Corn Beef

haaaaaaaaaaaaaa haaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

wouldn't want to ...america died in the mid 70's

remember visiting and seeing the end of it in 1979

real america....

the last hurrah ...

mmmmm floating along

The way I heard it was that in the Middle Ages, "meat" was the generic term for any solid form of food or sustenance and "flesh" was used for what we call "meat" nowadays. The OED seems to support that idea.

It is true that as late as the Tudor and early Stewart periods, "meat" was an alternative term for "victuals" in general. There are examples of that usage in Shakespeare in the early seventeenth century (and even the use of "viands" for the same purpose). The usage survives until the present; cf: "One man's meat is another man's poison".

A useful URL. The page is written in current language, describing historical practices. But all the terms are modern; "meat" means the flesh and/or muscle tissue of an animal.

QUOTE: The ingredients for the modern mince pie can be traced to the return of European crusaders from the Holy Land. Middle Eastern methods of cooking, which sometimes combined *meats*, fruits and spices, were popular at the time. Pies were created from such mixtures of sweet and savoury foods; in Tudor England, shrid [sic] pies (as they were known then) were formed from *shredded* *meat*, *suet* and dried fruit. The addition of spices such as cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg was, according to the English antiquary John Timbs, "in token of the offerings of the Eastern Magi." Several authors, including Timbs, viewed the pie as being derived from an old Roman custom practised during Saturnalia, where Roman fathers in the Vatican were presented with sweetmeats. Early pies were much larger than those consumed today, and oblong shaped; the jurist John Selden presumed that "the coffin of our Christmas-Pies, in shape long, is in Imitation of the Cratch [Jesus's crib]", although writer T. F. Thistleton-Dyer thought Selden's explanation unlikely, as "in old English cookery books the crust of a pie is generally called 'the coffin'."

The modern mince pie's precursor was known by several names. The antiquary John Brand claimed that in Elizabethan and Jacobean-era England they were known as minched pies, but other names include

As I said, There have been any number of historical food programmes on BBC over recent years, usually including Lucy Worsley and Ruth Goodman, which have mentioned this and similar.