Ireland exported corned beef for centuries while most Irish people rarely ate it
Corned beef and cabbage on Saint Patrick's Day is an Irish-American habit, not an Irish national dish. For centuries Irish ports shipped salted beef across the British Empire, but tenant farmers at home mostly ate salt pork and bacon. Across the Atlantic, beef was cheap, and immigrants often bought it from Jewish butchers.
The name refers to corns, the coarse grains of rock salt, or possibly saltpetre, used to cure the meat. Modern recipes usually add nitrates, which turn the beef pink and suppress the bacteria behind botulism; meat cured without them stays grey and is sometimes sold as New England corned beef. Salted beef turns up in a 12th-century Irish poem, The Vision of MacConglinne, as a rare delicacy with which a king purges a demon of gluttony, since cattle were too valuable to eat while still useful.
Industrial curing took off in the British Isles in the 17th century. Dublin, Belfast and Cork packed beef from local cattle with salt imported from Iberia and France; in 1668 Cork alone produced half of Ireland's beef exports. Cheaper grades went to the French West Indies to feed settlers and enslaved people, the best to imperial markets. Because most Irish farms belonged to Anglo-Irish landlords who exported the meat, native tenant farmers ate little of it, and bacon with cabbage became the common meal. Jewish delicatessens in America cured brisket the same way, and smoked it into pastrami.
Tinned beef fed armies for centuries. British sailors named the canned meat bully beef, after the dish soup and bouilli, and it was the main British field ration from at least the South African War to the Second World War. A 2009 plan to drop it from ration packs was reversed after a public outcry. In 1943 a single plant at Fray Bentos in Uruguay exported more than 16 million cans; today about 80 percent of canned supply comes from Brazil.
It even reached orbit unofficially: astronaut John Young smuggled a corned beef sandwich aboard Gemini 3 in a spacesuit pocket.
Source: Corned beef
