Salt beef (the layer before canning) Period COrigin theory CVerified

This is salt beef itself, the layer that lies before the canned corned beef of the nineteenth century. It flourished as an industry in Ireland, above all at Cork and Dublin, from the late seventeenth into the late eighteenth century. Salt beef as a food reaches back to the medieval period, so its beginnings have breadth, and no single year can fix when it started.

Cattle were a long-established animal on Irish land, herded on the island well before the common era. Salting in coarse salt to preserve the meat was an old craft too. The ingredient and the technique were both at hand early. What lets us still speak of an emergence is that the conditions for an industry, gathered in one place, came together.

The trigger was the Cattle Acts of 1663 and 1667. When live cattle were barred from export to England, beef piled up at home in Ireland and its price fell. Into that surplus stepped Cork, able to obtain good salt at low duty, and it became a great center for making and gathering salt beef. From Cork the salted meat went out to the Royal Navy, to the English and French colonies, to Newfoundland and the West Indies. The corned in corned beef comes from curing with coarse grains of salt. The English word corn once meant a hard grain; it became a verb, to corn, meaning to cure with salt, and in time settled as a name for the salted beef itself. Commonplace cattle and commonplace salt were assembled into a great industry under the conditions of law, port, and trade. That is how this old salt beef took shape.

The medieval layer beneath

Salt beef as a food is older than the seventeenth-century industry and reaches back to medieval Ireland. A manuscript describes salted beef as a food of kings; its tale is thought to have been composed in the late eleventh or early twelfth century, though the oldest surviving copy dates to the fifteenth. Cattle then were prized for milk, and eating their meat was largely a privilege of the wealthy. This is a layer apart from the founding of salt beef as an industry, and it shows that salted beef as a food was present from far back.

Salt beef is often spoken of as a traditional Irish dish. There is no wish here to deny its age. But there are two layers of time within it, and separating them brings a more accurate picture into view. This is not a quarrel over which is right; the layers simply belong to different periods, and both are certain.

One is the industrial layer. The beginning of salt beef as the industry that leads to the present is placed at late seventeenth-century Cork. The Cattle Acts left domestic beef in surplus and cheap, and against a background of good salt at low duty, Cork became the place where salt beef was made and gathered, a supply center of provisions for the Royal Navy and Atlantic trade. It reached its height from the middle to the late eighteenth century. This seventeenth-century turn appears not only in a culinary history of Irish corned beef but also in an independent historical study that traced the seventeenth-century Anglo-Irish livestock trade on its own; the two do not disagree. That corned derives from coarse grains of salt is likewise confirmed as a movement of language traced through time, from the English corn meaning a hard grain, to the verb to corn, to the salted beef itself.

The other is the older, pre-medieval layer. Salt beef itself is older than the seventeenth-century industry and reaches back to medieval Ireland. A manuscript depicts salted beef as a food of kings, its tale thought to have been composed in the late eleventh or early twelfth century, though the oldest surviving copy that carries it is from the fifteenth. That leaves breadth in dating the words. Cattle then were prized for their milk, and the meat was eaten only by the wealthy. This is a layer apart from the founding of salt beef as an industry, and it shows that salted beef as a food was present from long ago.

Separating these layers carries a real point, and it lies in not mistaking the two senses of age for each other. When the old age of Irish salt beef is invoked, it matters greatly whether that age points to the table of medieval kings or to the seventeenth-century export industry.