By: Blonde Two
I enjoyed a corned beef sandwich yesterday, it also had pickle and lettuce in and was delicious. The term corned beef can cause some confusion, I don’t mean pemmican (as in Swallows and Amazons – http://wp.me/s2OiIR-pemmican) or the lovely pink slices of brine-cooked beef that I munch in New Zealand; but rather the squashy, fatty stuff in a tin. You know the tin, the one with the key opening system that only ever breaks if you have no access to a tin opener.
I have some fond corned beef memories. Up until a couple of years ago, Mr Blonde Two and I had a tin of corned beef that had been put into in our camping box even before Bearded-Blonde was born. He is twenty-six now, it was there for emergencies, we obviously never had one, but I wish we had kept the tin for posterity. I first cooked corned beef for Mr Blonde Two in a tent (of course). It was in fact, the first meal I ever tried to cook him. I say ‘tried’ here because the egg/flour/corned beef mush that eventually slipped onto our tin plates was a far cry from the sleek fritters for which I had been aiming. He was very polite about it all! Not-at-all-Blonde once won a Ready-Steady-Camp-Cook competition at Scout camp because she chatted to the judge beforehand and found out that he liked his corned beef fried in slices and not mushed with onions etc. Corned beef hash was a staple for family Blonde Two when the younger generation were growing up. We hashed a lot of things then, it made meals stretch further!
Some Blonde facts:
Apparently a budget supermarket once put horse meat into their corned beef, ‘corned horse’ just doesn’t have the same ring to it. The word ‘corned’ does not refer to the cow’s diet but to the size of the grains of salt used to cure the meat. Most tinned corned beef is imported from South America. Corned beef is still a good staple to take camping, you can eat it hot or cold and (in theory) don’t need a tin opener to open it.
I have sat, more than once crying over a corned beef tin that wouldn’t open.
One of my favourite recipes: Take a deep Pyrex bowl. Slice potato thinly and line the bowl, bottom and sides. Slice corned beef in bottom. Add a layer of sliced onion, then a layer of sliced potato and continue with those layers until the bowl s full topping off with a potato layer, but sprinkle with allspice as you go. Dissolve one or two Bovril cubes in hot water and add – that can be thickened using McDougall’s thickening granules. Cover with Clingfilm and put in the microwave for about 10 mins on full power then uncover and put in the oven on fairly high heat for half an hour or so until the top is golden brown. Don’t avoid the microwave step, otherwise it is difficult to get the potato to cook through.
Sounds good to me and one you could maybe do at a bunkhouse (if it had a microwave which I don’t at home!)
When I was a deli girl, one of my customers used to call it “cornered” beef, I’m assuming because the slices were rectangular and had corners??? Always used to make me chuckle!!!
Round cornered beef maybe!
You could also try spam spam spam spam – not the current connotation of the word spam, but the old war time favourite substitute for ‘real’ meat! If you select carefully, some spam brands have a ring pull, though they have been known to fall off under force!
I have cried over spam tins too. I am sure it doesn’t taste as nice as it did when we were younger.
I wonder if Conrad’s recipe would work with Quorn slices? Used to love corned beef fritters – but cornered beef is a bit like window screens on the front end of cars.
There is only one way to find out if a recipe will work …
Hmm. It might be beyond my culinary expertise – – –