Getting ready for St. Patrick’s Day

It’s getting close to St. Patrick’s Day and I’m beginning to plan my menu.  In the US, the obvious choice is corned beef and cabbage, the traditional centerpiece of any good St. Patrick’s Day feast in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, or the rest of the US.  On the other hand, St. Patrick’s Day as celebrated in the US is a celebration of the Irish-American experience and has little to do with St. Patrick or Ireland.  Neither, of course, does green beer, soused leprechauns, or t-shirts emblazoned with “Kiss Me I’m Irish,” and I can live with that.

I’m going to try for a more Irish-focused experience on March 17 and I’m still considering my options.  I’ll definitely be making some Irish soda bread (or maybe brown bread) and colcannon (mashed potatoes and cabbage) as sides, but I haven’t decided on the main yet.  Before getting into that, though, I want to stop for a moment on the topic of corned beef and cabbage. 

As an iconic food, corned beef and cabbage could be considered one of those American foods created by immigrants designed to simulate the cuisine of “home.”  Foods such as General Tso’s Chicken or spaghetti and meatballs could also be described this way, except that in the cast of corned beef and cabbage, it isn’t quite true.  Corned beef itself simply refers to a method of preserving beef with salt.  Many European cultures have developed a salted beef technique and most of them brought that technique with them when they came to America.  And many of them also brought an affinity for cabbage flavored with this preserved and salted beef.

Not the Irish, though.  Corned beef and cabbage was served in Ireland in the 18th and 19th centuries, but the more prosperous types and primarily in the Protestant north.  The more Catholic (and rural) south, the source of most of the emigrants to America, were far too poor to afford meat of almost any kind except for the most special of occasions.  Furthermore, when the Irish could afford meat, it was pork or lamb – there was no tradition of eating beef in Ireland by anyone except for emigrants from England.

Jane Ziegelman’s 97 Orchard is one of my favorite books about food.  It traces the culinary history of five families who lived at the tenement at 97 Orchard from the late 19th century to the Depression.  When the Irish began settling into the Lower East Side, German and German-Jewish immigrants were already present in great numbers and there were any number of establishments selling plates of cabbage boiled with corned beef to single men.  In general, the Irish immigrants themselves were among the poorest to arrive in the US and couldn’t afford beef of any kind, but an Irish laborer might get a plate of cabbage and boiled preserved beef for a few pennies at a local saloon for lunch. It might have even become a badge of honor for an Irish family to bring home some corned beef from the Jewish delicatessen down the street to boil with cabbage for a special occasion.

Years later, when Irish-Americans had established their presence in America and had made inroads into urban politics and business, the idea of corned beef and cabbage came to symbolize the hard-scrabble past of the nouveau-riche Irish-Americans.  Nowhere was this more clear than at Dinty Moore’s, a New York saloon opened in 1914 to provide “home cooking” for the city’s upscale Irish-American elite (before the brand became more identified with canned beef stew).  A cornerstone of Dinty Moore’s menu was corned beef and cabbage and the popularity of the dish and the saloon solidified the dish as a key element of Irish-American heritage.

So if you consider St. Patrick’s Day a celebration of Irish-American heritage, corned beef and cabbage seems to me to be the perfect choice dinner.  For a celebration of Irish heritage, not so much maybe.  As for green beer, drunk leprechauns, and “Kiss Me I’m Irish” I’m at a total loss.

This post has turned out to be longer than I thought, so I’ll talk about what I’m planning for St. Patrick’s Day tomorrow.  Stay tuned.