March 17th again. (A nice day here, fortunately. The rain took itself away just in time to miss the parade.) And as the world turns and the Sun climbs up the sky over North America, suddenly hundreds and hundreds of websurfers start rolling into the “Ireland” page at EuropeanCuisines.com looking for…guess what?
Recipes for corned beef and cabbage.
(sigh)
Why We Have No Corned Beef Recipes
Ask someone who hasn’t lived or visited here about what Irish food is like, and nine times out of ten, as they grope for answers, they’ll mention corned beef and cabbage.
However, investigation shows that, while corned beef and cabbage is sometimes eaten here, it’s probably eaten a lot less than most people imagine: and by no means is it the Irish national dish.
It first turns up, if translations are to be trusted, in the Vision of MacConglinne, the 12th-century poem which describes so much of Irish food as it was eaten at that time. It’s described as a delicacy given to a king, in an attempt to conjure “the demon of gluttony” out of his belly. This delicacy status makes little sense until one understands that beef was not a major part of most Irish people’s diets until the last century or so. To be sure, cattle were kept here from very early times, but they were kept mostly for their milk — few people except perhaps the Swiss have ever so loved their dairy products as the Irish have, and the ancient Irish especially. (“They make seventy-several kinds of food out of milk, both sweet and sour,” said one bemused sixteenth-century traveller and historian, “and they love them the best when they’re sourest.”)
From the earliest historical times, for routine eating, pork was always the favorite. Cattle were only slaughtered when they were no good any longer for milking, or for breeding purposes; otherwise, they were prized as a common medium for barter. The size of one’s herd of cattle was an indication of status, wealth and power — hence all the stories of tribal chieftains and petty kings of the ancient days, endlessly rustling one another’s cattle (the greatest of the ancient wars of legend was started by one of these thefts, the Cattle Raid of Cooley). Eating beef, except for that of a cow past its milking days or accidentally killed, was the cultural equivalent of lighting your cigars with hundred-dollar bills…unless you were a chieftain, or a king, in which case you could afford it.
In later centuries, when the cattle raids were long done, the majority of Irish people still didn’t eat very much beef — because it was still much too expensive. Those who did eat beef, tended to eat it fresh: corned beef again surfaces in writings of the late 1600’s as a specialty, a costly delicacy (expensive because of the salt) made to be eaten at Easter, and sometimes at Hallowe’en. — Then other factors, tragic ones, made beef even rarer in the Irish diet. It often astounds people to discover that, during the worst years of the Great Famine, among much other food, Irish tenant farmers were still exporting hundreds of thousands of barrels of salt beef to Britain and Canada. (“Corned” beef, it then came to be called, because of the size of the grains of salt used in the preserving process: once upon a time, any single grain of wheat or rice or whatever was called a “corn”.) But that was beef that the farmers were raising on behalf of the landlords who owned the land on which they lived and worked: they couldn’t touch it themselves, and couldn’t possibly afford what little fresh beef came on the market in their areas.
Many of them, during that period, hardly ever got a taste of beef until after they emigrated to America or Canada, where both salt and meat were cheaper. There, when they got beef, they treated it the same way they would have treated a “bacon joint” at home in Ireland: they soaked it to draw off the excess salt, then braised or boiled it with cabbage, and served it in its own juices with only minimal spicing (a bay leaf or so, perhaps, and some pepper).
This dish, one which still turns up on some Irish tables at Easter, has become familiar to North Americans as the (usually) dreadfully overcooked glop which in many East Coast cities becomes unavoidable around Saint Patrick’s Day or (in some places) at election time. Why the festive association of corned beef slipped from Easter to the Saint’s day, on the western side of the Atlantic, there’s no indication. But one thing seems fairly certain: the basic understanding of the preparation of the dish has suffered over time. In the USA, at least, it’s almost never done right in any restaurant: it’s possibly too labor-intensive to cook the cabbage fresh every time, and not overdo it.
Certainly there are enough places in Ireland which will be serving corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick’s Day, but most of them will doing so to gratify the expectations of tourists. To most Irish-born people, the dish is seen as much too “poor” or plain to eat on a holiday. They’d sooner make something more festive …if they bother cooking at all, in these days when the Irish shopper has as many frozen-food, microwaveable, and cook-chill options available to him or her as anyone else in industrialized western Europe. In any case, an observer of the supermarkets both in the city and country will note the appearance of a few packages of corned beef in the cold case this week…but only a few. A true “national dish” does not put in so poor a showing.
This does still leave us with the question of what the Irish national dish is. If by this we mean the dish most often cooked at home when the cook (a) doesn’t feel like simply microwaving something and (b) is thinking about “traditional” food, the winner might very well be that “bacon joint” — various cuts of salted or smoked and salted pork. The joint would sometimes be cooked alone, or it might be braised with a small chicken keeping it company in the pot; it might be served with vegetables, or with potatoes boiled in their jackets. For holiday eating, the winner would probably be spiced beef, found at Christmastime in the butcher’s window with a red ribbon around it — served cold, sliced thin, with soda bread and a pint of Guinness on the side. (Though there are also people who will argue loudly for roast goose at Christmas, or lamb at Easter, as well as for other festive occasions.)
What people will be eating here on St. Patrick’s Day is a good question. We passed it on last year to one of our local radio stations, South East Radio, which serves south Wicklow and parts of counties Wexford and Kilkenny — conservative areas, mostly very rural. (Want to hear them live? Their streaming audio is here.) South East kindly conducted an informal telephone poll to see what people liked to eat on “the day that’s in it”. The responses we got were things like, “Eat? I eat pints.” (One respondent referred jocularly to the pint of Guinness as a “shamrock sandwich”.) One lady mentioned a dish her family sometimes made on The Day, recalling the colors of the Irish flag, and using cabbage, turnip and potatoes. But no one else of the twenty-five people who responded mentioned any specific food as being of any interest. — Meanwhile, inspection of two of the local branches of the two major supermarket chains (Tesco in Arklow, and Superquinn in Carlow) revealed a total of eight packages of corned beef (about evenly divided between brisket and silverside). These were vastly outnumbered by heaps of boiling bacon — a couple hundred pounds’ weight of it in each store.
So we think it can safely be said that corned beef and cabbage won’t be a terribly common menu choice for native Irish people celebrating Saint Patrick’s Day in the place where it was invented. That being the case — and since we also think there are a lot more interesting and typical Irish dishes — we don’t see why we should perpetuate this particular food-stereotype, so we won’t be carrying any recipes for the stuff on our own site. But here are a few Web sites that do:
- Stephanie da Silva’s recipe. The spicing suggests non-Irish influences, but it still looks good. Stephanie’s recipe is the one which appears in the Irish section of the FAQ for soc.culture.celtic.
- The recipe in Mike Audleman’s and John Lyver’s Dutch Oven Cookbook
- There was a link here to a recipe for CB&C with Jalapeño dumplings…a concept bizarre enough to cause a brief headache. But only a brief one. We’re trying to find where it went. (The recipe, not the headache.)
- “The smell of corned beef and cabbage is always in the air come Saint Patty’s Day….” A recipe for potatoes stuffed with corned beef.
Meanwhile, looking for a quintessentially Irish dish? Try this —
- Peter’s Mum’s Soda Bread Recipe(s)And to supplement the above article, we’re offering two video tutorials:
These files are both in Windows MovieMaker (.wmv) format. Part 1 contains ingredient measurements and other advice for soda bread in general. (29 megs) Part 2 contains instructions for “farl” and a very small dissertation on Irish tea (40 megs). In either case, please read the article first!
And no sooner do I get that off my chest than I find that others agree with me…and have even written poetry about it.
I feel so much better.
And now it’s time to go down to the local and watch Moggie and our other neighbors wear silly hats and do the Pinky Dance while wearing wellies.
