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Boiled Corned Beef
Soak one hour in cold water. Put into a kettle with a carrot and one onion, using enough cold water to cover well. Add to each quart of water one teaspoon of vinegar. Cook slowly, twenty to twenty-five minutes to the pound being a fair allowance. Let it lie in its liquor twenty minutes or so after 20 it is done. Then drain and serve. Butter rubbed over the meat just before serving is a great improvement. a
A plain method for a cut that is mostly about patience. Two things in the original need adjusting for meat as it is sold now: the soaking and the cooking time.
- Keep it below a boil"Cook slowly" is the hinge. Hold the water at 180-190F, where the surface barely shivers, for the whole time. A rolling boil squeezes the muscle fibres and gives you stringy, dry corned beef no matter how long it cooks.
- The timing is short for a brisketThe timing is short by modern standards -- Twenty to twenty-five minutes to the pound probably reflects a stronger, longer cure and often a smaller piece. A modern 3-4 lb corned brisket usually wants something closer to 45-60 minutes per pound, so anywhere from about two and a half to four hours, and it is done when a fork slides in and twists with no resistance, not when the clock says so.
- SoakingThe one hour given assumes barrel-cured beef, which was aggressively salty. Supermarket corned beef is wet-cured to a milder standard; a rinse is usually enough, and an hour's soak does no harm. If you have a butcher's heavily salted piece, soak two to three hours and change the water once.
- The spice packetVacuum-packed corned beef often comes with a sachet of pickling spice. The sachet is a modern packaging convenience rather than anything this recipe called for, though spiced curing brines themselves were not unknown in the nineteenth century. Add it if you want the familiar flavour; the carrot and onion here do the same job more quietly.
- The vinegarOne teaspoon per quart of water is a trace amount and will not make the meat sour. It barely acidifies the cooking liquor, and any softening effect on connective tissue at this dilution is slight. Cider vinegar suits it.
- Resting in the liquorDo not skip this. Twenty minutes off the heat, still submerged, lets the meat reabsorb liquid and firms it enough to slice cleanly. Longer is fine if you keep it warm.
- CarvingCorned brisket has a pronounced grain and it changes direction between the flat and the point. Find the grain and cut across it, thin. Cut with the grain and even perfectly cooked meat eats tough.
- The butterA knob rubbed over the hot drained meat is period seasoning that still works, and it partly stands in for the fat lost to the water. Serve any vegetables cooked separately in some of the strained liquor.
- YieldCorned beef loses a third of its weight in the pot. Figure half a pound raw per person for a main course, so a 3-4 lb piece serves six to eight.
Corning has nothing to do with maize: a "corn" was any small hard particle, and in this case the coarse grains of salt rubbed into or dissolved around beef to preserve it. Before refrigeration, brisket and plate were the cuts that went into the barrel, being tough, fatty and cheap, and a household might have a crock of beef in brine most of the year. By the time this recipe was written, commercial packers were beginning to supply cured beef ready to cook, and the recipe's job had shifted from managing your own barrel to simply boiling what the butcher sent. The pink colour familiar today comes from nitrite in the cure; nineteenth-century brines used saltpetre for the same effect, though many home-cured pieces came out a dull grey-brown.