In third grade, my teacher announced that we would be celebrating St. Patrick’s Day by wearing green hats and giving ourselves fake Irish names. And so was born that great Celtic patriot Francis McLam, and next to me was the even-more-improbable sounding Mike O’Gotkowski. Our friend Michael O’Reilly was now — in the face of all this Irishness — no longer sufficiently Irish, and so he became Michael McO’Reilly. It was my first inkling of how strange Americans are about traditions on St. Patrick’s Day, a feeling reinforced years later by watching people of all races and ethnicities pretend at Irishness by getting plowed on green beer and painting themselves like leprechauns. But despite all this, maybe the most straightforward of St. Patrick’s Day celebrations, eating the corned beef and cabbage, is secretly one of the strangest.
From Ireland to the Outer Banks: the origin of corned beef and cabbage
“My Irish family never ate corned beef,” the letter began. I’d just written a story about new immigrants in Queens, called “Where Curry Replaced Corned Beef and Cabbage,” and a reader was gently protesting my mention of that stereotypical dish.
“My grandmother was perplexed that Americans associate corned beef with being Irish. In Ireland, most people ate pig. Lots of bacon, lots of sausage (lots of trichinosis).
…Corned beef was made popular in New York bars at lunchtime. The bars offered a ‘free lunch’ to the Irish construction workers who were building NYC in the early part of the 20th century. But there’s no such thing as a free lunch. You had to buy a couple of beers or shots of whiskey to get that free lunch. And that’s how corned beef became known as an ‘Irish’ food. My grandmother hated the stuff and wouldn’t allow it in her home. I myself first tasted corned beef when I was in my thirties at some non-Irish-American person’s ‘St. Paddy’s Day’ party.”
Dismayed, I sent that letter to a friend from Dublin. “Every word of that post is pure gospel,” she wrote back. “We NEVER eat corned beef and cabbage. We mock Americans and their bizarre love of that ‘meat’.”
Irish people denying corned beef and cabbage! Shocking! Like if Italians denied pizzaand Chinese denied General Tso’s Chicken. Wait, they have? OK, well, let’s move on.
Theories abound as to why Irish Americans wear the corned beef and cabbage mantle. There’s the “Irish drink a lot in bars” theory, above. And then there’s the “they got to New York and couldn’t find their beloved bacon, so they started eating their Jewish neighbors’ corned beef instead” theory.
First, let’s settle one thing: Ireland knew how to rock the corned beef. According to Irish food experts Colman Andrews and Darina Allen, corned beef was, in fact, a major export of Cork from the 17th century, shipping it all over Europe and as far as the sunny British West Indies, where they still love their corned beef in cans.
Most of the Irish who came in massive waves to America during the Potato Famine in the late 1840s were from around Cork, so they probably knew corned beef well enough. But, as the historian Hasia Diner argues in “Hungering for America,” they may have been trying to forget altogether what they were and weren’t eating back in Ireland.
By the 1900s, she writes, there was a movement in Ireland to revive Irish culture, flagging after decades of emigration and centuries of English colonial rule. The Irish were embracing their language, their dance and music, but there was little mention of traditional cuisine. “Food lay at the margins of Irish culture as a problem, an absence, a void,” Diner writes. “The Irish experience with food — recurrent famines and an almost universal reliance on the potato, a food imposed on them — had left too painful a mark on the Catholic majority to be considered a source of communal expression and national joy.”
St Patrick’s Day Food Specials
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