2 hours; test with a fork, which should slide in and out with no resistance.
- The "salt meat boiler"Presumably a large pot kept for cured meats and their brine-heavy cooking water; the book names the vessel without explaining it. Any pot deep enough to keep the meat covered by an inch or two of water will do; top up with hot water as it reduces.
- Corned beef has changedNineteenth-century corned beef was barrel-brined on the premises and often ferociously salty, which is why cooks soaked it first. Modern vacuum-packed brisket is milder and nitrite-cured; rinse it, and taste the water after an hour before deciding whether to change it.
- He is right about reheatingCorned beef reboiled the next day does go grey and flavorless, as he says. Slice leftovers cold across the grain, or warm them briefly in a little of the strained cooking liquid rather than putting the whole piece back on the fire.
- YieldReckon on losing a third of the raw weight to shrinkage and trimmed fat. A 4 lb brisket serves six to eight generously, less if the cap is thick.
- The cooking liquidIt is too salty for stock but excellent for boiling cabbage, potatoes, carrots or turnips in the last half hour, which is where the cheap trimmings economy he preaches actually shows up on the plate.
"Corned" has nothing to do with maize: it refers to the coarse grains, or corns, of dry salt rubbed into the beef before barreling, a usage recorded in English well before American salt-beef packing became an industry. Jessup Whitehead wrote for hotel and boarding-house kitchens in the Midwest of the 1880s, where salt beef was the reliable, cheap centerpiece of a table that had to feed dozens at a fixed price, and that context explains why a simple set of instructions here spills over into several hundred words on carcass yields and carving waste. His figures on shrinkage are the working arithmetic of a steward who bought beef by the side, and his complaint that so-called French cookery had become an excuse for extravagance rather than economy was a standard grievance of American professional cooks in the period, who saw the fashionable menu French of big-city hotels as a veneer over careless butchery.