2. Heat the water to boiling, stirring to dissolve the other ingredients.

3. Remove from heat.

4. Wash off meat, arrange in bowl, pour the pickle over it. Weight down the meat with stones as necessary to keep it submerged.

5. Store in refrigerator. After a week, meats will be quite salty.

Use in recipe for Boiled Dish or Baked Beans, below, or other recipes calling for corned beef or salt pork.

BOILED DISH-MEAT (1844)

This recipe, from the 1844 The New En­gland Economical Housekeeper, and Family

Receipt Book, by Mrs. E.A. Howland, seems to be the first for what we now call "New England Boiled Dinner," or at least the first to describe it as made in one pot by timing the vegetables. However, by 1845 boiled corned beef and salt pork had probably been eaten almost every day for more than 150 years in the United States, north and south. Mrs. Howland's boiling times suggest either that she was working with very dried-out early spring vegetables, or that Americans were beginning in the 1840s to overcook vegetables. Lydia Maria Child's American Frugal Housewife, fifteen years earlier, had much shorter boiling times for beets and potatoes, although longer for parsnips. Because we have much smaller pots today, I have given a recipe with boiling times suit­able to modern vegetables, and suggest cutting them into four-ounce pieces to cook faster. Unlike most modern cooks, Mrs. Howland cooked her beets along with everything, often staining the meat and cut vegetables pink, except when she had white beets or yellow beets (which you may still find in farmer's markets). Her turnips may have been larger than ours, and she probably cooked the cabbage whole.

“Corned beef should be boiled three hours, pork two hours. Beets need as much boiling as the beef in

winter; one hour will do in the summer, when they are more tender; carrots, cabbage and turnips, each an hour, parsnips forty-five minutes, potatoes twenty to thirty minutes.”

Later recipes mention other vegetables, such as summer or winter squash, corn, and rutabagas. I have not found a reference to boiled corned beef with onions in the nine­teenth century. There is also some record of cooking an Indian pudding in a muslin bag along with the beef and vegetables, or adding dumplings like the Corn Dumplings below.

Yield: Serves 6

1 flat-cut corned beef brisket (2-3 pounds)

lean salt pork (optional)

6 2-inch beets

6 potatoes (red or waxy preferred) 6 parsnips

6 large carrots

Large head green cabbage

6 2-3-inch, white-topped turnips (or one large rutabaga)

Equipment: 1 oversized soup pot, or 2 spaghetti pots, long tongs

1. About 3 1/ 2 hours before you are planning to eat, put the meat in a large pot, and cover with water up to about half the pot (4 quarts). Bring to a boil.

2. Remove top of pot and reduce heat until water just simmers.

3. Turn up the heat and a bagged pud­ding, if using. Reduce heat again to a bare simmer. Make a time chart for when the dish is to be served, and plan to add beets an hour before serving,

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