Corned Beef & Cabbage: A Different Take on a Holiday Classic

If you're Irish-American or you just enjoy celebrating St. Patrick's Day, you may be planning to dig into some corned beef and cabbage this weekend. After all, it's the traditional dish of the Emerald Isle, right? Well, not quite. Corned beef and cabbage is actually more of an Irish-American creation that came about on this side of the pond.

Back in 1800s Ireland, cows were more often kept for milk, instead of meat. Beef was an expensive luxury that most poor and working class could not afford. Beef, including corned beef, was a big industry in Ireland, but most of it was exported to countries like England, France and later the United States.

The beef was "corned" by packing and storing a salt-cured brisket into barrels with coarse grains or "corns" of salt. But with most of their beef either being exported or unaffordable, most Irish citizens turned to other choices for their protein source. For example, to celebrate a holiday meal, Ireland's working class were more likely to cook up a ham or bacon joint (a cured piece of pork) with their cabbage and potatoes. Beef was expensive and therefore not a big part of the national cuisine at that time.

But when thousands of Irish immigrants came to the U.S. in the mid 19th century during the Potato Famine, they had to adjust their eating habits to what was available in the new world. Bacon joints were not as easy to come by, so they looked for a cheap replacement and that replacement was the Jewish corned beef brisket.

The Jewish Kosher corned brisket was similar in taste and texture to the Irish salted or corned pork and it was affordable. Here in the U.S. corned beef was now an affordable food for the lower working classes and soon became a staple of the Irish immigrant diet.

While there is a place for corned beef in Irish cuisine, it is not considered a national Irish dish, say like Irish stew or shepherd's pie. But once the stigma of eating "working class food" faded here in the U.S. and Irish-American pride grew, the tradition of eating corned beef and cabbage for St. Patrick's Day became an exclusively Irish-American tradition. Today many Americans enjoy this dish, whether of Irish heritage or not.

So I became curious about Ireland's original salted pork and cabbage dish. What would it taste like, compared to the traditional corned beef? I searched online and eventually found a recipe, courtesy of Bon Appetit, which I modified to my taste:

CORNED PORK & CABBAGE

• 1 gallon water
• 3 cups coarse kosher salt
• 1 6 1/2-pound bone-in-pork shoulder roast,
excess fat trimmed
• 6 large heads of garlic, halved crosswise 
• 2 teaspoons whole black peppercorns
• 1 large head of green cabbage, cut into wedges
• 1 pound carrots, peeled, cut crosswise in half
• Spicy mustard and or horse radish

Combine 1 gallon water and salt in large heavy pot. Stir until salt dissolves. Add pork. Cover and refrigerate for 1-2 days. 2 days is better.

Bring pork in salt water to a boil. Boil for 10 minutes. Carefully drain the salt water and remove the pork from the pot.

Cutting small, 1-inch slits in the pork, stuff them with half of the sliced garlic. Put the pork back into the pot and refill the pot with enough cold water to cover the pork. Bring that water to a boil over high heat. Add the rest of the garlic and the peppercorns.

Transfer water and pork to slow cooker or continue cooking on stove. Cover and simmer for the next 3 hours until pork is tender.

About an hour before you plan to eat, add carrots and cabbage wedges. Meat is ready when it falls off the bone.

If you like boiled potatoes with your dish, make them as usual. I'm not a big fan and instead made mashed potatoes.

If you're not a big fan of garlic, cut the garlic by half.

It's not a hard dish to make, just boiling a lot of stuff and keeping track of it all.

I was worried that I was ruining a perfectly good pork shoulder by boiling it, but it turned out really good. The meat was tender and juicy and the salt had permeated the meat, but not by too much. After just a few hours of cooking, the garlic and peppercorns had infused the meat and vegetables with their tangy and garlicky flavor. The textures of the two corned meats are similar, but the pork flavor definitely resonates here, you can tell the difference. I like to mix spicy brown mustard with horse radish, which really makes a dish like this explode, but regular mustard is fine too. It's a tasty and different take on a holiday tradition.

Have a Happy St. Patrick's Day.

For more go to www.yourpotluck.com.