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The Fascinating History Behind Canned Corned Beef

Modern foodies are digging the innovative wonder that is canned meat. Tinned fish is having a moment, as is canned Spam. Today, we're exploring one perhaps less common variety that also belongs in your weeknight dinner rotation. There might even be a can of it diligently waiting in your pantry right now.

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Rich, dense, canned corned beef has a fittingly rich and dense history. To home cooks today, canned corn beef is a convenient option for adding sweet-savory flavor and protein to one-pan meals like Polish haluski, hearty toothy stews, or skillet potatoes. Long before it was taking go-to recipes to nourishing new levels, canned corned beef was feeding the folks of centuries past.

Canned food was inadvertently invented by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1795. Faced with the matter of feeding his troops, he offered a prize to anyone who could invent a viable method of food preservation for extending shelf life. Canned food was the answer to that call, and it didn't actually arrive until 1810 after 14 years of research and development. It's unclear exactly when corned beef entered this sphere. But, in 1813, Northumbrian inventor Bryan Donkin served his canned beef to Queen Charlotte and King George III of Great Britain, and they wrote him a letter to share how much they liked it. Canned beef was officially good enough for the refined palettes of the royal family — debunking any suspicions for skeptical home cooks with canned corned beef questions.

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Troops and royalty alike begin acquiring a taste for the canned stuff

Prior to the advent of canned corned beef, British troops were chowing down on a combination of four ounces of beef concentrate and five ounces of cocoa paste during the Boer War — sounds appetizing? It even fed both sides of the Anglo-French War and continued to sustain British troops during World War I and II. To British troops, canned corned beef was known as "bully beef" — a tough-sounding etymological nod to this modernized version of the boiled "bouilli" beef rations that fed French soldiers in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War. 

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From the 1600s until 1825, the Irish city of Cork was one of the largest producers of corned beef in the world, feeding foreign troops and civilians alike across Europe, the New World (soon to become America), and the West Indies. It wasn't long before canned corned beef expanded to a global fanbase. Corned beef itself has been historically traced to Ireland, Scotland, the British Isles, and kosher Jewish butchers immigrating to 1800s New York City. Fast forward to 1875, an ocean away in Chicago, and Arthur A. Libby (of enduring Libby's canned corned beef fame) and William J. Wilson had just obtained a patent for the trapezoidal can shape fans today associate with canned corned beef. That tapered shape makes it easier to slide the corned beef out of the can (non-trapezoidal tinned meats like Spam can be infamously difficult to liberate from the packaging).

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Salty corned beef made a natural candidate for canning

The fact that salt acts as a natural preservative might have naturally heralded corned beef's translation into the canned format. The word "corned" itself stems from the Old Germanic "kurnam" meaning "small seed-sized object," like kernels of rock salt. Corned beef is made by covering brisket in a generous layer of coarse salt to cure and flavor. Thanks to the advent of canning, foodies were able to utilize their corned beef with more gastronomic creativity compared to having to doctor up the heavily salted meat intended to extend its shelf life.

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Corned beef production thrived in Ireland thanks to the nation's abundant cattle population and 90% lower salt tax compared to England. However, the global demand for canned corned beef didn't keep its production exclusive to Ireland alone. "[M]uch of modern canned corned beef came from the river port of Fray Bentos in Uruguay where Justus von Liebig had set up a processing plant in 1866," wrote Technological University Dublin. "In 1924, the Fray Bentos firm passed into British hands and by the height of World War Two, in 1943, over 16 million cans were exported from this town that called itself 'the kitchen of the world.'" 

Indeed, canned corned beef's popularity in the U.S. took off during World War II when supplies of fresh meat were limited. Nowadays, America celebrates September 27 as National Corned Beef Hash Day — beloved comfort food that comes in a can.

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