Corned Beef Trivia
- Corning is a form of curing and has nothing to do with corn. The name comes from early England -- before there was refrigeration. In those days, the meat was dry-cured in coarse "corns" or pellets of salt. The corns were rubbed into the beef to keep it from spoiling and to preserve it. Hence the term "corned beef" stuck. Today brining (the use of salt water) has replaced the dry salt cure, but the name "corned beef" is still used, rather than "brined" or "pickled" beef. Peppercorns and bay leaf give corned beef its distinctive flavor.
- In 1965, during a Gemini 3 flight, astronaut John Young presented Virgil (Gus) Grissom with a corned-beef sandwich he smuggled on board as a practical joke. It was purchased at Wolfie's Restaurant in Cocoa Beach, Florida, and was eaten by Grissom during the four hour, 52 minute, 31 second flight. Preflight instructions were that Young was authorized to eat specially prepared space food, and Grissom wasn't to eat anything. Crumbs from the zero-gravity sandwich scattered throughout the Gemini 3 spacecraft, posing a potential, if unintentional, flight safety risk. This rules violation caused NASA to clamp down on what astronauts could and could not carry into space.
- Arnold Reuben was the owner of a celebrated New York delicatessen of the 1940s and 1950s. His restaurant was known for its elaborate sandwiches named for celebrity regulars -- like the Frank Sinatra, a tasty combination of cream cheese, white currant jam, tongue, and sweet pickles on whole wheat. Thankfully, he was more inspired on the day he created his namesake "The Reuben," the gooey combination of corned beef, sauerkraut, Russian dressing and Swiss cheese grilled on sourdough pumpernickel. The Reuben has also been credited to Reuben Kay, a wholesale grocer in Omaha, Nebraska, who may have invented the sandwich for a weekly poker group.
- Did you know that Americans eat 45 billion (that's billion with a "B") sandwiches a year and that National Sandwich Day is November 3.
Pickles and Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh-based H.J. Heinz Co. first produced pickles in the early 1870s, several years before it started making its flagship ketchup.
Heinz stopped making pickles in Pittsburgh between 1910 and 1920. Heinz’s sole U.S. pickle-making factory is in Holland, Michigan, which processes about 2 million bushels of cucumbers into roughly 24 million jars of pickles a year.
But what is the perfect pickle?
According to Pickle Packers International, Inc., the trade and research association founded in 1893, the perfect pickle should exhibit seven warts per square inch for American tastes. However, Europeans prefer wartless pickles.
Pickling is one of the oldest forms of food preservation, discovered at the dawn of civilization, 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. Favored by Roman gladiators, pickles also were fed to Napoleon’s armies and used by Cleopatra as a beauty potion.
Roughly 29 billion pickles are consumed in the United States each year, the equivalent of 105 pickles per person.
If placed end to end, the number of pickles eaten nationwide annually would reach to the moon and back 8.25 times.
Good pickles have an audible crunch at 10 paces. This can be measured at "crunch-off" using the "scientific" device known as the Audible Crunch Meter. Pickles that can be heard at only one pace are known as denture dills. |
