Pregled posta

If you've never eaten corned beef I can assure you that it has nothing to do with corn but a lot to do with beef, usually the less tender cuts such as brisket or rump. The corn in the title doesn't refer to either wheat or corn on the cob but is a form of dry-curing.

The name is an ancient one and goes back to the days before refrigeration when meat was preserved in corns of salt. Pellets, some the size of kernels of corn, were rubbed into the meat to stop it spoiling. Nitrate, or saltpetre, which fixes colouring pigment in the meat, is also used in the curing process.

Today brining - using salt water - has replaced the dry salt cure but the use of the old name "corned", rather than "brined" or "pickled", lingers on. The spices that give the meat its flavour are peppercorns and bay leaf.

Corned beef comes in sealed rectangular tins which have to be opened with a key. This can be a very tricky operation for the inexperienced because if you mess it up there's no other way of getting the block of meat out.

If you're unlucky you might also cut your fingers off. But with luck the contents will slide out in one piece, allowing it to be sliced up for consumption. Spam, by contrast, now comes complete with an easy ring-pull top. Where does it come from?

Mostly from the large cattle processing factories in South America. Fray Bentos, once a well-known manufacturer and the brand we all remember, started up in Uraguay in mid-Victorian times and developed into a worldwide business.

An outbreak of food poisoning was blamed on the factory and it closed in the 1970s. Sales of corned beef plumeted.

So, having successfully got the stuff out of the tin, who actually eats it?

Corned beef still has its fans among the lazy since you don't have to cook it and can eat it cold, although since the widespread advent of refrigeration sales have declined.

It was well-known to the "Tommies" in the First World War trenches. These soldiers called it "Bully beer (boiled beef) and virtually lived on the stuff.

One reliable source states it was actually produced in small tapered tins so that these would fit snugly into their knapsacks. It's also said that in the last war army cooks were issued with special recipe books entitled 1001 Ways To Cook Bully Beef.

The idea was to stop the troops from mutinying.

Tobacco from the newly-settled America was a key import and the tobacco factories employed only women. A tobacco factory, similar to this one, was the setting for the opera Carmen.