One of the most popular centerpieces to adorn the holiday table and hotel or club carving station is prime rib. Despite the famed cut’s omnipresence on menus and retail features since the late nineteenth century, end users, whether at the retail or foodservice levels, are often confused as to what is defined as a “prime rib.”

The term is often used interchangeably to describe different ribeye sub primals. Some of my more seasoned clientele directly refer to the cut as a 109 Rib, but that too can be many things based on purchaser specification. Some people believe that the prime rib is strictly boneless, and others, when describing it as prime, believe that it is graded USDA Prime. For some, it can be USDA Choice or USDA Select or even No Roll. If that isn’t confusing enough for the end user, the USDA and meatheads on the processing side utilize our own esoteric language when referring to the prime rib as a roast-ready “export rib.”

But as I often explain to my customers or when conducting education sessions for our distribution partners, nothing is complicated in the meat industry. Simply put, meat terminology is often quite literal. However, unraveling etymology is sometimes more difficult when it is an amalgamation of tradition, shared language, and various standards. The prime rib certainly falls into this category.

America naturally inherited beef processing standards and terminology from Great Britain as the direct result of the mother country’s demand for colonial beef. In Colonial America, the port of Boston served as the locus of beef production in British North America. Cattle were raised in New Hampshire and Vermont, and then driven to areas outside Boston to be fattened. Beef cattle were processed, salted, packed into a “tierce” or barrel, preserved with saltpeter and salt, and then exported across the Atlantic. Each tierce weighed approximately 300 pounds. When a rib sub-primal was included in a tierce, it was referred to as a “standing rib.” Oddly enough, that term is still used today.

Beef production in the fledgling United States continued to be informed and dominated by British demand. The earliest production standards for beef cattle can be found in Niles Weekly Register, arguably the most read national periodical in the Early Republic (1789-1830). In “Directions for Curing and Packing Pork and Beef for the English Market,” an inspector outlined four categories of beef for export: Beef, Prime Beef, Prime Mess Beef, and India Mess Beef. The quality of the cut or combination of cuts dictated the type of category. “Beef,” for example, was considered the lowest grade and value, while India Mess Beef was considered the best since a “tierce” or barrel contained the most amount and best quality of beef. India Mess Beef also included more standing ribs. “The cattle for India mess should be well-fatted, and weigh seven hundred pounds,” the inspector wrote in 1848. He continued, “All provisions intended for the English market should be handled with great care and neatness.”

It wasn’t until the 1860s when Americans started developing a unique set of terminology to describe beef cuts. This was likely the direct effect of immigration on the American marketplace. As Thomas DeVoe related in The Market Assistant (1867), “many foreign butchers had not only brought their countries’ customs of cutting up meats, but also their names of joints.” As we learn again from DeVoe, the cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn all had different names for the rib section of the animal. But it was the Boston market that referred to the standing rib as a “prime rib.” What particularly stands out about DeVoe’s definition of the prime rib and associated meat cut chart is that the rib ends at the tenth rib. In this way, the Boston market played a critical role in defining what Americans know as the prime rib.

Boston’s primacy in the early American export market in the nineteenth century arguably influenced the additional term, “export style rib.” (I should note that Boston’s export market also played a role in naming the so-called Boston butt or pork shoulder, but that is a story for another time.) This is later confirmed by the University of Illinois’ First Annual Report of the Agricultural Experiment Station in 1888. “Boston” cattle or cattle intended for export were processed differently than other cattle in the United States, the report outlined. Whereas domestic ribs were “ribbed” between the twelfth and thirteenth ribs, ribs for export were “cut between the tenth and eleventh ribs.”

The term export rib stuck and was colloquially adopted by the meat processing industry in the early twentieth century. However, the terms “export style rib” or “export rib” didn’t become formally incorporated into the meat processors' lexicon until the late twentieth century when it was included in the USDA’s Institutional Meat Purchasing Specifications (IMPS) – Series 100 and the North American Meat Processors Association’s (NAMP) The Meat Buyer’s Guide sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s.

‘Tis the Season for Boston’s Prime Rib

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