Corn Beef

I had corn beef for dinner tonight. First time in 4 years. Eating corn beef reminds me of my child hood. It was one of the few canned meat that I actually enjoyed, along with luncheon meat or spam as they call it here. Classy!

I suddenly realise I had no idea what corn beef was actually made of, bar the beef of course. I never bothered to find out, till today!

Corn beef as we know it today owes its origin to the Irish who began salting beef and pork in the middle ages. Basically, the Irish started debonning pieces of beef and soaking them in brine ( a process called curing). The name corned beef came about in the 1600s. "Corn" comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for granule or pellet, referring to the grains of salt used to make the brine in which the beef soaked.

Well, who would have thunk. The corn beef I ate when I was a kid was brung from China!

So how much salt is in the typical can of corn beef? According to saltmatters.org, the typical sodium content of corned beef is 1200 mg/100g or more. The human bodies requires about 5 gram of salt per day. That's a lot of salt man! The funny thing is that there used to be a lot more salt in the old days. The stuff they used to feed the sailors back then had so much salt in it they call it 'salt junk'. At least the current corn beef today doesn't taste half bad.

To sum up, tonight's cheap and tasty corn beef meal consisted of
1. Stir fried corn beef and lightly cooked chopped up peppers ( 1.20 euro for beef and 2 euro for peppers )
2. Peas (1 euro)
3. Rice (1 euro approx )
total cost of meal for two, 5.20 euro.

My next plan is to make my own corn beef. I'll let you know when it happens.