Page 104 - Southern Oregon Magazine Winter 2020

The second part of historical accuracy is that corned beef exists,
and has been made for centuries in the British Isles, as well as
other cattle producing parts of the world. At root, corned beef
is simply salt cured beef, named “corned beef” after the large
rock salt “corns” that were used in its production. Food histo-
rians believe that as early as the 15th century, the Irish were
making a salted beef product that is essentially the precursor to
modern corned beef.

This is where, like so many Irish stories, things take a terrible
and tragic turn.

As the population boomed during the industrial revolution in
England, foodstuffs that were storable for long amounts of time
became necessary to support the growing population of labor-
ers. Thanks to a long history of subjugation at the hands of the
English, virtually all of the land in Ireland was controlled by
absentee English owners, controlled by tenant farmers. By the
early 19th century, the best land was being transitioned from
traditional farming into grazing land for cattle herds and the
production of salted beef.

This in turn made the resident Irish tenant farmers reliant on
less desirable land for their own survival. Since almost all of
the beef was being exported, and too expensive for the Irish to
afford, they turned to the potato as their main form of nutri-
tion. It was a crop that could be grown in less desirable soils,
and at low expense for high nutritional output.

These benefits meant that smaller-sized farms could support
larger families, which in turn created a population boom in
Ireland during the early 19th century. But Ireland became the
cautionary tale of monoculture, when a single potato blight
decimated the crop over several years. Too poor to afford the
beef they were raising, and with no crop of their own, the rural
Irish were starving to death. Millions of Irish were faced with
this decision—stay in Ireland and very possibly starve to death,
or gather your family and try your chances somewhere else.

Life for the Irish immigrant was not easy in the 75-year-old
United States. Destitute, often arriving with only the clothes
they were wearing, they found themselves on the bottom of
the social ladder. They were treated with prejudice, not hired
for jobs because of their stigma of violence and drunkenness,
and generally relegated to neighborhoods of other stigmatized
immigrants.

In a multicultural port of entry like New York City, the Irish
found a surprising food they could purchase inexpensively
from the Jewish butchers—salted beef. In the late 19th cen-
tury, as the west was opening, and cattle became especially
inexpensive, the taste for salted beef returned—a luxury item,
afforded by almost no one in their native Ireland.

The final piece of this story is the social aspect. After centuries
of colonization by the English, and decades of prejudice in the

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