Creamed maize . Cornbread . Indian meal . corn beef . One of these things is not like the others . Not only does corned bitch carry zerocorn , but corn is n’t even demand in the process of preparing it . So why do we call it that ?
In myopic , because the wordcorndoesn’t only touch on to the prosperous chickenhearted cereal grain that do from a hazelnut .
As far back as the late 9th century , according to the Oxford English Dictionary , people were usingcornto identify a “ small hard particle ” of any grainy pith like sand or salinity . By the16th one C , preserve meat or other food for thought items with ( corns of ) salt had become have intercourse as “ corning ” it .
pork barrel wascorned , fish was corned , and , of course , so was beef . But corned beef was n’t really that mutual in Ireland until the mid-17th one C . Basically , beef - eff Great Britain had domesticate a roar oxen industry in Ireland , whose general population had chiefly been using kine for farm labor and dairy product . According toSmithsonian Magazine , exporters brought tens of chiliad of live moo-cow from Ireland to England annually . This hurt the business of England ’s own oxen herders .
So , in the mid-17th century , the British government evanesce a serial of so - calledCattle Actsthatrestrictedand then prohibited the import of Irish cows . fortuitously , Ireland had salt in spade — theirsalt taxwas a fraction of England’s — so everyone just started corning the beef and exporting that to England ( and eventually other countries , too ) .
That say , Irish citizenry themselves were n’t really eating the stuff — they favor much cheaper salt pork barrel or else . That did n’t change until the early 19th century , when high pork barrel cost in the U.S. cue Irish immigrants to assay out a more affordable alternative . They found it in Judaic delis , where cured beef cattle was a mainstay . Corned beef and cabbagebecame the de facto dish ofSt . Patrick ’s Dayin America — but if you ’re celebrating in Ireland , porc is still the way to go .
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