Home › Vegetables › Boiled Dinner
Boiled Dinner
Put meat on, after washing well, in enough boiling water to just cover the meat; as soon as it boils, set kettle on the stove where it will simmer or boil very slowly; boil until almost tender, put in vegetables in the following order: Cabbage cut in quarters, turnips of medium size cut in halves, and potatoes whole, or if large cut in two; peel potatoes and turnips, and allow to lie in cold water for half an hour before using. The meat should be well skimmed before adding vegetables; boil together until thoroughly done (adding a little salt before taking out of kettle), when there should be left only just enough water to prevent burning; take up vegetables in separate dishes, and lastly the meat; if there is any juice in kettle, pour it over cabbage. Boil cabbage an hour, white turnips and potatoes half an hour, ruta-bagas an hour and a half to two hours. A soup plate or saucer turned upside down, or a few iron table-spoons are useful to place in bottom of kettle to keep meat from burning. Parsnips may be substituted in place of cabbage and turnips, cooking them three-quarters of an hour.
A one-pot dinner written for a wood or coal range, where the kettle could be shifted to a cooler spot rather than turned down. The instructions assume you know what meat you are using; the book does not say, because in most Southern and New England kitchens of the period it was salt pork or corned beef.
- What meat to useThe book does not say. Corned beef brisket, a smoked or salt-cured pork shoulder, or fresh brisket would all suit the method. Salt going in only at the end is consistent with a cured cut, though washing and skimming were done for fresh meat as well. Around 3-4 lb is a reasonable modern quantity for six, but the recipe gives none.
- Simmer, not boilThis is the hinge. "Set kettle where it will simmer or boil very slowly" means barely trembling water, around 185F. A rolling boil on brisket or shoulder squeezes the muscle fibers and gives you dry, stringy meat no matter how long it cooks.
- Time the meat firstNo time is given for the meat because it varies. Corned brisket needs roughly 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 hours to reach "almost tender" before any vegetable goes in; a fork should meet slight resistance. Test rather than count.
- The vegetable timings are longAn hour of boiling reduces quartered cabbage to mush by current standards; 15-20 minutes is enough for wedges. Peeled potatoes and halved turnips are done in 20-30 minutes, at the short end of the stated half hour. Rutabaga genuinely does need longer, but an hour is usually plenty for two-inch chunks.
- Soaking the peeled rootsThe recipe does not say why. The likeliest purpose was to keep cut potatoes from darkening before the pot was ready; it also rinses off surface starch. It can be skipped if you are cutting them just before they go in.
- Water levelStarting with water that just covers the meat, and finishing with barely enough to prevent scorching, means you should not top the pot up freely. That concentration is what makes the liquid worth pouring over the cabbage at the end.
- The trivet trickAn upended saucer or a few spoons in the bottom of the kettle keeps the meat off direct heat. A modern heavy-bottomed Dutch oven on low makes this unnecessary, though a small wire rack does no harm.
- ServingThe recipe does direct that the vegetables come out into separate dishes, the meat last. Slice the meat across the grain; the cooking liquid, seasoned with the salt added at the end, is the only sauce, and the recipe pours what is left over the cabbage.
The boiled dinner belongs to one of the oldest cooking patterns in American home kitchens, akin to the British and Irish practice of hanging a single pot over the fire with salt meat and whatever roots the cellar held. Its survival into a book like this one has as much to do with equipment and economy as with taste: a wood range gave you a hot spot and a cool spot, cured meat kept without ice, and cabbage, turnips, rutabaga and potatoes were the winter vegetables that stored longest. The New England version, made with corned beef, is the one most people now know, and the same method was worked on salt pork or a smoked shoulder elsewhere. What the compilers meant by "meat" is not recorded. The note about parsnips standing in for cabbage and turnips is a reminder that the recipe was understood as a template rather than a fixed list.