Haggis Recipes

A 2003 survey suggested 

that a third of US visitors to Scotland 

believed the haggis 

was an animal. 

Nearly a quarter thought 

they could 
catch 
one.

 ~ Jon Kelly

BBC News Magazine

“Of all offal,” writes Anissa Helou, “lungs are perhaps the least interesting gastronomically.” Helou’s Offal: The Fifth Quarter, is devoted to preparations of those “variety” meats such as lamb’s tongue, pig trotters, oxtail, and, yes, sheep and pig lungs now coming back to vogue, as they do in times of economic turmoil. Well. Lungs may take a bit more getting used to than some other cuts.

Not, however, for legions of Scots and Scottish Americans who mark Burns Night — January 25th — as one of the primary occasions for dishing forth haggis, the lead into any proper Burns Supper celebrating the life and poetry of the 18th century poet Robert Burns. Haggis is an unusual bit of Scots charcuterie that is both a bit of a joke among outsiders and a point of national pride. Traditionally, sheep’s lungs provide the bulk of protein, though heart and liver are also in the mix. Mixed with onions, oatmeal, and spices, the ground meats are stuffed into a stomach and simmered for hours.

While it enjoys a degree of popularity in Scotland (and, increasingly, England and Wales), authentic Scottish haggis is banned in the United States. It’s the lungs, you see. According to a recent piece in BBC News Magazine, US food safety officials regard lungs as “inedible.” Americans craving a bit of haggis can either try smuggling some in (not advised), opt for a domestic lung-free version (see below), or take a DIY approach and make it at home.

For those who want to tackle this "great chieftain o' the pudding-race" themselves, here are two haggis recipes. The first is from Anissa Helou who lifts it from F. Marian McNeill’s The Scots Kitchen. Helou reports that one could use bone marrow rather than suet but advises that doing so requires the cooking time to be doubled.

Haggis #1

 1 sheep's pluck (heart, lungs and liver)
250g minced beef suet
2 medium onions, finely chopped
250g coarse oatmeal, toasted in a moderate oven for about 30 minutes
Good pinch cayenne pepper
¼ teaspoon grated nutmeg
2 teaspoons dried herbs
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 large sheep's stomach, cleaned very well
300ml milk 

Prepare the lungs (see below) and discard the windpipe. Place in a large saucepan, together with the heart and liver. Cover with water and place over medium heat. As the water comes to the boil, skim it clean and boil gently for 1½ hours, or until completely tender. Remove the pluck from the pan. Trim away all gristle and nerves and chop them very fine. Strain and reserve the cooking liquid. 

Put the chopped pluck in a large mixing bowl. Add the suet (or chopped bone marrow, if you are using it, chopped onions and toasted oatmeal. Add the cayenne pepper, nutmeg and dried herbs. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Mix well, adding enough of the pluck's cooking liquid to have a smooth mixture. The mixture should be highly seasoned.  

Spoon the mixture into the sheep's stomach until it is three-quarters full. Sew the opening and place in a large pot. Cover with water. Add the milk. Place over a medium heat. As soon as the stomach swells up, prick it in several places, then reduce the hear and simmer for 3 hours, adding boiling water to cover if the water level goes below the stomach.
Serve very hot.

Helou’s method for preparing lungs: Rinse the lungs well under cold water. Put in a saucepan and cover with water. Add a 4" cinnamon stick and salt to taste and place over a medium-high heat. As the water comes to the boil, skim it clean. Then cover and cook for 40-45 minutes, or until the meat is done.

The second haggis version is one of two offered by British bacon curer Maynard Davies in his essential Manual of a Traditional BaconCurer. Although Davies’ recipe also calls for a sheep’s pluck (its combined heart, lungs, and liver), he suggests preparing it without the lungs. “Some manufacturers,” he reports, “put lights [lungs] and rinds into haggis but I am not a big believer in that. I say, put the best in and get the best price.” Lungs, no lungs: your call. 

Haggis #2 

Ingredients 

5 lb sheep's liver, hearts and tongues
1 lb beef suet
3 lb oatmeal
2 Spanish onions 

Seasoning 

3oz fine salt
1 oz white pepper
1½ pints of stock
Juice of one lemon 

Method

Put a sheep's or lamb's stomach in a strong solution of salt water to cleanse. Turn inside out and make sure it is very clean. After 30 minutes throw the water away and repeat the process — cleanliness must be paramount in these preparations. Clean the liver by placing it in a strong solution of salt water; this will remove any blood clots and debris. When clean, take out the liver and remove all the sinews; repeat this process with the tongue. 

Boil the liver, tongues and other oddments. Keep the water from the boiler for your stock. When cooked, mince all the meat ingredients on a medium grid. Mince the suet on a fine grid: add a small amount of flour so that the suet does not stick to the grid. 

Now put the oatmeal into a large container. Mix the oatmeal with the stock left from the cooked meat; mix into a fine paste and place in your bowl chopper. 

Add the minced meats and finely minced onions. Add the suet and spread this evenly in the bowl chopper. Lastly, add the seasoning, spreading this evenly over the surface. Turn in the bowl chopper until the mix is of a fine consistency; add more seasoning if necessary until the desired taste is reached. 

Check the stomach before stuffing to make sure it is well cleaned. Do not over-fill — fill three-quarters full to take into account expansion. Make sure the top is tied with a good knot; sometimes it is necessary to sew the stomach to close it. 

Now place the haggis in the boiler and cook gently for 21/2-3 hours, at no hotter than 180°F. Any hotter and the haggis will burst. To check that they are adequately cooked, use a needle and prick one of them — the needle should come out clean if the haggis is well cooked.

It is best to remove the haggis from the boiler using a sieve. Place the haggis on trays, leaving a space between them to cool. Place in the fridge when cooled.

Goes well with:

• The offal truth about American haggis, Jon Kelly’s piece for BBC News Magazine
• Craving a bit of haggis for Burns Night or the next hogmanay? W.A. Beans of Bangor, Maine makes a domestic, lung-free, version for the American market in 1-, 2-, and 5-pound doses. 
• A revised, expanded edition of Offal: The Fifth Quarter is available here. 
• How about some Scotch whisky to go with that?

Kinderheim Gritz: Prohibition-era Pork Belly Charcuterie

North Carolina has liver mush, Pennsylvania is known for scrapple, and in some parts of Appalachia, poor-do is the local name for a dish that gives outsiders pause. These are venerable and entrenched regional charcuterie specialties with names that can be off-putting to modern eaters. Those who either grew up with them, though, or who have overcome the names, know that the stuff can be damn delicious when prepared properly.

Meat porridges such as scrapple or the unfortunately named liver mush are specialties that are particularly easy to make at home. They vary in their makeup, but share four characteristics.

They:

• are made with meat (finely ground or chopped pork is most common, though beef, poultry, and even bison are not unheard of)
• are thickened with cereal or buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum)
• have a thick, gruel-like consistency when cooking
• thicken on standing so that, once cool, may be sliced and fried

Yep. It's a Kookbook.

Add to these the Ohio/Kentucky specialty goetta. Like the others, it’s an immigrant dish. Although sometimes made with beef rather than pork, goetta is essentially scrapple made with steel-cut oats in the place of scrapple’s buckwheat. Its name is a transliteration into English of the Plattdeutsch (Low German) götta, meaning groats (i.e., hulled, cracked grains). In standard High German, the word is Grütze, a cognate our own Southern grits. In fact, my great grandmother’s name for sliceable puddings such as scrapple was Happelgritz. Happel is an old dialect word for “head” suggesting that her recipe was made from pork head — a very common practice.

Her recipe didn’t seem to survive. At least, I haven’t found it yet. I recognized the gist of it, though, in a recipe from a Prohibition-era fundraising cookbook from Addison, Illinois just outside Chicago. The recipe is, simply, Gritz. Its use of steel-cut oats puts it firmly in the Germanic Ohio/Kentucky goetta tradition while its call for pork bellies appeals to modern eaters who have rediscovered this unctuous cut of pork.

From the 1927 Kinderheim Kookbook, here’s Mrs. W. G. Bohnsack’s recipe for

GRITZ

4 to 5 lbs. of fresh pork sides (the part used for smoking bacon), cut in 3 or 4 inch pieces
Cover with hot water, add
1 teaspoonful sage
1 teaspoonful thyme
1 teaspoonful sweet marjoram
2 to 3 tablespoonfuls salt
½ teaspoonful each of cloves and allspice (ground)

Boil until meat is tender. Take meat out of juice and put through meat chopper. Strain liquid and add to it 1½ lbs. steel cut oats and stir until it starts to boil and boil fifteen minutes stirring constantly. Stir in ground meat and let all come to boiling point. Put tightly covered kettle in oven at 300° and bake one hour. Turn off gas and let gritz in oven one-half hour longer. Stir occasionally while in oven. May be cooked on top of stove by stirring constantly 1 hour or until oats are soft. When cooked gritz must be consistency of corn meal mush.

Fry in iron skillet ten minutes for breakfast. Gritz should be made in cold weather only. Small pig's head may be used instead of pork sides. After having made gritz once, each cook can determine whether she needs more oats, less meat or more seasoning.

Goes well with:

• William Woys Weaver’s book Country Scrapple is a scholarly, but short and enjoyable, exploration of not just scrapple, but panhas, goetta, poor-do, liver mush, haslet, pashofa, backbone pie, and other such goodnesses in need of exoneration among squeamish eaters. I drew on it here for parsing out the shared characteristics of scrapple-like dishes and for some of the German vocabulary. 
• My own bacon dumplings for a wicked hangover.

William Woys Weaver (2003)
Country Scrapple
162 pages (hardback)
Stackpole Books
ISBN: 081170064X
$19.95

A Smooth and Creamy Pâté

My introduction to Nigel Slater’s writing was at Kitchen Arts & Letters, Nach Waxman’s cookbook store in New York. Its manager, Matt Sartwell, understood my tastes and my interest in titles from Europe, Latin America, and Asia. He also understood that I was willing to pay more for such imported books because they were often more interesting than so many of the latest American offerings. Or, at least, the titles in that particular store were.

Once, nearly ten years ago, I was browsing the shelves and making a small pile of books to take home when Sartwell asked me if I’d heard of Slater. The name was only vaguely familiar. British was all I could come up with, perhaps a columnist. “His earlier books weren’t anything special,” I recall him explaining as he took a book from the shelf “But his latest one” — and here he pulled an old clerks' trick by placing it in my hand — “is quite good. He writes like you talk.”

I wasn’t at all convinced that anything resembling more of me was something the world needed.

But I humored Sartwell and flipped through the book. The more I plucked through its pages, the more I realized that this guy did write a lot like I speak. Not entirely. Maybe a bit more floral and breezy than I might be. His ingredients, tastes, and methods of cooking, though, as well as a casual style that puts less emphasis on exactitude than on appropriateness, was uncannily similar to my own. He wrote of “enough” butter, glugs of brandy, and splashes of wine. Commonsense in a way that made me appreciate just how uncommon sense truly is.

I added the book to the pile. Some books in my library I don’t open for years on end. Not a month goes by, though, that I don’t crack open Slater’s Appetite for inspiration. Still on my Braunschweiger high, I was craving a bit of liver sausage. For wont of a proper smoker here at the house, though, braunschweiger was out. Chicken liver it was, then.

The milk was whole, the brandy from Jepson (which I wrote about here), and the schmear photo is mine. The rest of this is all Slater (sounding freakishly like me):

A Smooth and Creamy Pâté

There is a constantly recurring lunch in my house that consists of little more than deli shopping laid out on the kitchen table, eaten from its wrappers and cartons. It is a Saturday morning thing, really. Hunks of bread, either freshly baked sourdough or a crisp ficelle, some tiny, purple-black olives, miniature gherkins, a knobbly salami, and a couple of fat wedges of cheese are pretty much what we seem to have. Yet it is a favorite meal, one I enjoy as much as any other, I like a pear with mine, too, or a huge bunch of sweet, muscaty grapes. The star of such a meal is often a white china dish of homemade pâté to go with the little gherkins, or cornichons as they seem to be called nowadays. It is so difficult—almost impossible—to find a commercial pâté that is both velvety and pink enough that I think it worth making your own. The method that follows may sound pedantic, but it is small points such as the sieving after the initial blending that make the difference between a good pâté and one that is truly sublime. Some swamp-green canned peppercorns, hot, soft, and addictive, to scatter on as you eat will bring untold rewards.

Enough for 6

chicken livers—about 14 ounces
milk—enough to soak the livers in
butter—½ cup, plus ¼ cup at the very end
whipping cream—6 tablespoons
brandy [Jepson Rare Alembic Brandy]

Trim any dark or green bits from the livers, cover them in milk, and leave them for thirty minutes. This will rid them of any bitterness. Soften two-thirds of the ½ cup butter, not so far as to melt it, but just so it takes a finger easily. Melt the remaining third in a shallow pan. When it starts to foam, drop in the livers, drained of their milk [and blotted dry on paper towels]. Take care—they will spit at you. Let them develop a pale, golden crust on one side, then turn them over and do the same to the other. It is essential that the butter is hot enough for this to take only a few minutes, otherwise, the center will not stay pink and the pâté will lose its magic.

Now tip the livers, their butter, the softened butter, and a generous seasoning of salt and black pepper into a blender or food processor with the cream, and blitz to a smooth puree. Pour a couple of good glugs of brandy into the empty pan, put it over the heat, and bring to a boil so the alcohol burns off (some people ignite it at this point, but I have never found it makes that much difference). Pour the brandy into the creamed chicken livers and continue to blitz. No matter how much you whiz the pate there will still be some graininess, but it should remain pink.

Now, using a rubber spatula, push the mixture through a stainless steel sieve into a bowl. I know this is deeply boring, and the sieve is yet another thing to wash up, but it really does make a crucial difference to the pâté, turning the grainy and the mundane into the blissfully velvety. The point is to have as smooth a texture as possible, and you can only get that by sieving. Scrape the whole lot into a terrine or bowl, smooth the top, and put it in the fridge to set.

Half an hour later, and no longer because the mixture will discolor, melt the ¼ cup of butter and scrape off the froth that rises to the surface. Pour the butter over the pate and return it to the fridge to set. I tend to leave mine for most of the day or overnight, but it should be ready in three or four hours. It will keep for a day or two.

Details for the American edition:

Nigel Slater (2002)
Appetite: So What Do You Want to Eat Today?
448 pages (hardback)
Clarkson Potter
ISBN: 0609610783
$35.00

Goes well with:

• A trip to Kitchen Arts & Letters (1435 Lexington Avenue, New York City, 212.876.5550, www.kitchenartsandletters.com)
• Jepson made the brandy I used to great effect in our quince-infused brandy.  At $19.99, it was a steal. Peel your eyes and keep 'em peeled for that price at Trader Joe's in case they ever score a great deal on it again. 
• Jennifer McLagan's new book on offal cookery, Odd Bits. I recommend this one less because there's any particular resonance between the writing styles of McLagan and Slater than because of the odd bit recipes I yoiked from each.

Bookshelf: Odd Bits (and Brain Fritters)

I have licked the inside of a dead man’s skull, yet cannot bring myself to eat brains.

Brains don’t disgust me; it’s not that they are icky, yucky, or gross. After all, I dote on sweetbreads, said to be of similar consistency. No, it’s that, of all an animal’s odd bits, the brain is so clearly the seat of cognition. It’s not for nothing that a German word hammers this point; the brain, the human one, anyway, is das Denkorgan, the “thinking organ.”

Surely, I have eaten brains, given all the scrapple, brawn, and brei I’ve downed since childhood, but I’ve never actively pursued a hot platter of grey matter. I could chalk up my eschewing brain to mere caution. After all, transmissible encephalopathies such as mad cow disease and other pernicious, degenerative brain disorders, no matter their rarity, can be traced to a heady diet. But the truth is that I hesitate at the idea of devouring thoughts — even a lamb’s.

I’ll eat livers, lungs, trotters, and tongues, but no one — not Fergus Henderson, not Mrs. Beeton, not Charles Ranhoffer of Delmonico’s, or even Escoffier himself — has come as close as has Jennifer McLagan to convincing me that my thoughts about brains ought to be reconsidered.

McLagan’s new book Odd Bits covers brains as well as beef cheeks, liver, tongue, heart, Bath chaps, guanciale, pig ears, haggis, kidneys, sweetbreads, testicles, ribs, lungs, marrow, and more. After writing about the culinary use of bones and fat in two earlier well-received books, her latest subtitle (How to Cook the Rest of the Animal) pretty much sums it up. In this troika of titles, McLagan has firmly established her expertise in converting cast-off bits of mammalian anatomy into tasty dishes. Hair, I suppose, or eyeballs may remain unaddressed, but when she’s covered even toenails, her expertise in offal is unassailable (really, now, what is blood orange calves’ foot jelly but quivering red essence of toenail?).

Continuing hard times and a growing taste for stronger flavors means you’re going to be seeing a lot of what polite company once referred to as "variety meats" on menus. You could do a lot worse than sitting down with Odd Bits and reading up to understand what you’re seeing when you’re out — and how to make some of those toothsome morsels at home.

Taking her inspiration from Australian chefs and food writers Greg and Lucy Malouf, McLagan presents a cocktail menu snack: cheese and brain fritters. She writes:

Frying and the addition of cheese often help persuade people to try something they think they don't like. I serve these as appetizers with drinks—that way guests only have to try one, but I'm pretty sure you won't have any left. The recipe is very straightforward; just make sure the cheeses are very finely grated, a microplane is the ideal tool.

Cheese and Just a Little Brain Fritters

3 eggs
½ cup/¾ oz/25 g very finely grated Gruyere, packed
¼ cup/⅓ oz/10 g very finely grated Parmesan, packed
2 Tbl finely chopped chives
Finely grated zest of 1 orange
½ tsp fine sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper
3 sets poached lamb's brains (see below)
1 Tbl cornstarch
1 cup/7 oz/200 g lard

Preheat the oven to 200°F/100°C. Place a baking sheet lined with paper towels in the oven.

In a bowl, whisk the eggs, then slowly whisk in both the cheeses and the chives, orange zest, and salt, and season with pepper.

Slice each brain lobe into ½ -inch/1-cm slices and toss them in the cornstarch to coat. Transfer them to the batter and stir to mix; you will have something resembling a lumpy pancake batter.

Melt the lard in a heavy frying pan over medium heat; you should have about into ½ -inch/1-cm of fat. When hot, drop a little batter into the oil, it should sizzle and rise to the surface. Now add a few spoonfuls of brain batter mixture to the fat; don't overcrowd the pan and adjust the heat so the fritters bubble gently. Cook the fritters about 3 minutes, or until set and golden on the underside. Using a slotted spoon, gently turn them over and cook for about another 3 minutes. As they finish cooking, transfer the fritters to the baking sheet in the oven to keep warm. Serve right away.

Cleaning Brains

The general method for cleaning brains involves removing any remaining skull fragments, then soaking them in a light brine (about 1 teaspoon of salt per cup of cool water) both to draw out blood and to help firm the lobes. After soaking, the membrane is removed and then the cleaned brains often poached in water or stock.

Jennifer McLagan (2011)
Odd Bits: How to Cook the Rest of the Animal
256 pages (hardcover)
Ten Speed Press
ISBN: 158008334X
$35.00

Goes well with:

• McLagan's blog where she's got some behind the scenes materials and roundups of what others are saying and writing about her books. 
• Feasting on Bones

Elise Hannemann's Liverwurst

Even though one of my Irish grandfathers' families hails from Cork, a city known for its appreciation of offal, and the other from County Mayo, my wurstlust is traceable to another side of the family entirely.

As a child, if I were particularly antsy, my mother would rebuke me with an exasperated "Sitzt du!" and I would know to sit and immediately unfuss myself. Asked what I wanted for my birthday dinners, I declared the tedious "rouladen" more often than she probably liked to hear, and in my grade school, I was one of the only children — certainly the only freckled one — who toted Braunschweiger and mustard sandwiches for lunch. To this day, if you startle me, you're as likely to get a German expletive as an English one.

The unavoidable conclusion is that somewhere in the woodpile lurks a beer-drinking, sauerbraten-making, spätzle-simmering subject of the Kaiser. Suspicion falls squarely on my great grandmother whose maiden name, depending on which relative you asked, was either Schultz or von Hasenberg. As a small child, I once asked why some of our cousins had German names. She konked me on the head with the back of her hand and chided me. "We are not," she insisted, "German. We are Prussian." Years later, I think it may have been a joke...but, then, Lily von Hasenberg (if that was her real name) was not known for levity, so who knows?

That Braunschweiger above is a spreadable pork liver sausage, a subcategory of the wider liverwurst clan, and one likely to be found at family gatherings at my great-grandmother's massive lawn parties in the 1970's. To be honest, the kids generally eschewed it; those who didn't like it really didn't like its mineral bite. To me, though, it was one of the perks of no-class summer diversions. Broadly, Braunschweiger — known as BS to some of its admirers — is ground pork liver mixed with finely ground bacon, stuffed in hog bungs, simmered, then smoked. Because lately I've been both on a liverwurst kick and struck with bouts of insomnia, I've been digging up recipes that elucidate the whole category of liver sausages — and make sense of my childhood snacking.

On a hunt for Braunschweiger recipes in particular, I came across one in my library for "Leberwurst" from Elise Hannemann's 1904 Kochbuch. The book is dedicated to Hannemann's patron, Ihrer Majestat der Kaiserin ["your Majesty the Empress" (i.e., Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein, wife of Kaiser Wilhelm II)] and is a revealing look at middle class German cookery in the years before World War I. Although Hannemann does not call this particular sausage "Brauschweiger," the bacon and optional smoking would make recognizable to American Midwesterners as exactly that.

Klicken Sie hier

My somewhat free translation is below. Following that is my transcription of the original — as always, feel free to correct my translations. The original recipe's Fett- oder Krausedärme refer to slightly different natural hog casings. Those sold as 2.5-3-inch "bungs" (no snickering) in the US are just fine for a finely ground and simmered sausage like this. Wurstkräuter are simply herbs and spices for seasoning wurst. Although Hannemann doesn't specify, white pepper, marjoram, nutmeg, allspice, and even cloves would not be out of place. Start with a 3/8" plate, then grind twice more with a 1/8" plate.

Liverwurst

Very Good. In winter, it will last three weeks.

500 g liver
400 g of cooked bacon
1 whole egg
Sausage herbs
Dried truffles or fresh anchovies
Salt
Pepper

Run the liver and bacon through a grinder three times, then thoroughly mix in the herbs, salt, pepper, finely sliced truffles or chopped anchovies. Stuff this mixture loosely into hog bungs and let cook slowly for a half an hour* in boiling water. Then remove them immediately place in cold water.

The sausage for slicing and is especially good if they are smoked two days. 

*Note that some modern authorities suggest cooking liverwurst until its internal temperature is 165°F. 

Transcript of the above image:

Leberwurst.

Sehr Gut. Im Winter 3 Wochen haltbar.

500 g Leber
400 g gekochter Speck
1 ganzes Ei
Wurstkräuter
Getrocknete Trüffeln oder frische Sardellen
Salz
Pfeffer.

Die Leber und der Speck werden dreimal durch die Fleishhackmaschine genommen, mit den Krautern, Salz, Pfeffer, kleingeschnittenen Trüffeln oder gehackten Sardellen gut vermischt, lose in Fett- oder Krausedärme gestopft und ½ Stunde langsam in kochendem Wasser ziehen gelassen; dann werden sie herausgenommen und sosort in kaltes Wasser gelegt.

Die Wurst wird zum Ausschnitt verwandt und ist besonders gut, wenn sie zwei Tage gerauchert wird.
  
Goes well with:

• I am a Meat Wagon —When I say "wurstlust," it's not a joke. I crave sausages and cured meats; my last stop out of New Orleans was at Butcher where I scored two types of bacon we can't get in San Diego . I even tempt the TSA in a story about getting stopped smuggling andouille after a trip to LaPlace, Louisiana. 

Homemade Corned Beef

For some unknown reason corned beef does not receive the careful display it should get. Too many meat men merely toss the corned beef into a platter any old way. It should be remembered that corned beef is a big trade puller for people who will go miles out of their way to patronize a meat market that is known for good corned beef.

~ Albert Todoroff (1949)

Store Tested Ideas for Meat Men

Inspired by (a) St. Patrick's Day (b) Darina Allen's book and (c) the repugnant pink sludge enrobing vacuum-packed corned beef that started showing up on store shelves several weeks ago, I made corned beef this week. That's not to say that I merely cooked a piece of it — I sourced a fresh beef brisket, washed it, trimmed it, slipped it in cold spiced brine and let that mother sit in there for almost a week. The result was a rosy pink hunk of beef that was the centerpiece of a simple dinner last night: corned beef brisket, boiled fingerling potatoes, and — since I don't care for plain boiled cabbage — coleslaw. On the side: a pot of homemade mustard made with Filipino vinegar.

Simple, tasty, the precursor to both sandwiches and homemade beef hash. The following recipes may seem like a lot of work; they're not. They are super simple, just heavy on the words to describe it for anyone who's never tried making corned beef before.

Corned Beef

Beef brisket — about a 5-pound piece
1 gallon cold spiced brine (see below)
Pickling spices*

Wash and pat dry the brisket. Gently place it in a pot large enough to accommodate the piece in one hunk. Carefully pour the chilled brine over it to cover. Weigh it down, if necessary, with a ceramic plate or bowl. Alternately, carefully slip the brisket into the brine if it's already in an appropriate container. Refrigerate for five days, checking now and then to make sure it remains submerged. After 2 or 3 days, turn the beef over (overhaul it) and continue brining.

After five days, remove the (now shrunken and somewhat darkened) beef from the brine, rinse it, and place in a large pot or dutch oven with fresh water to cover. Add a small handful (say, somewhere between an eighth and a quarter of a cup) of pickling spices, bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. Cover and simmer 3-4 hours until done.

Remove from the liquid and rest 15-20 minutes before slicing. Alternately, allow to cool completely before slicing for sandwiches or cutting thicker bits for hash.

Spiced Brine

1 gallon/4 liters water
2 c/450g kosher salt
.25 c/50g white table sugar
.25 c/50g brown sugar
1oz/25g pink curing salt (aka Prague Powder No.1)
Half a head (about 6-8 cloves) of garlic, peeled and minced
1 oz/25g pickling spices*

Bring all the ingredients to a boil, stirring until the salts and sugars are dissolved. Turn the heat off, let it cool, then refrigerate before using — you don't to start cooking the beef in a hot brine.

*Pickling spices are available at numerous grocers, spice shops, and ethnic markets. The dry mixture generally contains mustard seeds, black peppercorns, bay leaves, cinnamon, and hot pepper. The version below is cobbled together from several sources, including Micheal Ruhlman and Brian Poleyn's Charcuterie, Linda Ziedrich's The Joy of Pickling, and Quick Pickles, a collaboration between Chris Schlesinger, John Willoughby, and Dan George.

By volume (cups, tablespoons, sour cream containers, whatever constant comforts you), mix the following:

2 parts each — cracked black peppercorns, yellow mustard seeds, black/brown mustard seeds, coriander seeds, cracked allspice berries, Aleppo pepper (preferred) or crushed red chili, and cloves.

1 part each — ground ginger and ground mace

For every cup of the above mix, add a small handful of crumbled dry bay leaves (not fresh ones) and 2 or 3 4" sticks of Mexican canela, roughly crushed into large pieces. If you prefer to use the firmer, darker cinnamon sticks, use only 2. What you don't use for the brine and cooking the beef, you can use later for homemade cucumber pickles.