New England Boiled Dinner
Corned beef simmered with cabbage, carrots, potatoes and turnip in a single pot until tender, served with mustard.
Photograph credit: BoiledDinner (image of New England boiled dinner on Wikidata Q17110708) by Dumarest · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons · this resized copy is shared under the same licence
The Method for New England Boiled Dinner
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Put the beef, onions, bay, peppercorns and water in a large pot. Bring to a boil, skim, then reduce to a bare simmer. Cover and cook for 2 1/2 hours.
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Add the turnip and carrots and simmer for 10 minutes.
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Add the potatoes and simmer for 10 minutes. Lay the cabbage on top, cover and simmer for 10 minutes more until all the vegetables are tender.
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Lift out the beef and rest for 15 minutes. Slice across the grain and serve with the vegetables, some broth and the mustard.
What Can Go Wrong
- Keep the water at a bare simmer; boiling makes the beef tough.
- Taste the broth before adding salt; corned beef is already salty.
- Slice across the grain for tender slices.
About This Recipe
Keep the heat low. That is most of the recipe, and the part people skip. A boiled dinner is a single pot of salted beef and vegetables, and a hard boil toughens the meat and clouds the broth. A gentle simmer, with the water barely moving, turns the brisket tender enough to cut with a spoon.
The corned beef goes in first and cooks alone for 2.5 hours, with onion, bay and peppercorns. Then the vegetables join it in order of hardness: turnip and carrots first, then the potatoes, and the cabbage last, so each one is just tender when the beef is done. Everything shares the same salty, savoury broth.
Lift the beef out and rest it for 15 minutes before slicing across the grain. Serve the sliced meat and the vegetables on a platter with some of the broth spooned over and a pot of mustard on the table. Keep the leftover broth for soup.
What to Serve It With
Mustard · Horseradish · Rye bread · Pickles
Leftovers
Keeps in the fridge for 4 days, with some broth to stop the meat drying out.
Common Questions
How long does New England Boiled Dinner take to make?
20 minutes of preparation and 3 hours of cooking, plus 15 minutes of resting, so allow 3 hours 35 minutes from start to finish. The recipe serves 6.
The Numbers per Serving
Per serving, calculated from the ingredient list with USDA FoodData Central figures (SR Legacy). A calculation, not a laboratory analysis: brands, cuts and how you measure change the real numbers. How the figures are worked out.
Your notes on this recipe
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Compiled by Turab
Checked by script for timings, diet labels and nutrition arithmetic. How the recipes are checked.
First published ; last changed .
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