- oh my god yes tell me more
Long before the days of the Frigidaire, the icebox or even a reliable means to make ice, people had to either a.) eat their food on the spot or b.) find ways to keep it from turning into a bacteria-fungus casserole at room temperature while they stored it for days, weeks or even months. Enter: curing.
Humans learned long ago that covering things in salt keeps the rot away, but it wasn’t until late in the Iron Age that we began mass-producing salt. The increase in available supply made it much more practical to use for everyday preparations like curing foods. I feel sorry for the first few generations that just covered their meats in granulated salt and left it there (dry curing) – must have been a bitter reunion when it was finally served. However, at some point in the Middle Ages we learned the technique of “brining.” Brining is submerging a cut of meat for a few weeks in a salt-water mixture (ideally you should be able to float an egg in the brine) along with some choice seasonings like pepper, garlic, coriander or whatever the local flavor may be. It is quite common to add sugar during the brining as well for an extra sweet kick in the mouth.
- salt! smoke! history!
The oncologists, gun nuts and pee enthusiasts reading this may be interested to know: It used to be much more common to use potassium nitrate or “saltpeter” for brining. Saltpeter is a common ingredient for oxidizing gunpowder, can be obtained from decomposed urine and could very well give you cancer. It also has the effect of giving cured meats their distinctive reddish coloring.
Brining a cut of beef or pork brisket (or even turkey), giving it a rinse in fresh water and simmering it for several hours is called “corning” the meat. You can see where this is going, but you might be asking “Where is the corn?” Given the European roots of brining, it’s no surprise those cheeky Anglo-Saxons put a word to it – “corn” to them meant “small granule or pellet.” So in the case of cured meats, “corn” referred to the granules of salt used in the process Even up until colonial times the word “corn” meant any common grain. Thus, the maize that Native Americans introduced to settlers was called “Indian Corn” and the rest, as all the famed Etymologists of the world say, is history.
Oh, and from corned beef, the jump to pastrami isn’t a big one. Once you have a cured and rinsed chunk of meat, all you have to do is smoke it and cover it with crushed peppercorns and various other seasonings and there you have it – what the Yiddish called “pastrame,” the Turks called “pastrima,” and what most Americans affectionately call: “Holy shit that’s $3 a pound cheaper than ham!”
- hello please make me a sandwich it’s important
- Mike Beech lives in the Cleveland area and really just wanted to find out what the heck corned beef was all about.
