Corned Beef | Origins, Ingredients, Irish, & St. Patrick’s Day (2024)

corned beef, food made of beef brisket cured in salt.

Related to the word kernel, a corn is a coarse grain of rock salt. In North America, corned beef is brisket, taken from the lower chest of a cow or steer, that has been brined in salt and spices. (In general British usage, fresh corned beef is called “salt beef,” while the canned version retains the “corned” designation.) Because brisket is a tough cut of beef, the brining process usually lasts for two or three weeks. Corned beef is similar to pastrami, of Turkish origin, save that pastrami can come from several cuts of meat other than brisket, is fattier than corned beef, and is often smoked.

Conversely, corned beef is made from lean brisket. At the end of the brining process, any excess salt is washed away, and the meat is then simmered for about three hours or prepared in a pressure cooker. If properly cooked, the corned beef will be tender, have a pink-red colour, and retain some of its saltiness while having the slightly sour earthy taste of umami.

Corned beef is strongly associated with Irish cuisine and is widely eaten on St. Patrick’s Day, served alongside cabbage and potatoes or the mixed cabbage-potato dish called colcannon. However, the history is somewhat circuitous, for although corned beef was well known in Ireland and the rest of the British Isles in antiquity, the dish as it is known today is largely owing to diasporic Irish, particularly in the United States, who adopted it in their new homelands. Beef has historically been relatively scarce in Ireland and, as a measure of wealth in ancient Irish society, it was not widely eaten because it was prohibitively expensive; a St. Patrick’s Day meal in good times was instead likely to involve Irish bacon, a kind of ham, in a culinary culture that favoured pork over other meats. In America, however, Irish immigrants found that beef was abundant and inexpensive, and they discovered as well that their Jewish neighbours in New York and other immigrant centres ate corned beef—its texture similar to that of Irish bacon—along with the eastern European staples of cabbage and potatoes. The connection between Irish consumers and kosher butchers and the ready availability of beef both helped install corned beef as an Irish American tradition.

Commercial beef production has grown in Ireland in modern times, and beef is eaten more regularly now in Ireland than in times past, at least in part because of market demand by Irish Americans visiting their ancestral homeland. By contrast, beef has long been a staple of the diet in England and Scotland. Much beef consumed there in the early 21st century, including much of the prepared corned beef delivered to the U.K. market, was imported from Argentina and Uruguay. Historically, however, when Ireland was an economic colony of Britain, corned beef was produced on that island for export to the British market, an industry made all the more profitable because the tax on salt in Ireland was substantially lower than the tax in Britain.