“Boeuf Corné au Cabeau”

The “Great Emancipator” as Abraham Lincoln was often called, wasn’t much of a gourmet. He was more partial to corn bread, honey and a good cup of coffee than ”Haut Cuisine” but even those down to earth meals had only his mildest interest as he often forgot to eat altogether. One morning when he was sitting for the painting of “The First Reading of the Declaration of Independence” he interrupted the artist Francis B. Carpenter with the remark :”I believe, by the by, that I have not yet had my breakfast, – this business has been so absorbing that it has crowded everything else out of my mind.”
At another occasion he was having breakfast with a friend, Noah Brooks, who reported that Lincoln appeared to forget that food and drink were essential for his well being. Seeing that the President was drinking a glass of milk he said to him that he was astonished that he preferred milk to coffee at breakfast. The President, eyeing his milk with some sort of surprise as if he had not noticed what he was drinking, said: “Well, I do prefer coffee in the morning but they don’t seem to have sent me any.” Surprisingly however, he showed enough interest when he was asked to compose the menu for the inaugural dinner. He decided on:
Mock Turtle Soup
Corned Beef and Cabbage
Parsley Potatoes
Blackberry Pie
Coffee
This is what the Americans call a “New England Boiled Dinner”. A wholesome and true American meal indeed.
One of Abraham Lincoln’s successors, President Grover Cleveland told a friend that when he was dining on some very refined and delicate dishes in the White House one evening, he smelled the odour of corned beef and cabbage coming from the servants quarters. He stopped eating, immediately shoved the gourmet food aside, and ordered the butler to trade it for the corned beef and cabbage. He relished the “New England Boiled Dinner” and exclaimed that it was the best meal he had had for months. …this “Boeuf Corné au Cabeau!”
Although corned beef is not uniquely American - in Dutch we call it “Pekel Vlees” or pickled (salted) beef - Americans seem to love it more than anybody else and for good reason. Pastrami is another form of corned beef, not Italian as the name may suggest but of American Jewish origin. I have never been able to obtain a recipe for this delicacy and “Pastrami on Rye” seems to be the thing to order in a New York Jewish delicatessen restaurant. According to Mirriam Webster’s dictionary, the word came into use in 1936. It is Yiddish and derived from the old Roman “Pastrama”. It also said that it is highly seasoned smoked beef while corned beef is not smoked.
I first became acquainted with corned beef when I was a child in Indonesia where we did not have good beef. It came in those typical trapezoid cans of boiled corned beef produced in Chicago, USA. I loved it on a sandwich but recall that my mother did not know very well what to do with it.
Later, just after the war, when we still lived in a kind of camp in Jakarta under the protection of the British or rather Indian army, we were given British Army food supplies and two of the items which came in huge cans were; corned beef and corned mutton. Although I knew what a sheep was, my knowledge of the English language was not good enough to understand the word “mutton”. We did not know what it was - mutton or lamb was not popular on the Dutch table in former days - and could not get used to the rank flavour of the corned mutton which we found nauseating, but we made delicious “Nasi Goreng”, or fried rice from the corned beef.