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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DS" data-source="post: 823246" data-attributes="member: 556">how do you corn beef?We start around the year 700 AD, give or take a century, when salt production saw a great technological advance. Salt in those days was obtained by trapping seawater in a pond, closing it off, and waiting for the sun to evaporate the water. The great advance was building a series of ponds, with pumps and sluices. The water in the first pond evaporated a little, increasing its salinity, then was moved to the next pond, while a new batch of seawater was let into the first pond. Call it an assembly line, way before Henry Ford. When the brine became dense enough, the salt crystallized and fell to the bottom of the pond to be scooped out. The process probably took a year or more using only solar heat. Of course, this would be done most efficiently in an arid climate with no rainfall to dilute the ponds. The process produced coarse salt, nowadays also called "kosher salt," not the fine-grained table salt you're used to.Today, one distinguishes between Irish corned beef and English spiced beef. Either one is a far cry from the "salt junk" of two hundred years ago, partly because of modern refrigeration, which permits use of a much weaker brine. Less salt means a more palatable end product.First, you need brine - water, coarse salt, and seasonings. An Irish recipe by Theodora Fitsgibbon, quoted by Mark Kurlansky in his wonderful book Salt: A World History (2002), calls for adding bay leaves, cloves, mace, peppercorns, garlic, allspice, brown sugar, and saltpeter to the brine. The meat is usually a brisket - ribs and meat from the chest of the cow - which you soak in the brine for a week. (Other recipes use other cuts of meat and different periods of soaking. One recipe we saw called for four days, another for four weeks. We presume it has to do partly with the amount of meat.)After the soaking period, wash the meat thoroughly under running water to remove the surface brine. Then cover it with fresh water, add carrots, onions, and herbs, and simmer for five hours. During the last hour, add a half pint of Guinness, says Fitsgibbon. (To the meat, silly.) Serve hot or cold.The full article        <a href="http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2153/how-do-you-corn-beef" target="_blank">http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2153/how-do-you-corn-beef</a></blockquote>

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