TOP O’ THE MORN TO YA!

Not being Irish I have no idea what that is like. At the end of the day, there are people who say they are Iwish and live in Long Ireland. They are celebrating today.

Having married an Irishwoman, my kids are half Irish, making them mutts I guess. All their years living at home, they never asked for corned beef and cabbage, then they never asked for spanking either.

I believe the dish itself is American in origin, the Irish borrowing it from the Jews because the Jews couldn’t eat pork, so substituted beef brisket.

The first St. Patrick’s Day parade took place in New York City and not Ireland, in 1762. The next 100 years saw Irish immigration to the United States grow rapidly. They brought their own food traditions such as and including soda bread and Irish stew.

Pork was a staple since it was cheap in Ireland and a regular fare on the dinner table. The Irish favored Irish bacon, a lean, smoked pork loin something like Canadian bacon. But in the United States, pork was too expensive for most poor Irish families, so they substituted by cooking beef—the main staple on the American table and its diet—instead.

Irish immigrants lived alongside other “undesirable” European ethnic groups who also faced discrimination in their arrival to America, including Jews and Italians. The Irish working class in New York City frequented Jewish delis or lunch carts, and it was there that they first tasted corned beef. Resembling Irish bacon, it was the perfect and cheaper alternative to the expensive pork. Cabbage was a cheaper alternative to poor Irish families.

I make corned beef and cabbage in a slow cooker, adding the brisket rubbed in brown sugar a bottle of stout to cover everything, and the usually chopped cabbage, onions, carrots, red potatoes, and one sweet potato and cook it in the cooker for 6 hours. That’s it and it is so good I would make it more than once a year.

To all my Irish friends and relatives:
HAPPY SAINT PATRICK’S DAY!

Patrick was believed to have born in Roman Britain (Scotland), the son of a wealthy family. His name was Maewyn Succat. He was kidnapped when he was 16 and taken to Ireland as a slave. He escaped and afterward he said, God, told him to run from his captors to the shore, where a boat would be waiting for him to take him back to Scotland. He fled, the boat was there and he headed home, but he didn’t stay.

He returned to Ireland as a priest using the name Patrick. He worked there for the rest of his life to convert the Irish, who, at the time, practiced Celtic polytheism (Celtic paganism and bar hopping).

While he was never officially canonized, his followers regarded him as a “saint in heaven,” thus he received a feast day from the Roman Catholic Church and the title of “saint.”