Corned beef Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Canned corned beef, the kind that came out cheap and in bulk, appeared in the late nineteenth century, in the world that revolved around Britain and its colonies.

Beef was already there, and curing it in salt to keep it was an old practice. The phrase "corned beef" itself is on the record in English by 1621. Even so, corned beef as an affordable everyday food that anyone could buy had to wait for a new kind of packaging: the tin.

In 1873 the Liebig factory at Fray Bentos, in Uruguay, began making canned corned beef. It sealed South American cattle into tins, cooked them to keep them, packed them into one-pound cans, and shipped them off to Britain, to the colonies, and to the army. By 1879 more than four thousand tons were crossing to Britain, and cattle from distant South America were turning up on the tables of workers and soldiers. Only when this industrial method of curing beef, sealing it in a tin, and heat-sterilising it spread did corned beef become a cheap preserved food for ordinary people.

Where it was eaten shaped what it was: the family table, the ration, the army mess. Carried mainly by workers and soldiers, keeping its character as a cheap keeping-food, it spread across Britain, Ireland, and the colonies.

Corned beef and cabbage is beloved as the Irish country dish eaten on St Patrick's Day. Follow the record, though, and that homegrown image turns inside out.

In the old Gaelic period, cattle in Ireland reflected wealth and holiness; they were not everyday food. In the seventeenth century, when the Cattle Acts of 1663 and 1667 cut off the export of live cattle to England, Cork and other places built a thriving industry that turned cattle into salt-cured beef. But that cured beef was an export commodity, bound for the British and French navies and for the colonies; it did not reach the mouths of Ireland's poor and oppressed. They leaned instead on pork and bacon and the potato. A commodity made for export and a dish of the everyday table were, in later years, mistaken for one another.

The corned beef and cabbage we know today was born across the sea. Irish immigrants who fled the Great Famine (from 1845) to New York met corned beef there at Jewish kosher butchers and paired it with cheap cabbage. It is an Irish-American dish that took shape in the New World at the end of the nineteenth century. Smithsonian magazine, a study of the culinary history of Irish corned beef (Mac Con Iomaire and Gallagher, 2011), and Britannica all tell this story.

That said, salt-cured beef before the tin is genuinely old. The Oxford English Dictionary records that the phrase "corned beef" was already in use by 1621. So the account of how the dish came to be splits in two. One view starts today's cheap everyday corned beef with the industrial canning of 1873; the other sees it as a continuation of Cork's cured beef and naval provisions, with the tin simply a newer way of packing it.