Corned beef

• 1. Introduction

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  Astronaut John Young once hid a corned beef sandwich in a pocket of his spacesuit and sneaked it aboard Gemini 3. It was contraband. Corned beef is salt-cured beef, known as salt beef in Ireland and across Commonwealth countries. It sounds like a humble thing, yet one sandwich of it was worth smuggling into space. Why is a cut of meat named for grains? How did cattle from Ireland and Scotland feed an empire while most of the Irish ate little of it? And why do Americans tie the dish to Saint Patrick's Day when it is not an Irish national dish?

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• 2. Grains of Salt

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  The word corn comes from Old English, where it described any small, hard particle or grain. In corned beef it most likely points to the coarse rock salt rubbed into the meat, often called corns of salt. A second explanation points to corns of potassium nitrate, also called saltpeter, which was once used to preserve the beef. Some recipes add sugar and spices to the salt.

  Nobody knows where corned beef first appeared. It most likely began whenever people started preserving meat in salt. Traces of that habit turn up in ancient Europe and the Middle East, and curing beef was already common around the world in classical antiquity.

  Most modern recipes include nitrates, and these give the meat its pink color. They also matter for safety. During curing, nitrates and nitrites hold back the spores of Clostridium botulinum, the bacterium behind botulism. Beef cured without them turns gray, and that version is sometimes called "New England corned beef."

  Salting itself is ancient. Turning it into a large industry took a particular moment in British farming history.

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• 3. Cork's Barrels

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  In 1668, the port of Cork alone shipped out half of Ireland's annual beef exports. Cork, Dublin and Belfast all grew large curing and packing industries. They used local cattle and salt brought in from the Iberian Peninsula and southern France. Industrial corned beef began in the British Isles during the British Agricultural Revolution. From the 17th century, beef from Ireland and Scotland fed civilians and soldiers across the British Empire, because it did not spoil.

  Seventeenth-century packers paid little attention to individual cuts. They worked with tough, unwanted parts such as the shank and neck. Everything was sorted by weight into three grades: "small beef" at the bottom, then "cargo beef", then "best mess beef" at the top. The French bought mostly small beef and cargo beef. Best mess beef went to markets across the British Empire.

  Some of the Irish and Scottish beef went to the French West Indies, where it fed both settlers and slaves. In European colonies in the Americas, corned beef carried a stigma, because poor people and slaves were the ones eating it. In Europe it carried no such shame.

  Few Irish farmers saw the benefit. Most of the Irish population in this period were native tenant farmers, and they ate little meat. Meat was expensive, and Anglo-Irish landowners, who held most of the farms, marked most of the beef from their cattle for export. Meat was more common in County Cork than in places far from the curing centres, such as Northern Ireland. Working-class Irish Catholics mostly ate cheap salt pork.

  The American social theorist Jeremy Rifkin saw a larger effect. In his 1992 book Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture, he described English enclosure pushing thousands of rural families into factory work in London, Leeds, Manchester and Bristol. High prices and shortages threatened rebellion. In his words, "British officials and entrepreneurs quieted the masses with Scottish and Irish beef." Without the pastures of Scotland and Ireland, he argued, calming the unrest might have been impossible.

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• 4. Bully Beef

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  In 1862, Lord Clarence Paget judged that "very good corned beef" had replaced "old mahogany" on naval ships. That shift belonged to a wider habit of feeding fleets and armies from tins. From the 17th through the early 20th centuries, many militaries and navies relied on tinned corned beef, salt pork and hardtack. Even in the two world wars, when fresh meat was rationed, the tins stayed standard.

  The British name for the tinned version, bully beef, grew out of the dishes soup and bouilli. During the 19th century, canned food was stored on merchant ships and in the Royal Navy. Sailors called the meat portion bully beef, and the phrase spread to all canned meats, corned beef included. English soldiers used it for their own tinned rations, and by the Ashanti War of 1873-1874 corned beef was a staple of military supply.

  The quantities were large. During the Anglo-Zulu War, more than 500 tons went to South Africa in six months. At the Battle of Isandlwana, British troops reportedly threw thousands of tins into the Buffalo river to lighten their retreat.

  The tin itself was an invention. In 1875, Arthur Libby and W. J. Wilson patented a rectangular can with tapered sides. Its contents could "slide out in one piece, so as to be readily sliced as desired." The meat was precooked to limit shrinkage and packed under pressure to drive out air and excess moisture. That is why labels read compressed corned beef. In 1879, Libby, McNeil and Libby exported over 4,400 tons of preserved beef to England, with over 260 tons going to troops in South Africa. The patents were declared void in 1881 once prior art came to light, so other packing houses could make similar cans. Around the time of the Second Boer War and World War I, bully beef began arriving in rectangular key-open cans.

  Bully beef served as the main field ration of the British Army from at least the South African War until World War II. In February 2009, British Defence Equipment and Support announced it would be phased out of ration packs as the new Multi-Climate Ration Packs arrived. Mass backlash later reversed that change.

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• 5. Tins Across Oceans

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  Production at Fray Bentos in Uruguay began in 1873, and the tins reached Britain under the name Fray Bentos. In 1943 alone, 16 million tins left the town, mostly to power the Allied war effort. The Frigorífico Anglo plant made much of this beef. Uruguayans themselves rarely eat it.

  Corned beef became a less important commodity in the 19th century Atlantic world, partly because slavery was abolished. Even so, canned corned beef stayed an important food through World War II. Today large amounts of the world's canned supply come from South America, and roughly 80% originates in Brazil.

  In Israel, a canned corned beef called Loof was the traditional field ration of the Israel Defense Forces until it was discontinued in 2011. Its name is a colloquial short form of meatloaf. The army developed it in the late 1940s as a kosher form of bully beef. Earlier, Jewish organizations such as Hadassah had sent similar canned meats in relief packages to Europe and Palestine.

  In Fiji, Samoa and Tonga, western colonialism brought canned goods, and corned beef became highly prized. Natural disasters brought food aid from New Zealand, Australia and the United States. The world wars of the mid-20th century then made foreign foods a bigger part of daily meals, though taro and coconuts stayed on the table. Samoans distinguish povi masima, the brined beef, from pīsupo, the canned kind. The word pīsupo literally means "pea soup" and now covers canned foods in general. In Tonga, masima names the wet-brined beef and kapa the canned meats.

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• 6. Irish by Adoption

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  A poem from the 12th century, Aislinge Meic Con Glinne or The Vision of MacConglinne, gives the first appearance of corned beef in Irish cooking. In it, a king eats the meat as a delicacy to purge himself of the "demon of gluttony." Cattle served as a bartering tool and were eaten only when they could no longer give milk or work. Salt was costly too. The dish in the poem was rare and valued, and it was unrelated to the corned beef of today.

  Mark Kurlansky, in his book Salt, says the Irish made a salted beef around the Middle Ages that was the "forerunner of what today is known as Irish corned beef." He adds that in the 17th century the English named it corned beef.

  Before the wave of Irish immigration to the United States in the 19th century, many ethnic Irish immigrants did not eat corned beef at all. At home it had been a luxury. In the United States it was cheap and easy to find, which may explain why it won out over back bacon among Irish immigrants.

  Jewish butchers played a part. The Jewish population made a similar corned brisket and also smoked it into pastrami, and Irish immigrants often bought their corned beef from these butchers.

  In the late 19th century, Irish immigrants used corned beef as a substitute for bacon. Corned beef and cabbage became the Irish-American version of the Irish dish of bacon and cabbage. That is how the beef came to be linked with Saint Patrick's Day in North America. It grew from Irish-American culture, and it is not an Irish national dish.

  A cousin of the dish, the New England boiled dinner, pairs the beef with cabbage and root vegetables such as carrots, turnips and potatoes.

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• 7. Plates Around the World

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  In Newfoundland and Labrador, corned beef is sold in buckets of brine and goes by the name salt beef. It supplies meat through the long winters and anchors the local Jiggs dinner. Cooks there have even turned the meal into a Jiggs dinner poutine.

  A grilled Reuben sandwich stacks corned beef with Swiss cheese and sauerkraut on rye bread, finished with Thousand Island or Russian dressing. In the United States and Canada, the beef is usually brisket, sometimes round or silverside, and Jewish delicatessens often sell it ready to eat. Smoking it with a similar spice mix gives smoked meat, such as the Montreal-style kind. In the United States, corned beef hashed with potatoes and served with eggs is a common breakfast.

  In Puerto Rico and among Puerto Ricans in the United States, canned corned beef was a cheap choice for working-class families. The dish combines sofrito, plantains, potatoes or canned corn, and was long called a struggle meal. A recent rise in beef prices has made it more popular in areas with large Puerto Rican communities. Jamaica and Barbados have versions of their own.

  Pingyao beef, a specialty of Shanxi in China, dates back to the Ming dynasty. Cooks rub it dry with salt and then braise it slowly. It became a tribute item for the imperial court during the Qing dynasty, and today it is a protected geographical indication product. In Hong Kong, corned beef has been heavily adapted to local taste. It appears alongside Western fusion dishes at cha chaan teng and other cheap restaurants.

  In the Philippines, corned beef is called carne norte, Spanish for "northern meat." The name refers to norteamericanos, the colonial Spanish word for Americans. During the American colonial period of 1901-1941, the Libby's brand became popular among the wealthy as a luxury. It was served cold from the can over rice, or as patties between bread. From 1942 to 1945, American soldiers brought the same corned beef and airdropped it. It was a life-or-death commodity, because the Japanese Imperial Army controlled all food to crush resistance.

  After 1946 its popularity grew far greater. Corned beef now rides in balikbayan boxes and sits on Filipino breakfast tables, and ordinary Filipinos can afford it. Century Pacific Food, CDO Foodsphere and San Miguel Food and Beverage are among the wholly Filipino-owned brands made locally. Philippine corned beef is typically shredded beef or buffalo meat, boiled, shredded and almost always sold in cans. The classic breakfast is corned beef silog. Carne norte guisado is fried with onions, garlic and often cubed potatoes, carrots, tomatoes or cabbage, then served with sinangag, garlic fried rice, and a fried egg. Mixed with egg and fried, it becomes tortang carne norte, a corned beef omelet. It also stretches a small amount of meat into sopas and sinigang.

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• 8. The Cost of Curing

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  The International Agency for Research on Cancer, known as IARC, says processed meat causes cancer, particularly colorectal cancer. Corned beef falls in that group of processed red meat. Strong evidence also links processed meat with higher risks of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. The World Cancer Research Fund recommends minimizing it.

  The nitrates that keep botulism at bay carry their own cost. They react with amines in beef to form compounds that cause cancer. Red meat does offer protein, iron, zinc and vitamins B1, B2, B6 and B12.

  Yet the tin endures. Canned corned beef remains a standard meal in field ration packs around the world because it needs no preparation. The American Meal, Ready-to-Eat is one example.

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