Getting an early start on St. Patrick’s – I don’t have any green to wear, so I’ll bring in this corned beef. I had planned to brine my own, but March 17th crept up on me and it takes 5 to 7 days to cure. I have a nice cut of round (you don’t necessarily have to use a brisket) and may corn it anyway.
Did you know that the “corn” in corned beef didn’t come from the kind that grows on ears? Of course you did, because you’re smart or you wouldn’t be reading this blog. For the people who don’t read it though, back in Merrie Olde England, they called any cereal grain, but especially the money crop, “corn.” That allowed them to have corned beef long before Columbus discovered America and, along with it, this strange grassy plant with funny looking seeds. They called that “corn” just because that’s what they called most seeds. Even though they’d never seen it before they knew it was something that grew.
This all was quite a few years before Churchill used “corn” as a code name for Coventry. So what kind of seeds go into corned beef? None! Those silly Brits took to calling anything “corn” that was roughly the size of it. It wasn’t until 1604 that Robert Cawdrey wrote A Table Alphabeticall, which turned out to be the first dictionary, so folks had a reference to consult when they wondered what to call small objects or how to spell words like “alphabetical.” On the other extreme, there is that likely urban legend about how Eskimos (really Inuits) have a hundred words for “snow.” That seems like a few too many, if it’s true, but it’s too bad they couldn’t have loaned some, say 95, to the Brits so they didn’t look so damned mono-etymonal (Or at least teach them how to make up words for things. Mebbe trade 'em a thesaurus for some beads or something, but they probably called the beads "corn" too). Whatever, the "corn" in corned beef was really salt. They had a word for salt, I suppose, but maybe they forgot it.
After the corned beef boiled 2 ½ hours, I thought it might be fun to crisp the mantle of fat atop it – so I put it under the broiler for a few minutes. That looks better.
6:02:11 PM 
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