Salt Beef with Carrots and Parsley Sauce

There's a quiet satisfaction in deciding, five days before you eat, what dinner will be. Salt beef asks for that. Not skill, not fuss, just the willingness to plan ahead and then leave things alone. You make a brine on Sunday, lower a piece of brisket into it, and put it in the fridge. The kitchen carries on around it. By Friday, the salt has done its slow, invisible work, and you have something worth cooking.

On the day, you lift the beef from its bath, rinse it, and set it to poach in clean water with an onion, some celery, a couple of bay leaves. The kitchen fills slowly. Not a roasting smell, something gentler: savoury and deep, with a mineral warmth from the cure. The carrots go in towards the end, to cook in that same liquor and carry its flavour to the plate. This is a London meal, in the truest sense. The kind of thing you'd queue for on Brick Lane, but better when you've made it yourself and the house smells like it.

Parsley sauce is not optional. It's the thing that lifts the plate from good to right. A proper white sauce, thick with chopped parsley, loosened with a ladle of the poaching liquor, sharpened with a touch of English mustard. The beef goes on a warm plate, sliced against the grain, pink if you used saltpetre, grey-brown and honest if you didn't. Carrots alongside. Sauce over everything. There are few better feelings than putting this in front of someone on a cold evening.

The leftovers are half the point. Cold salt beef in a beigel with mustard and a gherkin is another meal entirely, and just as good. I wrote it down in the notebook once: beef, brine, five days, worth it. I still think that covers it.