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How to Serve the Dinner
Put your meat on a large platter and lay the vegetables all around it, except the cabbage and beets, which should be served in separate dishes. The beets should have the skins rubbed off them with a cloth and should be cut in halves and put in a deep dish with a sauce of melted butter, salt, pepper and half a cupful of vinegar; this sauce should be hot. Take half the cabbage and some of the potatoes and mash them up together and season with a little cream, some butter and salt and pepper, and make in a mound like mashed potatoes. This is delicious; the entire dinner will be found most appetizing. Provide pepper sauce, tomato catsup, higdon, and any other pickles you like; serve tea as a beverage. This is a recipe for a New England dinner, which needs only to be prepared according to directions to be greatly enjoyed by all who have the good fortune to partake of it. It is very often prepared with one chicken added to the meat and removed when tender, or when the vegetables are added. The chicken gives all a delicious flavor. "DINNER FROM THE BIBLE."
Spread a cloth of blue, and put thereon the dishes and the spoons, and the bowls, with the bread in the basket (Num. 4:6; Lev. 8:31); salt without prescribing how much, and oil in a cruse (Ezra 7:22; I Kings 17:12). Bright shining of a candle giveth light (Luke 11:26). Tell them who are bidden. I have prepared my dinner (Matt. 22:4). They are strong of appetite (Isaiah 7:11). Let us eat and be merry (Luke 15:23). The feast is made for laughter, wine makes merry (Eccl. 10:19). Yea, hear all kinds of music (Dan. 3:5). Grace. - Give us this day our daily bread (Matt. 6:11).
This is the closing half of a New England boiled dinner — the assembly and the two side dishes — so it assumes a pot of corned beef and vegetables already cooked and ready to lift out. Read it as plating instructions with two small recipes embedded.
- What the recipe assumesA boiled dinner already cooked: a joint of meat and vegetables ready to lift from the pot, with the cabbage and beets held back for separate dishes. The page does not name the meat or list the vegetables. Nothing here is raw at the start; the beet skins rub off with a cloth, which implies they have already been cooked whole.
- The hinge: cook the beets apartThe beets, served apart -- The original directs that the beets go in a dish of their own, dressed with the hot vinegar-butter sauce. Beets do bleed, so keeping them out of the mixed platter avoids staining the other vegetables, though the text gives no reason and does not say whether they were cooked separately.
- The hot vinegar butterHalf a cupful of vinegar is 4 fl oz. The recipe gives no quantity for the butter, and the strength of the vinegar a nineteenth-century cook had to hand would have varied; start with less vinegar than the full half cup, warm the sauce through without boiling, and add more to taste.
- Cabbage and potato moundThis is colcannon in all but name. Squeeze or press the boiled cabbage dry before mashing or the mixture goes soupy and will not hold a mound; a splash of cream, a good knob of butter and generous pepper are enough.
- HigdonA chopped mixed pickle in spiced vinegar, of the chow-chow family; recipes under the name vary, typically using green tomatoes, cabbage, onions and peppers. Any sharp mustardy relish or a chow-chow stands in.
- The chickenA whole bird added to a pot of salt beef will be done long before the beef and should come out when the vegetables go in, as the text says. Modern practice is to check the thigh at 165F rather than judge by tenderness alone.
The New England boiled dinner is the plainest kind of one-pot cooking: salted beef, which kept through winter, simmered with whatever root vegetables were in the cellar, with the beet-reddened hash a traditional use for what was left. What is interesting here is that the passage is about service rather than cookery — the platter, the two dishes held back, the array of pepper sauce, catsup and pickles, the tea instead of wine. The "Dinner from the Bible" that follows is a parlour amusement, a mock menu stitched together from scriptural phrases; such pieces circulated in American household compilations of the period. Note also that the compiler recommends tea as the beverage, then quotes Ecclesiastes on wine making merry.