Where’s the corned beef?

It fed the wartime troops and was a ration-book staple – and Trevor Grove’s father used to make it in Argentina

There is a corner of a supermarket shelf that is for ever wartime England.

It is the corned-beef section. There you will find trapezium-shaped tins, each with a small metal key stuck to its lid or side. The label shows a slice of pinky-brown, speckled meat accompanied by a rampant lettuce leaf or, in some cases, a fried egg.

Printed in small letters alongside this not very appetising image, no matter which the brand, are the words ‘Serving suggestion’.

Younger shoppers might be puzzled by the small metal key. Oldie-readers know what to do. You detach the key from its soldered fastening, locate a tiny tin tongue on the side of the trapezium, slide the tongue into the slit at the tip of the key, and then turn. As you turn, a thin strip of metal rolls up on the end of your key until, hey presto, the can is cleft in two. There emerges a slab of what looks like compressed dog food plus a slightly sulphureous whiff.

Why do the corned-beef producers of Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina all feel the need to stick so exactly to this formula?

Possibly it is a marketing ruse, a canny(!) example of retro chic. It suggests unchanging quality and traditional values. But my guess is the manufacturers believe this is a food product on its last legs, aimed at a dwindling band of consumers on theirs. The loyalty of the latter is the former’s chief selling point.

In its heyday, Fray Bentos promoted itself boldly, if not very imaginatively, as ‘The beef with the delicious flavour… Choice beef scientifically cooked.’

But I can’t remember when I last saw an ad for this wholesome, nutritious and relatively cheap foodstuff – surely just the thing for the hard-pressed folk of food-bank Britain.

Historically, salt beef in its unminced, unboiled form was the staple of seamen under sail and slaves in the West Indies.

In the last century, cooked and canned, it fed the troops in both world wars. It nourished ration-book Blighty.

And it’s still good value today. A 340g tin of corned beef sells at about £3. It’s almost pure protein – just beef and salt. The word ‘corned’ comes from the treatment of the beef with large-grained rock salt, also known as corns of salt.

I can vouch for these qualities because my father used to make the stuff. Most of the beef exported from the Frigorifico Anglo plant in Buenos Aires, which he ran during the 1950s and ’60s, was chilled or frozen. But the market for tinned, corned beef, which had developed during the First World War, still flourished. Cans of it shuffled off the assembly line in hundreds per hour.

I remember as a boy in Argentina going round the plant and staring fearfully into colossal vats of bubbling bits of beef that had, only half an hour earlier, been a herd of lowing steers, just off the trucks and trains from the Pampas. It was not the horror of living animals being reduced to this simmering stew that struck me. It was the fear of falling in and ending up as the centrepiece of some distant English family’s high tea.

For the truth is we never ate it ourselves. And most Argentines didn’t even know what it was, since they had more fresh beef than they could eat.

But, years later, when I was sent over here to boarding school and had to live on a diet of extreme awfulness, I grew to think fondly of corned beef: it was one of the few foodstuffs the school kitchens were prepared to leave alone and serve, so to speak, au naturel

True, back in 1964, an outbreak of typhoid in Aberdeen (which caused three deaths) was traced to a contaminated tin from my homeland. But, as an impoverished undergraduate, I was not put off my corned-beef and mustard sandwiches.

The problem with cooking corned beef is that it tends to break up and go mushy. But then there are occasions, such as a wet camping holiday or a children’s winter supper, when a hot, quickly prepared meal of broken-up, mushy meat is ideal.

The best-known corned-beef dish is hash – a good descriptive word for a simple fry-up of corned beef, chopped onions and diced potatoes. You don’t really need a recipe.

Constance Spry, co-inventor of coronation chicken at the last Coronation in 1953, has two variations for what she calls ‘a good American classic’. One proposes the addition of pickled walnuts, the other pickled mushrooms. The Jamaican version, known as bully beef, includes garlic, sweet corn and Scotch bonnet peppers.

My own twist? Cumin seeds, sultanas and chopped parsley.

That’s what I call serving suggestions.

Trevor Grove’s memoir, No One Taught Me to Tango: Memories of Anglo-Argentina (Eyewear Publishing), is out now