Corned Beef

As far back as I can remember I've been a fan of corned beef. Easily prepared, tasty, as good cold as it is hot. What more could one ask of a meal?

Sonya likes a bit of mustard on the side and I swear one of these days I'm going to convince her that mustard can be more than that insipid stuff that comes in a yellow plastic bottle and is squeezed onto the plate like so much toothpaste.

I prefer my corned beef with real Aussie Tomato sauce. Rosella[^] no less!

Alas, my carefully guarded stash of Tomato Sauce ran out a couple of weeks ago and when Sonya asked what I wanted for dinner one Sunday I first suggested corned beef and then remembered a lack of sauce. We deferred the corned beef until the order arrived.

We order the sauce from a small company located in San Antonio, Texas. Go figure! They also sell Cherry Ripes[^] and as much as I miss the odd Cherry Ripe I'm not really prepared to spend 80 bucks on a box of the buggers. Some pleasures are most economically remembered!

Sauce arrived it was time for some corned beef but what is it with the modern world and its obsession with salt? Time was you had to boil the buggery out of the beef, drain the water, start over again and it'd still be too salty! Indeed, I remember one Sunday evening in 1968 when a friends mother had roasted a piece of corned beef (don't ask me how she could have made *that* mistake) and it turned out so salty as to be inedible.

These days the 'corning' process seems not to involve salt at all. I'm sorry but it just seems unnatural to be obliged to resort to the salt cellar when sitting down to a plate of corned beef!

It's not just corned beef though. Bacon, at least here in the US, needs to be salted after cooking! What's up with that? (As Andrew would say). Take a vacuum sealed pack of bacon, open it, stick it in the fridge and how long does it last before putrefaction sets in? Maybe a month max. Time was when bacon would last years unsealed if chilled.

Introduce wonderful digital technology to make it possible to carry a thousand CD's worth of music around in a device smaller than a pack of cigarettes by all means but don't mess with corned beef and bacon. If God had meant them to lack salt He wouldn't have created bacteria!