I associate boiled meals with mid-winter. It's the only time of the year that I look forward to boiling a terrible and cheap cut of meat for hours on end; slowly transforming it from leathery and sinewy to gelatinous and forgivable. It’s the only time of year that I relish corned beef: there is something about cold weather that brings forward food from your childhood.

Corned beef gets its name from the original method of preservation. Pieces of beef were cured in a trough with “corns” (or coarse grains) of salt and water. It is something of a minor mystery as to why the term “corned beef” persisted when almost every other meat that is cured by the same process is called “pickled” or simply “cured”. To corn, as a verb to refer to curing, came into use in the mid-1500s and has managed to staunchly hang on to beef.

Modern corned beef is a far cry from the original recipe. Sailors originally referred to corned beef as “salt junk” - junk in this context referred to scraps of worn out rope used on the ship. Almost every early reference to corned beef refers to it as almost being rock hard and requiring hours of both soaking and boiling in order to make it loosely edible. Janet Clarkson from The Old Foodie found this in the American journals of author, Nathanial Hawthorne from 1844, describing a rough battle with a rock hard lump of meat:

I get along admirably, and am at this moment superintending the corned beef, which has been on the fire, as it appears to me, ever since the beginning of time, and shows no symptom of being done before the crack of doom. Mrs. Hale says it must boil till it becomes tender; and so it shall, if I can find wood to keep the fire a-going. ... Meantime, I keep my station in the dining-room, and read or write as composedly as in my own study. Just now, there came a very important rap at the front door, and I threw down a smoked herring which I had begun to eat, as there is no hope of the corned beef to-day, and went to admit the visitor.

What changed over the past hundred years is the method of preservation and refrigeration which has left us with meat that cooks prior to the crack of doom and with cooks in no need of resorting to a smoked herring.

The original corned beef was salted to the extreme because it was the only way to keep the beef edible, ending up closer to the hardness of prosciutto than the original cut of beef; solid bricks of greying meat that could survive sloshing around on ship in a lukewarm barrel.

The current method to corn beef uses nitrates and vastly less salt so the beef more or less looks and feels like the original cut of meat. Due to less curing, modern corned beef requires refrigeration and I’d imagine, cooks with a superior texture to the salt junk of old.

Need a recipe? Here is a fairly traditional corned beef recipe from the SBS archives.