Boiled meat will never win any marketing awards. It speaks of cabbagey kitchens and bones poking out of stockpots and of blandness. I had never tasted boiled mutton before, though it's considered a great dish in the UK. It's cooking gently: Just the odd glop-glop across the kitchen. It smells of turnip, Tom Brown's Schooldays and pious frugality.
The first thing to point out about boiling meat — and here I include poaching, simmering and stewing — is that it works better on tough, cartilaginous cuts than leaner ones.
Slow, steady cooking in water or stock unfolds the bashful glories of shin and shank, and tripe and trotter, the chewy muscled tasty bits of working beasts of the farm.
There's science to all this: Arid treatises on collagen, gelatine and muscle fibre, and the temperatures of leaching cells — but all it really says is that you should keep the temperature low and regular.
"It's a humanistic approach towards cooking," Fergus Henderson said. "My mum, who is a wise soul, always said never to boil meat but just to give it the gentlest simmer." And the most familiar boiled meats follow Ma Henderson's advice.
Boiling meat is cheap and easy, so it's closer to the diet of villeins and serfs than the rich and pampered. Salting is one of the oldest ways to preserve meat: Boiling salted meat helps keep it tender. The nutritious broth that a joint leaves behind is an excellent base for a hearty soup.
Boiled meat has a succulence, an integrity and a heritage that is entirely, viscerally ours. Boiled lamb with a sharp caper sauce is hearty and exquisite, and I know this because I'm eating it right now.
