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Corned Beff and Cabbage
Have in a saucepan one two-pound piece brisket of corned beef, with one and a half gallons cold water; place on the fire and boil for one and a half hours. Cut a small white cabbage into four equal parts. Trim off the stalk and outer leaves and place cabbage in the pan with the beef. Cover the pan and boil for thirty minutes. Add six medium-sized peeled, raw potatoes. Cover the pan again and boil for twenty-five minutes. Lift up the beef; slice it into thin slices. Remove the cabbage with a skimmer, place on a large hot dish, arrange the corned beef on top, one slice overlapping another, place the potatoes around the dish and serve.
PASTE FOR SAVARINS (CAKES) Four ounces sifted flour, one and a half ounces butter, half ounce fine sugar, one gill lukewarm milk, five whole eggs, half saltspoon salt, quarter ounce compressed yeast, two tablespoons finely chopped sweet almonds and two tablespoons cream. Dilute the yeast in a bowl with the milk. Sift the flour into a small basin, make a small fountain in the centre, then pour the diluted yeast into the fountain and carefully knead with the hand for five minutes; then gradually incorporate half the flour around and place the remaining flour on top of the paste. Cover the basin with a slightly wetted cloth and lay in a warm place for thirty minutes. Then add the salt, sugar, cream, butter, eggs and almonds. Sharply knead the whole with the hand for ten minutes, in every direction. Cover again with the cloth; lay it in the same warm place to raise for twenty-five minutes.
Then fill up six small, lightly buttered savarin cake moulds to three-quarters of their height. If any of the paste is left after filling the six moulds, fill up one or two other moulds. Place the moulds in a warm place until the paste is raised to the brim. Arrange into a pastry-pan; set in the oven to bake for twenty minutes. Remove, unmould and let get cold.
Two unrelated recipes ran together on one page: a boiled corned beef dinner and the yeast-raised paste for savarins. Both are workable, but the timings and a couple of the measures need translating.
- Boil means simmerA hard rolling boil for the full two and a half hours squeezes brine and moisture out of the meat and shreds the cabbage. Hold the water at a lazy simmer, barely breaking the surface, the whole time.
- A gallon and a half of waterThat much water will leach salt out of a heavily cured brisket. If your corned beef is a modern, mildly brined supermarket piece, cover it by two inches and no more, or the meat will end up bland and the cooking liquid worth nothing.
- Cabbage and potato timingThirty minutes for quartered cabbage and twenty-five for whole peeled potatoes both hold up, provided the pot is simmering rather than boiling. Add the potatoes first if they are large, and test with a knife rather than the clock.
- Slicing the brisketLet the meat rest five minutes out of the liquid, then slice thinly across the grain. Sliced with the grain it reads as tough no matter how long it cooked. Serves four.
- A gill and a saltspoonA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz). A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Four ounces of flour is about a cup when sifted if you are measuring by volume, though weighing is safer here.
- Compressed yeastQuarter ounce of fresh compressed yeast is roughly 7 g, equal to about 1 teaspoon of instant dry yeast or a generous 1 teaspoon of active dry. Fresh yeast is still sold in some markets but is no longer a pantry staple.
- The paste is a batter, not a doughFive whole eggs, a gill of milk and cream against only four ounces of flour gives something closer to a thick pouring batter than anything you can knead by hand. Beat it hard with a wooden spoon or a stand mixer with the paddle; the ten minutes of working is what develops the gluten that lets a savarin hold its ring shape.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Savarins of this size bake at 375-400F for the twenty minutes stated; they should come out deep gold and spring back when pressed.
- No syrup is givenA savarin is not finished until it is soaked, usually in a hot sugar syrup laced with rum or kirsch and brushed with apricot glaze. This entry supplies only the paste, so look to the book's syrup entries or use a standard 1:1 sugar-and-water syrup.
Corned beef and cabbage is claimed as Irish in America and largely disowned as Irish in Ireland, where bacon and cabbage was the older farmhouse dish; the beef version is generally traced to Irish immigrants in nineteenth-century American cities, where cured beef from Jewish and other butchers was cheap and pork was not. "Corned" has nothing to do with maize: it refers to the coarse grains, or corns, of salt used in the dry cure. The savarin on the same page belongs to a different world entirely — a ring-shaped yeast cake named for Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, author of La Physiologie du goût, and generally credited to the Parisian pâtissiers Julien in the 1840s as a variation on the rum-soaked baba. Setting the two side by side is exactly what a book called The International Cook Book was for: a single volume in which a tenement Sunday dinner and a Paris pastry could sit in the same column without comment.