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Old-Fashioned Boiled Dinenr
Procure a brisket of corned beef; put into the pot over a brisk fire with enough cold water to cover it; let it come to a boil in one-half hour, then remove the scum, set the pot back on the fire and boil slowly until tender. About three-fourths of an hour before dishing skim the liquor free from fat; put a portion of it into another kettle with one cabbage cleaned and cut into four quarters, one-half dozen peeled white turnips of a medium size, cut in halves, and four scraped carrots and the same number of parsnips each cut into four pieces; boil till tender. One-half hour before serving pour more boiling water into the kettle containing the meat and put in medium-sized peeled potatoes. Serve all together, meat and vegetables, from one dish. Boiled beets, cooked separately, and sliced hot, with vinegar over them should also be served as a side dish. Cooking the cabbage in another kettle prevents the meat from tasting of this vegetable when cold.
A New England boiled dinner in its standard form. The recipe is sound; what needs adjusting is the timing, since the vegetables are all given roughly the same window and they do not cook at the same rate.
- The hinge: never let it boil"Boil slowly until tender" means a bare simmer, 180-190F, with the surface barely moving. A true rolling boil squeezes brisket into strings. Figure about 50 minutes per pound, so 3 to 4 hours for a 4-5 lb piece, and test with a fork rather than the clock.
- "Brisk fire"High heat, only to bring the pot up. Bringing it to a boil in half an hour is the original's way of saying do not rush it from cold; on a modern burner use medium-high, then drop to low the moment it breaks.
- Buy the right brisketSupermarket corned beef is wet-cured in brine and sold in a sealed bag, usually 3-5 lb, often with a spice packet. Point cut is fattier and more forgiving; flat cut slices neatly. The persistent pink is from curing salt, not undercooking.
- SaltinessModern brines vary a great deal. Rinse the meat well and, if the brand runs salty, cover with fresh cold water once during cooking. Beef corned at home in a barrel could run saltier still, and some period cooks soaked it before boiling, though this recipe says nothing about doing so.
- Vegetable timingsThree-quarters of an hour is too long for all of them. In the skimmed broth, give carrots and parsnips 20-25 minutes, halved turnips 20, and cabbage quarters only 12-15 or they collapse and turn sulfurous. Potatoes, added to the meat pot, want 25-30 minutes.
- The separate kettle is deliberateCooking cabbage apart from the beef, as the last line explains, keeps the cold leftover meat from tasting of cabbage. Worth honoring if you plan on hash or sandwiches the next day.
- Skimming the fatEasiest with a ladle held flat on the surface, or by dragging a paper towel across it. A well-degreased broth is what keeps the vegetables from tasting greasy, and it is the base for the next day's soup.
- Yield and servingA 4-5 lb brisket with this quantity of vegetables serves 6 to 8. Slice the meat across the grain, no thicker than a pencil. Mustard or horseradish on the table; the hot sliced beets with vinegar, which the recipe calls for as a side dish, are worth including.
The boiled dinner is the plainest of Yankee dishes and the one most tied to the salt barrel: before refrigeration, beef put down in brine in the autumn was what a New England household ate through the winter, and the brisket, being cheap and tough, was the cut that suited long simmering. "Corned" refers to the coarse grains, or corns, of salt used in the cure, not to maize. Boiling the meat and roots together in one pot fed a family from a single fire, and the leftovers had a second life as red flannel hash, so named for the beets that turn it pink. Its appearance here, in a general-purpose American cook book for the household trade, reflects how thoroughly the dish had become national kitchen furniture rather than regional cooking, needing no introduction beyond "old-fashioned."