No. 2430

Pressed Corn Beef

Boeuf Presse a l'Ecarlate

Remove the bones from a piece of breast or brisket of beef weighing about twelve pounds; put it in a brine of saltpetre (No. 15). After salting for eight days, drain and wash the meat; put it in a soup pot with plenty of water; let come to a boil, skim and leave to cook very slowly for four or five hours. When the meat is thoroughly done, untie the string, tighten the meat in the cloth, and fasten it like a boned turkey at both ends. Lay it under the press or a weight and as soon as the corned beef is cold undo and glaze it with some meat glaze (No. 402). Cut it in thin slices, replace as it was before cutting, garnish the dish with chopped-up jelly, or parsley sprigs, and serve.

← No. 2429 Bastion a l'Americaine The Cold Service No. 2431 Ribs of Beef a la Bourgeoise →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a cold buffet centerpiece from Delmonico's kitchen, and the eating part of it — long slow simmering, pressing, glazing, slicing — is sound. The curing step is not usable as printed, because the essential numbers live in another entry and are not on this page.

The brine is a cross-referenceThe salting relies on a separate brine recipe, so the weight of salt and saltpetre, the volume of water, and the holding temperature are all given elsewhere. Look those quantities up before starting, since eight days in brine is long enough for the nitrate concentration to matter.
Saltpetre is not interchangeable with modern curing saltNineteenth-century saltpetre is potassium nitrate, and the quantity used here is not visible on this page. Modern curing salts are pink-dyed, precisely diluted sodium nitrite or nitrate mixes formulated so that a specified weight per kilogram of meat gives a known concentration. Substituting one for the other by volume is guesswork, and nitrate overdose is a real toxicity, not a theoretical one.
Eight days at an unstated temperatureA twelve-pound brisket in wet brine for over a week sits squarely in the range where Clostridium botulinum and ordinary spoilage organisms are the whole reason nitrite is in the cure at all. The instruction assumes a cool storage temperature it never states. Use a current corned beef curing recipe with weights and a refrigerator temperature specified.
Twelve pounds is a banquet scaleA boned brisket or breast of that weight, cooked and pressed, will slice for thirty or more people on a cold table. Nothing about the method scales down badly, but it is not a household quantity.
"A l'ecarlate" describes the color the cure producedScarlet, from the nitrate (reduced in the brine to nitrite) fixing the meat pigment pink. The colour is the point of the saltpetre in this style of preparation, which is why it cannot simply be omitted.
The pressing and glazingTightening the hot cooked meat in the cloth, fastening both ends, and weighting it until cold is what makes it sliceable paper-thin without falling apart. The "meat glaze" of No. 402 is stock reduced to a syrupy, gelatinous concentrate, brushed on for shine. "Chopped-up jelly" is set aspic chopped fine for garnish.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of his long tenure as chef at Delmonico's in New York — usually given as some thirty-four years — and it is organized like a professional kitchen's reference shelf rather than a home cookbook — which is why the brine and the glaze are numbered entries elsewhere instead of ingredient lists here. Beef a l'ecarlate, "scarlet beef," is the French name for the salt-and-nitrate cure that English speakers call corning, after the coarse "corns" of salt used to pack the meat; the name refers to the pink color nitrate fixes in the muscle. Pressed and glazed cold beef of this kind belonged to the service froid, the cold buffet that anchored late-Victorian ball suppers and hotel sideboards, where a dish had to look architectural at midnight and slice cleanly for hours. Ranhofer's Delmonico's is generally credited as the restaurant that taught American dining rooms formal French service, and the cold table was one of its most visible exports.