New England Boiled Dinner

A prosaic meal that comforted locals for centuries and has a long traveled history

Jan 30, 2025

The iconic New England dish we are diving into today is linked to the salt trade, the American Independence war, ancient preservation methods and an abundant land. It’s often associated with Irish gastronomy and Saint Patrick’s Day but here, New Englanders feel it very much theirs, as it’s pretty much what locals ate for more than a century.

What is the New England Boiled Dinner

Collins dictionary defines it as “a dish consisting of meat, often corned beef, and whole potatoes, onions, carrots, cabbage, etc. cooked by boiling”.

Jane and Michael Stern, writing for New England magazine, get a bit more florid:

When it comes to eating plain and square, we in the northeastern part of the United States have everyone else beat. We’ve got the plainest, squarest, clunkiest, and most wonderful meat and potatoes meal in America — the New England Boiled Dinner.

Picture it: a big hunk of corned beef brisket, brick-red, striated with juicy veins of fat, falling-into-shreds tender, sliced thick, in the center of the biggest platter in the house. Around this great meat hub glistens a faded rainbow of vegetables: beets in a crimson puddle that bleeds into the salty dampness of the beef; limp cabbage wedges, steamy and pale; small boiled potatoes and heavy rutabagas luxuriating in the mingled juices. Above this hot rugged landscape hover clouds of briny perfume. With a glass of cider, hard or sweet, this is the ultimate, the Primal Meal.

The “big hunk of corned beef brisket” refers to a large cut of beef from the lower breast of the animal that has been cured in “corns” of rock salt. The name was given by the English, but we’ll get to the historical part later.

As with most of the New England dishes I have been researching for a year now, I also cooked this one at home. I wanted to experience the process first hand, and it was also my only chance to actually try it as I haven’t been successful in finding it in a restaurant. This shows how homey this meal is.

The ingredients you need to make a New England boiled dinner.

Finding the ingredients was very easy when it came to the vegetables, but the meat was not so ubiquitous. I first went to Whole Foods and they looked at me strangely when I asked for “corned beef” in the meat section. I then tried with Star Market where an employee named Rubén (written “Ruben” on his plaque) asked me how many slices I wanted. After switching to Spanish when learning I was from Spain and he from Cuba and explaining I needed to cook it, not get it in my sandwich, he cried out “ah! The Irish dish!” and pointed out to the fresh meat aisle. I could only find two vacuum sealed packs that were actually pre-cooked and he apologised and comforted me saying I for sure could make it work.

My last option around my neighbouring supermarkets was Stop&Shop and there I found another vacuum sealed pack that seemed more the piece of meat I should be looking for. It was in the kosher section of the supermarket and I doubted whether to purchase it because there was no sign that assured me it was “corned beef” rather than the word “salted”. I still bought it, as I had no more options. The cashier got very upset when he saw the brisket was priced $43, and he also apologised.

The meat I ended up buying. None was adequate for this dish.

Not knowing if I would be actually cooking corned beef or not, once at home, I gave it a try and followed a mix of these three recipes from New England magazine, from Taste of Home and from Simply Recipes. Probably, the apologetic notes should have given me a clue.

“Served as a midday meal on farms, a traditional boiled dinner goes to the stove soon after breakfast when corned beef and a piece of salt pork, along with a head of cabbage, are covered with water and simmered very slowly. In about three hours there may be added a dozen whole peeled potatoes, an equal number of scraped carrots, and six to eight peeled white onions; well-scrubbed beets are usually cooked separately. When the meat has simmered about four hours, the beef is drained and put on a hot platter, surrounded by the vegetables and garnished with parsley. Some Yankees call for a sprinkling of cider vinegar, but the most common accents are homemade horseradish sauce or strong mustard”. — Evan Jones, American Food (1974)

When was it invented

The act of preserving meat in salt was not invented by New Englanders, the Irish, or even the Romans, but has been practised since ancient times. Salt (sodim chloride) is a fundamental rock for sustaining life, ours included, and it’s had an essential role historically shaping the language, societies and even the landscape. The ancient Egyptians used its preserving properties both for keeping food and for mummification, as salt is dehydrating. And it’s believed that already in prehistoric China, by 6000 B.C., salt flakes were harvested in Lake Yuncheng, province of Shanxi.

In his book Salt: A World History (2003), Mark Kurlansky traces the links this ingredient has had around the globe. He says during the Middle Ages, the Irish would buy salt in the French port of Le Croisic and ship it to Cork or Waterford. They used it for herring, salmon, butter and leather, but specially for pork and beef. “Their salted beef, the meticulously boned and salted forerunner of what today is known as Irish corned beef, was valued in Europe because it did not spoil”, Kurlansky explains.

This salted, non-perishable beef, travelled far with the French and the British who transported it in their ships for provisions and to their colonies, as durable and inexpensive slave food. “It was the seventeenth-century English who gave corned beef its name — corns being any kind of small bits, in this case salt crystals.”, says Kurlansky. Though English style corned beef was not very appreciated, as it was deemed of inferior quality than the Irish one — better known as “spiced beef”—, and some even labeled it as “salt junk”.

Salt became a very sought after mineral for the English, the French and the Dutch as its preserving qualities could transform the newly colonised American coasts into a limitless source of wealth with salt fish. Saltworks began in Salem, Salisbury and Gloucester conserving fish and furs and trading them abroad, but also providing salt to the local households.

“The typical colonial New England house — the New England saltbox — got its name from being shaped like salt containers that were in every home. New Englanders slaughtered their meat in the fall and salted it. They ate New England boiled dinner, which was either salt cod or salt beef with cabbage and turnips.” —Kurlansky, Salt: A World History (p. 217)

In the seventeenth century New Englanders primarily ate bean porridge and vegetable stews with a bit of salt meat in it, this amount decreasing as the previous autumn’s slaughter’s stock reduced. “A hundred and fifty years later, the << ample depths>> of the <<huge dinner-pot>> in which people’s daily meals were prepared contained <<beets, carrots, potatoes, and turnips>> boiling <<in jolly sociability with the pork or corned beef which they were destined to flank at the coming meal>>. Pottage fare had thus been displaced by boiled dinner” tell us Keith Stavely & Kathleen Fitzgerald in their book America’s founding food (2004), quoting nineteenth-century author Harriet Beecher Stowe.

By the nineteenth century most people were eating meat two or three times a day in New England. There was abundance. “A new American style evolved that was based on plenty — plenty of meat and fish, wild or domesticated, plenty of good things direct from the good earth, plenty of eggs and cream”, says food writer Evan Jones in American Food (1974).

In her book The Pearl of Orr’s Island, Stowe depicts the daily meals in the first decades of American independence as a variation of boiled dinner. Salt meat and vegetables all cooked together in the open hearth, bubbling gently for hours, was everyday’s meal and an easy option for busy housewives that needed to make tough cuts of beef more palatable while taking care of many other daily chores.

Many Yankee cookbooks in the first half of the nineteenth century explained how to do it:

“When you merely want to corn meat, you have nothing to do but to rub in salt plentifully and let it set in the cellar a day or two. The navel end of the brisket is one of the best pieces for corning.

A six pound piece of corned beef should boil three full hours. Put it in to boil when the water is cold. If you boil it in a small pot, it is well to change the water, when it has boiled an hours and a half; the fresh water should boil before the half-cooked meat is put again.” — Lydia Maria Child, The American Frugal Housewife (1829)

Becoming an icon

New Englanders continued to live on boiled dinner in the twentieth century as well. A Rhode Island octogenarian, in 1915, recalled his mother’s meals as a boy “Mother would hang the pots on the crane and put in beef, pork and cabbage and other vegetables, and you’d have a dinner that would do you some good, and that would stand by you so you could do out and swing an ax or a sledge-hammer”. (Stavely & Fitzgerald, p.182)

The last decades of the nineteenth century and the first ones of the twentieth century witnessed how prosaic subsistence family dishes like baked beans, chowder, Indian pudding and boiled dinner transformed into cultural icons.

“The mystique of Yankee cooking that was being created in the 1870s had entered into a mature phase by 1939, when it was claimed that the entire meal regularly served to <<radio and movie star>> Nelson Eddy on his visits to his mother in Rhode Island consisted on such icons: a main course of <<New England>> boiled dinner, followed by a dessert of Indian pudding” — Stavely & Fitzgerald, America’s founding food (p.182.)

A melting pot

The brisket I bought was not salt-cured, even if the package said “salted”. Therefore the final result was not brick-red cooked slices, but brown frayed ones. The vegetables were cooked well and the resulting broth was tasty, but I cannot say I have really tried a New England boiled dinner.

Aside attempting to exchange my frustration and shame for honesty, I think my mistake had another side. I could only find two types of salt beef in the supermarkets I inquired. One was Irish style. Cooked previously and ready to be sliced into a sandwich. The second one, the one I used, was found in the kosher aisle.

Jews and Irish share a tradition of salted beef, but it originated in different places. “Pastrami has two possible ancestries: It’s either Romanian (where its predecessor, pastrama, was made with pork or mutton) or Turkish (where it’d be a descendent of pastirma, made with beef). Corned beef hails from Ireland, which is why it’s eaten on St. Patrick’s Day.”, says Brette Warshaw for Eater.

Corned beef is made from brisket, the lower chest of the cow; while pastrami is generally the deckle (a shoulder cut) or the navel (a juicier section below the ribs). Though you can also find it from the brisket nowadays. Which is what I got, but then it was raw meat, not previously cooked.

The tradition of salted beef came to New England by the English, however they took the idea from the Irish back at home. Mid-nineteenth century, many Irish also arrived to Boston and created a big community in Massachusetts. Eastern European and Russian Jews started migrating to New England at the end of the century fleeing anti-semitic laws and bringing their cultural traditions with them.

It’s in this melting pot that the identity of New England dishes got its final form. And even if it can bring some confusions, all these traditions create the gastronomic tissue of the place. Maybe I was not really meant to cook it myself, as the soul of the dish remains in the local families that still take the time to make it; to enjoy a comforting, deeply rooted boiled dinner.