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Old-Fashioned New England Boiled Dinner
NER.
Two pieces of corned beef, the inside part of the round and a plate piece and also a nice piece of salt pork; have the meat nice and fat and well corned; put it in a large kettle, cover with cold water and stand on a slow fire. As soon as the scum begins to rise skim it off, so there is not one fleck of it left; this must be done before it begins to boil. After this take a lemon, cut it in halves, remove the seeds and put it in the kettle with the meat, add one bay leaf and two chill peppers; then let your meat boil gently for two hours. In the meantime have vegetables prepared, cabbage, turnips, carrots, parsnips (if liked), potatoes and beets; the beets must be boiled in a separate kettle and put on in the morning and allowed to simmer gently all day, being well covered with water; the other vegetables must be boiled with the meat, which must be well covered with water all the time. After one hour and a half take the lid off and put the cabbage in first, then the turnips, carrots and parsnips, and let these boil two hours; just half an hour before serving, the potatoes must be added. Now, this allows four hours in which to cook the dinner. If the round piece of beef weighs over ten pounds, you will need five hours.
A straightforward one-pot dinner, but the original's internal arithmetic does not quite add up and its vegetable timings belong to an era of all-day stoves. A few adjustments give a far better plate.
- Keep it below a boilThe hinge of the dish. Corned brisket or round held at a rolling boil turns stringy and dry; keep the water at a bare shiver, around 180-190F, for the whole cooking time. The recipe's "boil gently" most likely indicates a gentle simmer rather than a rolling boil.
- The cuts"The inside part of the round" is corned top round, still sold in some butcher shops; the "plate piece" is the navel end, the fatty cut that gave us pastrami. Corned brisket, point end, is the closest common substitute and gives the same fat. Salt pork is still stocked near the bacon in many markets.
- "Well corned"Corned beef of this date might be cured at home or bought already corned, and the salt level varied either way. Supermarket corned beef comes in wet brine and is usually salty enough; if the package liquid tastes fierce, rinse the meat and start it in fresh cold water. Do not add salt to the pot at any stage.
- SkimmingThe instruction to remove every fleck before the water boils is sound and worth following. Once the liquid reaches a boil the scum breaks up and disperses through the broth, and the vegetables cook cloudy and grey.
- Chill peppersSmall dried red chillies, whole. Two of them in a large kettle season the broth faintly rather than making it hot. Dried arbol or a pinch of red pepper flakes does the job.
- The timings do not reconcileThe text says two hours for the meat, then adds root vegetables after ninety minutes for a further two hours, then claims four hours total. Work from the meat instead: simmer until a fork slides in easily, and test before adding anything else. A 4 lb piece takes roughly three hours; the recipe itself allows five hours for a round of more than ten pounds.
- Vegetables, revisedAdding cabbage first and cooking it two hours reduces it to grey pulp. Working backwards from the finish: potatoes and carrots 30 minutes, turnips and parsnips 25, cabbage wedges 15. Add each to the simmering pot at its own moment.
- The beetsSimmering beets from morning until dinner is a habit of the coal range, not a requirement. Whole medium beets, unpeeled, take 35-50 minutes in their own pot; the skins slip off under cold water. Keeping them separate is right, or the whole dinner turns pink.
- YieldTwo pieces of beef plus salt pork and six vegetables is a table of ten or twelve, with cold meat left for hash. Halve it to one 4 lb corned brisket and a quarter pound of salt pork for six.
The New England boiled dinner descends from the salt-beef economy of the colonial coast, where barrels of corned beef and salt pork were a staple winter protein of farm and ship alike; the vegetables are largely what kept in a root cellar through the winter. The dish is often linked to Irish-American cooking, and corned beef and cabbage grew from it, but boiled salt meat and vegetables was long established in Yankee households before that association. The seasoning here -- a lemon, a bay leaf and two chillies -- suggests a later and better-furnished kitchen than a colonial farm one. The leftovers had their own name, red flannel hash, so called because the chopped beets turn the whole skillet crimson.