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Ireland: Why We Have No Corned Beef & Cabbage Recipes

(Trying to discover what Irish people do eat? Click here to find out!)

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...

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