Boiled Dinner
A boiled dinner consists of warm unpressed corned beef, served with cabbage, beets, turnips, carrots, and potatoes. After removing meat from water, skim off fat and cook vegetables (with exception of beets, which require a long time for cooking) in this water. Carrots require a longer time for cooking than cabbage or turnips. Carrots and turnips, if small, may be cooked whole; if large, cut in pieces. Cabbage and beets are served in separate dishes, other vegetables on same dish with meat.
The instructions assume you already have corned beef simmering, and that you know what a boiled dinner looks like on the plate. Everything worth adding is about sequence and salt.
- "Unpressed" corned beefThe alternative was pressed corned beef: the cooked brisket weighted under a board overnight so it could be sliced cold and thin. Unpressed simply means served warm straight from the pot. A 4-5 lb corned brisket needs about 3 to 4 hours at a bare simmer, never a rolling boil, which tightens the muscle and dries it.
- The cooking liquid is very saltyThat is the hinge of the dish. Vegetables cooked in the beef water pick up seasoning and flavour, but if your brisket was aggressively cured, the potatoes and turnips can come out inedible. Taste the skimmed liquid first and cut it with fresh water if it makes you wince.
- Beets go in their own potThe recipe sets them aside for time, but there is a second reason: they will dye the whole pot magenta. Cook them whole and unpeeled in plain water for 30 to 50 minutes depending on size, then slip the skins off under cold water.
- Order of the vegetablesWorking back from the table: carrots 25 to 30 minutes, whole small turnips somewhat less (the recipe itself notes carrots take longer than cabbage or turnips), quartered potatoes about 20, cabbage cut in wedges through the core 10 to 15. Add them so they all finish together rather than cooking them in separate batches.
- Modern corned beefSupermarket briskets are wet-cured with sodium nitrite and usually come with a spice packet. They are milder and wetter than a nineteenth-century home-corned piece, and they shrink noticeably; buy by uncooked weight and expect to lose about a third.
- SkimmingSkim the fat after lifting out the meat, as directed, but do it thoroughly. Corned brisket renders a great deal, and unskimmed fat coats the cabbage in a way nothing later will fix.
- CarvingRest the meat 15 minutes under foil, then slice across the grain. Brisket sliced with the grain is stringy no matter how well it was cooked.
- YieldA 4-5 lb brisket with the full range of vegetables feeds six to eight, with enough left over for hash the following day, which is arguably the point of the whole exercise.
The New England boiled dinner is a one-pot descendant of the British salt beef and root vegetable tradition, adapted to a region where beef was corned in barrels each autumn and cabbage, turnips and beets kept in the cellar until spring. Fannie Farmer's book treats it as too familiar to need much explanation, which is itself informative: in a Boston household of the 1890s this was, by most accounts, a common Sunday or wash-day dinner, cheap in attention if not in time, and the leftovers were expected to become red flannel hash, traditionally said to be named for the beets that turn it pink. The association with Irish-American St. Patrick's Day tables came later and is generally traced to immigrant families in American cities substituting cured beef for the bacon used at home, where beef was the costlier meat.