Glorious and nostalgic: how to make corned beef pie

A few weeks ago I was at the super-market juggling a toddler, several heavy bags and, it transpired, no pound coin to insert into a trolley. A kind employee came to my rescue: on her key ring was one of those little keys you use to open tins of corned beef, which she deftly inserted and released, and lo, the trolley was mine.

What a nifty trick! I immediately resolved to add one to my own key ring, and then almost as quickly forgot. But also, what a peculiar thing: we’ve very much accepted ring pulls, or even just using tin openers, as the standard way to open tin cans. As a system it works very well. It’s pretty much only corned beef and spam that we still open with little keys that are precariously attached to the side of the tin, slipping them on to the metal tab and turning them round and round, as if winding up a musical box, until a disconcertingly oblong-shaped slab of meat is revealed.

It feels like a real relic from the past – but then so too are the contents of the tin. Corned beef has very much fallen out of fashion. Not to be confused with the cured salt beef of Jewish-American delis, known by the same name, the cured and canned corned beef – often called ‘bully beef’ in Britain – came along with the Industrial Revolution. Much of it was made in Ireland and then exported; for a long time, it was a necessity, used as rations in the Boer and both world wars, thanks to its almost indefinite shelf-life. Today, we have refrigeration, stronger supply chains and therefore less need for meat preservation.