I'm feeling peckish...

Made myself a corned beef sandwich the other day (and very nice it was too) and (I had never really thought about it before), wondered where this word "corned" came from and what it meant. Coincidentally at much the same time, I saw a recipe which called for corned mutton.  So what's the story?  A standard way of preserving meat before the days of refrigeration was by soaking it in brine - that is, salted water. "Corn" was an old English word for "grain".  Today we would refer to "a grain of salt" - back then it would more likely have been "a corn of salt".  So corned simply meant salted. The beef would be treated that way and then boiled.  In other parts of the world it is called salt-beef or bully-beef (from the French bouilli = boiled).  Ooh, I'm feeling like another sandwich!