Corned Beef
Corned beef has but little nutritive value. It is used to give variety to our diet in summer, when fresh meats prove too stimulating. It is eaten by the workingman to give bulk to his food. The best pieces of corned beef are the rattle rand and fancy brisket. The fancy brisket commands a higher price and may be easily told from the rattle rand by the selvage on lower side and the absence of bones. The upper end of brisket (butt end) is thick and composed mostly of lean meat, the middle cut has more fat but is not well mixed, while the lower (navel end) has a large quantity of fat.
The rattle rand contains a thick lean end; the second cut contains three distinct layers of meat and fat, and is considered the best cut by those who prefer meat well streaked with fat. The rattle rand has a thin end, which contains but one layer of lean meat and much fat, consequently is not a desirable piece.
To Boil Corned Beef. Wipe the meat and tie securely in shape, if this has not been already done at market. Put in kettle, cover with cold water, and bring slowly to boilingpoint. Boil five minutes, remove scum, and cook at a lower temperature until tender. Cool slightly in water in which it was cooked, remove to a dish, cover, and place on cover a weight, that meat may be well pressed. The lean meat and fat may be separated and put in alternate layers in a bread pan, then covered and pressed.
Most of this entry is a butcher's guide to cuts that no longer appear under these names; the cooking method itself is four sentences and still sound. The one thing to change is the word "boil."
- Do not actually boil itAfter the initial five minutes and skimming, hold the water at a bare shiver — 180-185F, with the surface barely moving. A rolling boil squeezes the muscle fibres and gives you stringy, dry corned beef no matter how long you cook it.
- TimingThe original gives none. Figure roughly 50 minutes per pound; a 4 lb piece runs 3 to 3 1/2 hours. It is done when a fork slides in and out of the thickest part with no resistance, not at any fixed clock time.
- Rattle randAn old New England market term for the plate and rib-end section behind the brisket; it carries bones, which is how the entry distinguishes it from the boneless fancy brisket. It is unlikely to be recognised in a modern butcher's shop. Ask for brisket — point (fatty) or flat (lean) — which is what most corned beef sold today comes from.
- SelvageUsed here in the tailor's sense: the strip of firm membrane and fat along the underside of the brisket, which the author offers as the way to tell brisket from rattle rand.
- Modern corned beef is differentNineteenth-century corning was dry salt and saltpetre, and the meat was heavily salty. Today's product is wet-cured with sodium nitrite and is milder. It usually needs no soaking, though rinsing the brine off before it goes in the pot is worth doing. Taste the cooking liquid after an hour; if it is aggressively salty, replace some of it with fresh water.
- The spice packetSupermarket corned beef comes with pickling spice. This recipe adds nothing to the water at all; a bay leaf, a few peppercorns and an onion will not hurt.
- PressingCooling the meat in its liquid keeps it moist, and weighting it firms the grain for slicing cold. A plate with a couple of tins on top is enough. The layered lean-and-fat loaf in a bread pan is essentially a pressed brisket terrine, meant to be sliced thin for sandwiches.
- YieldCorned beef loses about a third of its weight in cooking. A 4 lb raw piece feeds six to eight hot, rather more sliced cold.
- The nutrition claim"Little nutritive value" and "fresh meats prove too stimulating" reflect period dietary theory, not fact. Corned beef is protein and fat; what distinguishes it is the sodium.
"Corning" has nothing to do with maize — it refers to the coarse grains, or corns, of salt rubbed into the meat, a usage attested in English from the early seventeenth century, contemporary with the earliest colonies. Before refrigeration, salting was how a household kept beef through the year, and the New England boiled dinner of corned beef with cabbage, potatoes, turnip and carrot was a fixture of the region long before it was attached to St. Patrick's Day, an association generally traced to Irish immigrants in American cities who found corned beef cheaper and easier to get than the bacon they had eaten at home. The long butchering preamble here is characteristic of Fannie Farmer's book, which was written for pupils expected to buy meat by the cut and argue with the butcher about it, and which gave over considerable space to diagrams and cut-by-cut descriptions. The remarks about summer diet and the workingman's need for "bulk" belong to the era's confident physiology, when foods were sorted into stimulating and unstimulating and the calorie was only beginning to displace such reasoning.