Ireland: The Irish national dish: why it's not corned beef and cabbage

Ask someone -- especially a North American -- 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 it's definitely not the Irish national dish.

The first corned beef: food fit for kings

Corned beef 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 longer any good 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.

The hungry times: where's the beef?

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 ("corned" beef, it then came to be called, because of the grain- or "corn"-sized chunks of salt used in the preserving process) to Britain and Canada. 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 Irish people, during that period, got their first taste of beef when they emigrated to America or Canada -- where both salt and meat were cheaper. There, when they got beef, the emigrants tended to treat it the same way they would have treated a "bacon joint" at home in Ireland. (Click here for instructions on how to duplicate the Irish recipe for a bacon joint with cabbage.) They soaked the beef 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 does still turn up on some Irish tables at Easter. But it's otherwise much better known to North Americans, who are likely to see it turning up all over around Saint Patrick’s Day, or (in some places with heavy Irish-American constituencies) 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, it's now very difficult to tell.

Tourist's delight: but the native Irish aren't interested

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 be doing so with an eye to the tourist trade. To most Irish people, these days, the dish is either too poor, plain or boring to eat on a holiday, or just too much trouble to go to. They'd sooner make something more festive ...if they bother cooking at all, in these days when the Irish cook (a) has as many frozen-food, microwaveable, and cook-chill options available to him or her as anyone else in industrialized western Europe, and (b) doesn't just go out to eat instead of bothering to cook anything. 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 during St. Patrick's week...but only a few. A true "national dish" doesn't 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 Michaelmas and Christmas, or lamb at Easter, as well as for other festive occasions.)

The national dish: an (ongoing) investigation

What people do eat here on St. Patrick's Day is a good question. We put the question to one of our local radio stations, South East Radio, which serves south Wicklow and parts of counties Wexford and Kilkenny. They 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 the conclusion has to be that there's no particular food that's important to Saint Patrick's Day as it's celebrated in Ireland. Over here, the celebration itself is what matters. (Click here for a list of things that the native Irish and resident "New Irish" were doing on The Day in 2007.) And it can safely be said that corned beef and cabbage won't be a terribly common meal among the locals. Since the emphasis of our website is on European foods rather than North American ones, and since we think there are a lot more interesting and typical Irish dishes that people celebrating St. Patrick's Day might enjoy eating, we won't be carrying any recipes for corned beef and cabbage on our own site. (There are also sooooo many CB&C recipes out there for interested parties to choose from, and we'd rather concentrate on the less well-known Irish options.) But here are a few links to Web sites that have good-looking recipes you might check.

• 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 the venerable Usenet newsgroup soc.culture.celtic.
  

• The recipe in Mike Audleman's and John Lyver's Dutch Oven Cookbook

• Something a little on the unusual side: a recipe for CB&C with Jalapeño dumplings.
• "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. The article suggests that this is just the thing for "the morning after the green beer". (You know, if people stopped putting green stuff in their beer, their heads might not hurt them so much the next morning.

Meanwhile, looking for a quintessentially Irish dish? Try this --

• Peter's Mum's Soda Bread Recipe(s): with complete video tutorials
  

...Or visit our 2008 Festival of Traditional Irish Recipes for some possibilities. (The same page has the recipes from our 2007 Festival.)

(The above article was written for St. Patrick's Day of 1995, when we first introduced our main Irish recipe collection, and is © 1995-2008, Diane Duane. For permission to reproduce it, please click here to contact the author.)

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