The local Dillons store is offering special prices on corned beef brisket, $1.29 or $2.49 a pound, depending on cut, and cabbage, 38 cents a pound. Potatoes — white, red, yellow and new — are also available. Everything you need for a traditional St. Patrick’s Day feast is easily found.
Except that corned beef is not Irish, it’s Jewish. Irish bacon would have been the traditional partner to cabbage. The corned beef was substituted for bacon by Irish immigrants to the Americas who could not afford the real thing.
Corned beef refers to a particular style of brine-cured beef. The Oxford English Dictionary defines corn in this context as a “small hard particle, a grain, as of sand or salt.”
John Linnane, a lecturer in food production at the Dublin Institute of Technology, divides Irish cuisine into two periods — before and after the potato. Milk, cheese, meat, cereals and some vegetables made up the Irish diet before the introduction of the potato.
Boiling in a cauldron was the primary method of cooking after the Iron Age — before that, and even after for peasants, cooking would have been done in holes in the ground or wooden troughs in which water was heated by hot stones. Boiling as a main method of cooking prompted one wit to proclaim that Irish cuisine is food you slurp.
The potato, long thought of as a staple Irish food, was introduced to Europe from the New World in the sixteenth century and its adoption was a matter of survival, not choice.
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The local Dillons store is offering special prices on corned beef brisket, $1.29 or $2.49 a pound, depending on cut, and cabbage, 38 cents a pound. Potatoes — white, red, yellow and new — are also available. Everything you need for a traditional St. Patrick’s Day feast is easily found.
Except that corned beef is not Irish, it’s Jewish. Irish bacon would have been the traditional partner to cabbage. The corned beef was substituted for bacon by Irish immigrants to the Americas who could not afford the real thing.
Corned beef refers to a particular style of brine-cured beef. The Oxford English Dictionary defines corn in this context as a “small hard particle, a grain, as of sand or salt.”
John Linnane, a lecturer in food production at the Dublin Institute of Technology, divides Irish cuisine into two periods — before and after the potato. Milk, cheese, meat, cereals and some vegetables made up the Irish diet before the introduction of the potato.
Boiling in a cauldron was the primary method of cooking after the Iron Age — before that, and even after for peasants, cooking would have been done in holes in the ground or wooden troughs in which water was heated by hot stones. Boiling as a main method of cooking prompted one wit to proclaim that Irish cuisine is food you slurp.
The potato, long thought of as a staple Irish food, was introduced to Europe from the New World in the sixteenth century and its adoption was a matter of survival, not choice.
