Corned Beef
Should be cooked in plenty of water brought slowly to a boil. If very salt should be soaked over night. Should be cooked long enough to make tender, so that in a brisket or plate piece the bones may be readily removed.
Preserve the liquor and return unused meat to it and let stand over night to absorb it.
The liquor will make good soup if not too salt.
A method rather than a recipe: no weights, no times, no temperatures. What it does give is the two things that matter with corned beef, a slow start and a long finish.
- Never let it boil hard"Brought slowly to a boil" is the hinge. Modern practice is to bring it up gently and then hold it at a bare simmer, around 180-190F, with the surface barely moving. A hard rolling boil tends to squeeze the muscle fibres and give drier, stringier meat.
- TimingReckon on about 50 minutes per pound, so roughly 3 to 4 hours for a 4-5 lb brisket. The original's own test still holds: it is done when the bones in a brisket or plate piece may be readily removed.
- SoakingModern supermarket corned beef is wet-cured in a measured brine and often needs no overnight soak. Taste a spoonful of the first water; only soak, changing the water once or twice, if it is genuinely harsh. Butcher-cured or dry-salted pieces are another matter and the overnight soak stands.
- "Plate piece"An old cut from the belly, behind the brisket, fatty and bone-in. Point-cut brisket is the nearest thing on a modern counter. Flat cut is leaner and slices better but wants the same slow treatment.
- Cooling in the liquorSound advice, with one change: cool the pot down quickly and get meat and liquor into the refrigerator, rather than leaving it standing out overnight as a cold larder once allowed. Meat rested in its own brine stays moist and slices without crumbling.
- The liquor as soupTaste before you commit. Corning brine carries a great deal of salt into the pot, and the usual fix is to dilute the stock with water or unsalted broth rather than salt anything else to match. Skim the fat off once it is chilled.
- VegetablesThe original ignores them, but if you want cabbage, carrots or potatoes cooked in the pot, add them only for the last 20-30 minutes. Any longer in salty liquid and they collapse.
Corning has nothing to do with maize: a "corn" was any hard grain-sized particle, and the term describes the coarse grains of salt rubbed into or dissolved around beef to preserve it. Before refrigeration this was one of the standard ways a household kept beef through the year, alongside salt pork. The entry reads as a set of cautions rather than a recipe. The instruction to save the liquor for soup and to return leftovers to it belongs to the same thrift: nothing in a barrel of salt beef was meant to be poured away.