A little more on Corned Beef and Cabbage

There was some concern here as to whether my assertion that Corned Beef and Cabbase is not traditional Irish fare, but rather and Irish-American dish. Here’s the story:

The Irish cuisine most closely related is bacon and cabbage – a traditional Irish easter meal in which a salted bacon joint would be boiled with cabbage and potatoes. In the 19th century, as Irish immigrants became numerous on the east coast of the United States, particularly in New England, they found that corned beef was a palatable alternative to bacon and was more readily available from the Jewish butchers that were common. Corned beef was (and still is) also quite a bit less expensive than bacon, which was important when food and funds were not as plentiful as one would like.

So corned beef and cabbage is not traditionally Irish, but is of decidedly Irish-American origin. There’s even more information about the dish on wikipedia and kitchenproject.

St. Paddy’s day food fest

Today is St. Patrick’s day, and I cooked a “traditional” Irish dinner. OK, not really – I cooked traditional Americanized Irish food. Still, it was very good, and our dinner guests enjoyed it as much as we did.

It was actually a bit difficult to come up with a menu of Irish-esque food for a group of teetotalers, but here’s what we ended up having:


Corned Beef and Cabbage – not really traditional Irish, but traditional American-Irish, and I like it. The trick with this, as with most boil-in-the-pot-for-3-hours dishes, is in the spices. The perfect taste is just the right mix of black peppercorns, garlic powder, bay leaves, and salt. All this stuff just gets thrown into the water with the corned beef brisket and the oils from the herbs and spices permeate the meat as it cooks. Tres magnifique!
Colcannon – An authentic Irish dish, this is basically mashed potatoes mixed with garlic and steamed kale. As a tangential side note, the English variation of colcannon is called bubbles and squeak.
Irish soda bread – A really simple flatbread that uses baking soda (often referred to as bicarbonate of soda in the Irish recipes) instead of yeast for leavening.
And since we don’t drink alchohol, all traditional Irish drinks were out, so green kool-aid would just have to do.


Finally, for desert was a really cool looking St. Paddy’s day cake that Marcia made last night (and frosted this morning, with about 4 hours of sleep in between). You can see the amazing icing work in this picture, but what you can’t see is the cake itself, a green and white marbled cake baked to absolute perfection. I’m eating my third or fourth piece as I write this.

As far as I know, there’s no Irish blood in either of our families, but in my book, any holiday that presents itself as an excuse to cook good food is a holiday worth celebrating!

Whew!

It’s been a while since I’ve written a post on this blog.  Thankfully, Marcia’s picture quizzes have kept it alive while I’ve been “away.”

I haven’t really been physically absent, I’ve just been in crazy finish-the-product-and-get-it-out-the-door mode for the last 3 weeks, finishing up a new version of the software that I write.  I finally finished it last week, then had to deal with some other problems early this week, and yesterday, March 14, we finally “shipped” version 5 of our software, the best version we’ve done yet.

So, without that hovering over me and keeping me chained to my computer for 20 hours a day (yes, there were several days last week when I got about 4 hours of sleep), I finally have some time to do some other things I’ve been putting off, like reading a few new books, cleaning my desk, and blogging.

You will be hearing much more from me in the coming weeks.