[Sca-cooks] Spices and the Irish Common folk

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Mar 24, 2006, at 2:08 PM, Jeff Gedney wrote:

>>  3.  Beef in the timeperiod wouldn't have been fed corn ('corn',  
>> pre-maize, being generic grain), but would have been grass-fed.
>
> Just a heads up to friend Tom...
> "Corning" haas nothing whatsoever to do with what
> an animal is fed.
> It is a form of curing.
> It is similar to Pickling.
> It refers to the coarse salts and spices used as a
> packing to coat and cure the beef.
> Today most corning is actually done commercially by
> brining and not corning.

It's been alleged by various sources that "corning" is a reference  
either to A) coarse salt resembling "corns" of gunpowder, or possibly  
B) actually containing some of that gunpowder (for its saltpeter  
content). Spices are sort of incidental, it appears.

I've never encountered a period or near-period reference to corned  
beef, myself: salt beef, yes, and later, powdered beef.

> Also, beef would not have been common food.
> IIRC most beef was reserved as walking wealth for the
> English nobility, not the Irish peasantry (though Irish
> cattle, by all accounts needed a lot of boiling to eat).
> The ancestor food to corned beef was probably boiling
> a joint of salted pork or bacon with cabbage and potatoes.
> (Think "raw" ham and you probably got it.)
> In America beef was cheaper, especially in the 1800's
> for the Irish following the railroads west.
> So cheap corned beef was substituted for the bacon.
> Eventually Irish repatriots and nouveau riche brought
> the beef concept back to Ireland.

Malachai McCormick says that during his childhood in Ireland, most  
Irishmen thought corned beef on St. Patrick's Day was pretty funny --  
why eat an English dish on the feast day of the patron saint of  
Ireland? _Ham or bacon_ and cabbage, OTOH, is another matter  
entirely. Flavor-wise, one of those bullet-shaped, cured, boneless  
pork shoulders, the ones which actually used to be made with real  
pork tenderloin, once upon a time, is probably one of the better  
substitutes for the harder-to-find Irish boiling bacon, which  
generally comes from the loin, like "Canadian" bacon, only not so  
severely trimmed of the rib meat and fat...

I like coriander seed, mustard seed, and plenty of bay leaf in my  
corning mix, myself.

Adamantius (thinking for some reason of Dublin coddle)





"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la  
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them  
eat cake!"
     -- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,  
"Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
     -- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry  
Holt, 07/29/04