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Boiled Beef with Cabbage
1 Head Cabbage 5 Pounds Beef Salt, Pepper from cabbage, and cut in sections length- Remove all bruised or soiled leaves wise, leaving a piece of the heart on each for an hour, or more, according to size section to hold it together. Boil beef of piece. Place cabbage on top of meat and cook together one hour, seasoning to taste. Lift out the beef, allow the cabbage to boil a few minutes in the broth and serve.
The typesetting on this page has scrambled the sentence order, but the method is clear enough: boil a large piece of beef, lay wedges of cabbage on top for the last stretch, then lift the meat and finish the cabbage in the broth. Read the instructions in this order: trim the cabbage and cut it into wedges through the heart; boil the beef for an hour or more depending on size; add the cabbage; cook together; season; lift the beef out and let the cabbage finish in the broth.
- The beef needs far longer than an hourThe beef needs longer than the recipe implies -- Even counting the second hour with the cabbage on top, five pounds of a boiling cut — brisket, bottom round, chuck or shin — is unlikely to be fork-tender in two hours. Simmer it 2½ to 3½ hours, until a fork slides in and out without resistance, and only then add the cabbage.
- Cut is unstated but mattersThis is a simmering recipe, so it wants a collagen-rich cut: brisket, chuck, or a piece of bottom round. A lean roasting joint treated this way turns dry and stringy no matter how long it cooks.
- Keep it at a simmer, not a boil"Boil" in period cookbooks often covers what we would call a gentle simmer. A hard rolling boil at 212F squeezes the meat and clouds the broth; hold it at 180-190F, with the surface barely moving.
- Cabbage in an hour is too longA full hour on top of the meat reduces the wedges to grey mush and drives off sulfur compounds that make the whole pot smell strong. Fifteen to twenty minutes is enough for wedges from a 2-lb head; test the thick stem end with a knife tip.
- Water and saltNo liquid is specified. Cover the beef by an inch or two and salt the water properly from the start — about 1 tablespoon per 2 quarts — or the meat will taste flat however much you season at the end. Skim the grey foam that rises in the first fifteen minutes.
- Cutting through the heartThe instruction to leave a piece of the core on each wedge is the practical hinge of the dish. It holds the leaves together in the pot; wedges cut without it fall apart into loose leaves and overcook unevenly.
- Resting and slicingLet the lifted beef stand 10 minutes, then slice it across the grain. Slicing with the grain on a long-simmered cut gives you long, stringy fibers even when the meat is perfectly done.
- YieldFive pounds of boiling beef with a head of cabbage serves six to eight. Save the broth — strained and chilled, it makes the base for a soup the next day.
Boiled beef with cabbage is one of the oldest and plainest ways of handling a large, cheap, hard-working cut, and it survives in one form or another across most of northern Europe: the French pot-au-feu, the Irish bacon-and-cabbage, the New England boiled dinner, and the corned beef and cabbage of American cities. Its appeal to a household cook was economic as much as culinary. One pot on one fire produced the meat course, the vegetable and a pot of broth for the following day, and it required almost no attention once it came to temperature. The recipe assumes a good deal of unwritten knowledge, which is why this page never mentions how much water to use or what cut of beef to buy. The compressed, badly set text here is a typesetting fault of unknown origin.