Dear Whole Foods

Dear Whole Foods,

No matter if you fill a display area right by the entrance with it, I refuse to acknowledge the existence of a product called "uncured corned beef."

Corning is a cure. The name of this product is a contradiction in terms, like "raw chocolate cake" or "live poached salmon."

Simply floating a hunk of brisket in a cryo bag with a few pickling spices does not make it corned beef. It makes it "coriander, pepper and dried parsley flavored brisket." Injecting it full of red dye to make it the same color as the first Mayor Daley meeting with representatives from Operation Push does not make it corned beef. It makes it a faker. You know, like the first Mayor Daley called Senator Ribicoff on national TV.

As it happens, I went into Excel Corned Beef today, newly remodeled, and Bill and the guys were busting their humps to take bins full of corned beefs, stuff them into bags, and then stick them five at a time into this monster vacuum seal which looks like a pants presser. I said it looked like Christmas rush around there and Bill replied, "Yep, Irish turkeys!" Little did he know that a few miles away, that's about what they're selling at Whole Foods, flavorless gray meat trying to pass itself off as a healthy version of the real thing from the Auld Sod, and neither fish nor fowl nor corned beef.

Sincerely,

Mike O'G

Not for nothin Mike, but the real thing is an American invention. You would have to look long and hard to find real or fake corned beef in Ireland

And don't get me started on their "exorcised deviled eggs," "pushed pulled pork", and "freeform potted meat."

Yeah, I know, but I was on a roll.

(setup for bad pun complete)

A rare pun, yet still corny. Rather than pepper you with additional salty replies, I'll split.

Hi,

Cook's Illustrated some years ago advised corned beef sold in the northeast is brown and not red. The difference merely being the absence of curing salts, otherwise salt, spices and processing time were roughly the same.

Can it be the uncured Whole Foods corned beef was the variant sold in the northeast?

(I know, it was probably my responsibility to continue the joke. However the inner Mary Jane just had to set the record straight. )

Regards,

It's fairly pink, not brown. More pink than I'd think a meat swimming in that weak dishwater could be on its own.

I went to search for a picture and found that this thread is already the #3 Google result for "uncured corned beef."

Mike G wrote:I went to search for a picture and found that this thread is already the #3 Google result for "uncured corned beef."

#2 now! Look out!

atomicman wrote:Not for nothin Mike, but the real thing is an American invention. You would have to look long and hard to find real or fake corned beef in Ireland

Yeah -- but the UK has had salt beef (long time staple in the British Navy) for a long time, and it's pretty indistinguishable from corned beef. When I saw it on a menu at Harrod's, they told me, "It's just like your corned beef." I ordered it, and it was very similar. So the Irish may just be going after the familiar taste, rather than the correct name.

Cynthia wrote:

atomicman wrote:Not for nothin Mike, but the real thing is an American invention. You would have to look long and hard to find real or fake corned beef in Ireland

Yeah -- but the UK has had salt beef (long time staple in the British Navy) for a long time, and it's pretty indistinguishable from corned beef. When I saw it on a menu at Harrod's, they told me, "It's just like your corned beef." I ordered it, and it was very similar. So the Irish may just be going after the familiar taste, rather than the correct name.

According to Wikipedia, which as we all know is never wrong, the New York Irish picked it up from the Jews while searching for a less expensive substitute for Irish Bacon.

Always correct, Wikipedia.

Dmnkly wrote:

Cynthia wrote:

atomicman wrote:Not for nothin Mike, but the real thing is an American invention. You would have to look long and hard to find real or fake corned beef in Ireland

Yeah -- but the UK has had salt beef (long time staple in the British Navy) for a long time, and it's pretty indistinguishable from corned beef. When I saw it on a menu at Harrod's, they told me, "It's just like your corned beef." I ordered it, and it was very similar. So the Irish may just be going after the familiar taste, rather than the correct name.

According to Wikipedia, which as we all know is never wrong, the New York Irish picked it up from the Jews while searching for a less expensive substitute for Irish Bacon.

Always correct, Wikipedia.

Well, Wikipedia is always a good place for leads for additional research, if not always accurate.

I've read elsewhere that corned beef was a substitute for sausage, which the Irish boiled with cabbage.

Of course, Jews could have been responsible for the British salt beef, for all I know. They did have food shops all over the world.

And then there was the debate the Roman Emperor Claudius held over whether there was a better dish than corned beef and cabbage. (Though I'm guessing it was salt beef, as in Britain.) And it was the Romans who bred most of the cabbage varieties we enjoy today.

Worth studying further. As with many other foods, some are not invented, they evolve slowly over time, and many close relatives dot the landscape.
It would be an interesting thing to trace all the tributaries that led to corned beef as we know it today. (A quick look at Websters shows that the word corn in this application comes from the Latin granum, because the beef was preserved with granulated salt. So that hints at least at a history somewhat older than New York.)

On the history of Corned Beef, the Penguin Companion to Food (aka Oxford CtF in hardcover) has an entry:

Alan Davidson wrote:It may be, however that enthusiasm for corned beef has been even higher in Ireland, where it has been a traditional dish for Christmas, Easter, and on St. Patrick's Day, and where the combination of corned beef and cabbage provides one of the country's best-known dishes.

Emphasizing its long history in the Irish diet, Regina Sexton points out that a similar product is mentioned (as bóshaille) in the 11th century text Aislinge meic Con Glinne.... She adds that corned beef has a particular regional association with Cork City. From the late 17th century until 1825, the beef-cring industry was the biggest and most important asset to the city. In this period Cork exported
vast quantities of cured beef to Britain, Europe, America, Newfoundland, and the W. Indies...

There's also a clarification that the British term "corned beef" refers to what we'd call "canned pressed beef" and that what we'd call "corned beef" is (as mentioned above) what the British call "salt beef."

HI,

Chicago Foodways Roundtable recently had a program featuring Bruce Kraig talking about the food of the Civil War. In discussions prior to the talk, he suggested I have the corned beef sold in the slope sided cans present. Later he commented this was a food originating in the mid 1870's, while not Civil War era was still interesting.

There was a culinary professor present who upon seeing the cans asked if we knew what it was made of. He then proceeded to explain there was tripe and all sorts of organ meats, while certainly from a cow, would not be our conventional definition of beef. Further the two brands I saw in identically shaped cans were both produced in Brazil. He advised one of the big markets for this canned corned beef was the UK.

Regards,

I dont claim to be a scholar on such things but I do have first hand access to some anecdotal evidence so I will chime in. The fact that Cork City exported a lot of corned beef does not mean that the residents consumed much of it. For example my mother was born and raised in Cork City and while they frequently consumed Irish bacon with cabbage; she never had corned beef until she came to the US as an adult in 1956. My father grew up in Co. Clare and he never had corned beef in Ireland. I don't want to take this further off track than it already is but the boiled dinner with cabbage, potatos and cured meat; bacon or pigs feet (aka hairy bacon) are the two that I have seen most frequently, is very common in Ireland. Corned beef is an easily available inexpensive substitute into that menu.

atomicman wrote:For example my mother was born and raised in Cork City and while they frequently consumed Irish bacon with cabbage; she never had corned beef until she came to the US as an adult in 1956. My father grew up in Co. Clare and he never had corned beef in Ireland. I don't want to take this further off track than it already is but the boiled dinner with cabbage, potatos and cured meat; bacon or pigs feet (aka hairy bacon) are the two that I have seen most frequently, is very common in Ireland. Corned beef is an easily available inexpensive substitute into that menu.

This agrees with what other Irish natives have told me. "Corned beef and cabbage" is Irish-American, not Irish.

While the British Isles undoubtedly have had various forms of cured beef as long as they've had beef, I always understood that corned beef was popularized in Great Britain during World War I due to U.S. shipments of canned corned beef, which is why that product became known as "bully beef" (for Teddy Roosevelt).