It's corned beef season, which is either a blessing or a curse, depending on where you fall on the line. Personally, I have a childhood horror of corned beef, thanks to some very bad experiences early in my life. I will not pass along any details, except to say that for the longest time I assumed "corned" was just a synonym for "canned."

This year, in an attempt to face my phobia (if not defeat it) I decided to do some research on that most Easter of meats.

According to Wikipedia, the "corned" in corned beef refers to one of two things, depending on where you're from:

1. A particular form of canned meat (U.K. and Germany) which is more similar to Spam than it is to actual meat.

2. A particular cut of meat (the rest of the world)

The cut "corned beef" is usually brisket, but can be one of several other traditionally tough meats as well. The meat is then either cured or pickled in a seasoned brine. (Mm, nothing says "delicious" like the phrase "pickled meat.") When corned beef is then smoked in a second step, it becomes pastrami.

The "corned" in "corned beef" actually comes from a medieval term for the "kernels" of pickling salt which were poured over the meat during its preparation. One of the earliest references to corned beef comes from the eleventh century Irish text, Aislinge meic Con Glinne. Corned beef was an important Irish export during the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and was the primary industry of Cork City.

Corned beef became popular in the early American colonies because it was a shelf-stable meat. Later, corned beef was used by Irish-Americans in the late 1800s as a substitute for ham. This is the source of the association between corned beef and Saint Patrick's Day, and thus serves more as a celebration of Irish-American history than Irish culture itself.

Corned beef is also traditionally Jewish, and is associated with the Jewish cultural heritage of New York City, particularly in the form of corned beef on rye and reuben sandwiches. Most of the world's cultures have a history of preserving meat by salting it, and the Jewish culture is no exception. A particular synergy seems to have taken place in New York City during the nineteenth century, when Irish and Jewish populations overlapped in both the geographic and culinary sense.

From my research, it seems that most Irish people (which is to say, people who were raised in Ireland) spurn the association of corned beef as being a "traditional Irish food." It is definitely a traditional Irish-American food, but exploration of that schism is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that although Ireland was the world's biggest exporter of corned beef, America is the world's biggest exporter of Spam, and we hardly think of Spam as "traditional American food."

As a side note, if you would like to celebrate actual Irish culture alongside your celebrations of Irish-American culture, the correct dish would be colcannon.