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Boiled Dinner
Three or four pounds of corned beef, well washed. Place in the pail of the fireless cooker and cover with cold water. Let boil slowly for twenty minutes. Add a small head of cabbage, a few carrots, potatoes and turnips. Boil for five
A fireless-cooker recipe: the pot is brought to a hard boil on the range, then sealed into an insulated box to coast for hours on stored heat. Translating it means deciding how you will supply that long, gentle heat instead.
- What a fireless cooker wasAn insulated wooden or metal chest, usually holding one or two soapstone or cast-iron discs heated red-hot on the range. The "pail" is the fitted lidded vessel that sits inside it. A heavy Dutch oven at a bare simmer, a 200F oven, or a slow cooker on low all stand in for it.
- Hold the heat high enoughThe one thing that matters with meat in a fireless cooker is that the box actually stays hot. In a box that cools over an afternoon the meat can sit for hours at temperatures where bacteria multiply; a slow cooker on low or a low oven holds a steady heat far more dependably than stored heat in an insulated chest.
- Total time for the beefThree to four pounds of corned brisket wants roughly 3 to 4 hours at a simmer before it yields to a fork. The twenty minutes of boiling in the original is only to bring the pail up to temperature before it goes into the box.
- Washing the beefNineteenth- and early twentieth-century corned beef came straight from a brine barrel and was much saltier than a vacuum-packed brisket. Rinse a modern piece and taste the broth before adding salt anywhere; if it is very salty, discard the first water after the initial boil.
- Vegetables go in latePotatoes, turnips and carrots need roughly 25 to 40 minutes, cabbage rather less. Adding them to a pot that will run for hours gives you grey pulp. Cook the beef first, then add the root vegetables, and the cabbage in wedges for the last 15 minutes or so.
- Cabbage sizeA "small head" was probably somewhere around 1.5 to 2 lb, roughly an ordinary supermarket green cabbage now. Cut it into wedges through the core so it holds together.
- CarvingLet the brisket rest in its broth off the heat for 15 minutes, then slice thinly across the grain. Sliced with the grain it shreds into strings no matter how well it was cooked.
- YieldFour pounds of corned beef with the vegetables feeds six to eight, with enough left for hash the next day.
The fireless cooker had a brief, enthusiastic vogue in American households between about 1905 and the 1920s, and cookbooks of the period are often said to have given it its own chapter. The appeal was fuel economy and unattended cooking: heat stones on a coal or gas range in the morning, seal the pot in its insulated box, and come back to dinner. Tough, salty, slow-cooking dishes suited it best, which is why the New England boiled dinner, corned beef simmered with cabbage and roots and traditionally served with the broth, turns up here. That dish itself is older than the appliance by generations, a descendant of the British salt-beef-and-greens pot and a practical use for the barrel of corned brisket that many households kept through the cold months.