Today's special request is from my Dad. He raised a question that I'm sure a lot of us have, and probably thought of this past Tuesday on St. Patrick's Day. He wanted to know why do they call it "corned" beef? I was happy to research and find the answer.
Actually, it's a very simple answer. The term “corned” comes from putting meat in a large crock and covering it with large rock-salt kernels of salt that were refered to as “corns of salt”. This preserved the meat. The term "corned" has been in the Oxford English Dictionary as early as 888 AD. Wow, that's been in the dictionary quite a long time.
The practice of salting meat goes back to ancient times in cold areas when they found you could preserve meat by salting it. Nomads on foot or horse could also put salt on meat and hike for days without refrigerating it.
The term "corn" is from an Old Germanic (P.Gmc) Word "Kurnam", which meant small seed of anything. Since a kernel of rock salt look like a wheat or oat kernel size, it became known as a corn of salt. Even the word "kernal" comes from the word Kurnam.
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