What if You Could Make Great Corned Beef?
'Corned beef and cabbage is the scent of St. Patrick’s Day. A low, spicy pong of coriander and pepper, garlic and beef that carries a sweet, vegetal steaminess: the smell of low tide, ambrosia or a middle-school cafeteria, depending on your experience. For a large number of Americans, particularly Irish-Americans and particularly at this time of year, as shamrock posters appear on cubicle walls, deli cases and in the windows of liquor stores, it is a smell that signals the arrival of spring and the celebration of a culture unique to America and practically unknown in Ireland itself.
“It’s such a strong memory,” said the chef Kerry Heffernan, who, among other activities, runs the seasonal Grand Banks restaurant aboard a schooner at Pier 25 in Manhattan. Mr. Heffernan grew up in Fairfield County, Conn., and remembers surreptitious train trips into New York this time of year to drink, underage, in the old Irish bars that used to dot Midtown, near Grand Central Terminal.
“You could smell the corned beef from the steam tables inside,” he said. “We’d get smashed, eat a lot, and go home, tell people, ‘We went to the city!’ We went, what — a quarter block?”'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/dining/corned-beef-recipe.html?
2 cups coarse kosher salt
½ cup sugar
5 garlic cloves, smashed
5 tablespoons pickling spices
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon pink curing salt (sodium nitrite)
1 4- to 5-pound beef brisket
2 bottles of good beer
2 bottles of good ginger beer
https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1018642-homemade-corned-beef
= new reply since forum marked as read
I shared this link here a few years back and it's the only way I make corned beef now. It is wonderful.
http://www.ayearofslowcooking.com/2012/03/dijon-corned-beef-in-slow-cooker.html
And the Reubens after, yum. Thanks for the reminder to get rye bread and Swiss cheese. 
