Corned Beef Insurrection

    I rarely eat beef, but once a year I make a Jewish recipe in celebration of an Irish holiday. That's right, I make corned beef and cabbage for St Patrick's Day. But first I have to corn the beef, and therein lies the story. In order to make the brine the beef "corns", or pickles in, I have to bring to a boil and let cool 4 quarts of water, one and a half cups salt, 1 Tbs sugar, 2 Tbs pickling spice, 8 large bay leaves, 6 peeled cloves of garlic and one more ingredient**. Then a 5 lb hunk of beef (not too thick, fat removed) is submerged in the brine, covered, for 12 days (use a plate to weight it down.) Remove from the brine, rinse, and cook it on a low boil for about three hours with a carrot and celery stick.  You now can serve perfect corned beef!

**that last ingredient is the problem - it's one half ounce saltpeter. I realized I was all out, so I headed off on a fruitless search for some.

    While there are anecdotal stories that saltpeter is used in certain institutional kitchens to repress the male libido, for some reason the armed forces immediately springs to mind, it is primarily used to make gun powder - and dynamite.

    So here I am, innocently enough to my mind, going from shop to shop trying to purchase bomb making material, giving some cockamamie story about needing it for a recipe. And where did I get the recipe from? Why, the Anarchist's Cookbook, of course. I can almost hear the news announcement:

 Radical Bomber Arrested, Terrorist Cell Broken - story at eleven.

    Maybe I have too vivid an imagination. The recipe was in the old Time Life series "Foods of the World". Saltpeter really has a secondary use as a meat preservative, although it is an archaic one. Stores don't stock it anymore because there just isn't a demand, not because it might be dangerous. Now most people buy the inferior tasting packaged corned beef right off the supermarket shelves. Still, I'm an "old-fashioned" kind of guy who likes to make things from scratch. Certainly no one suspected I was a terrorist. Or did they? I do know that one store asked me if I were making a bomb. They were kidding, right? Two places asked me to leave my name and phone number, and said they would call if they could order any. Was it to give to the authorities, instead? I don't know.

    I might be on some homeland security list by now. My prescriptions could be examined to see what drugs I'm on, and my credit card records studied to see what other bomb ingredients I purchased. Phone numbers I've called could be cross-checked against those of known terrorists, and my video rentals examined for evidence of a viewing pattern of anti-social/anti-government fare. My book purchases and library "borrowings" could be checked for seditious material, and my neighbors could be interviewed about my comings and goings.

    All of a sudden I could find myself trying to explain to a humorless law enforcer that I bought pipe at Lowe's to repair frozen plumbing, I like Bruce Willis movies, and that it was a good sale on batteries so I stocked up in case of emergency. God forbid I should be so stupid as to buy a few extra 40# bags of lawn fertilizer when K-MART was closing! I'd be behind bars faster than you can say "innocent until proven guilty". Bill of Rights? What is that?

    Don't laugh, it could happen. That is one of the scary things about the world we live in. Our personal rights have been subverted by the federal government in the name of Homeland Security, and legislated away "for our own good" by people for whom reading the Sunday funnies is a literary event. This is an insidious  regression, a whittling away at the fundamentals of liberty our founding fathers fought and died to secure. And, I could be labeled unpatriotic just because I want to corn my own beef!

Bon Appetit!

Edited and reprinted from a Jan 13th 2006 Gather entry. The full recipe and photos of this year's radical dinner will appear here later this week. Happy St Patrick's Day everyone!