Ethnic Food

[naomikritzer]

The actual Irish don't seem to make nearly as big a deal of St. Patrick's Day as the Irish-Americans. (And the not-Irish-but-hey-any-excuse-for-a-party Americans, for that matter.) Ed and I visited Ireland in 1998, and saw signs up on the Dublin buses advertising a drawing where the grand prize was a trip for two to St. Patrick's Day in Chicago. Not even New York or Boston.

The weirdest thing, aside from green beer, is corned beef. The Irish-American St. Patrick's Day dinner is corned beef. Not only do the Irish not eat corned beef on St. Patrick's Day, they don't, so far as I saw while in Ireland, eat it at all. My friend Lyda says that the Irish-Americans picked up corned beef from the English, but you know, the English don't eat it either. Which is kind of funny, because a big boiled slab of beef is right up the British culinary alley. Except they'd want to smother it in bland, fatty gravy. But I digress.

So, whose old-country culinary tradition would include corned beef? Well, traditional Jewish cuisine includes brisket, and in order to make meat kosher after buying it from a kosher butcher, you're supposed to salt the hell out of it and let it sit in salt for a while, I think, before rinsing it off. (I am not an expert in kashering meat, but that's how they kasher a slab of brisket in one of the All-of-a-Kind Family books.)

Not that American Jewish cuisine doesn't include plenty of things they didn't eat in the Old Country. Let's take lox, for example. Lox is smoked salmon, sliced thin, eaten cold, preferably on top of bagels with lots of cream cheese. Do you suppose they had ready access to salmon in the shtetls of Eastern Europe? Not likely. And yet in the U.S. it is quintessentially Jewish, much the way corned beef is quintessentially Irish.

Who ate lox -- smoked salmon -- back in the Old Country? The Irish, as it turns out. At least, the modern Irish do -- when we were there in 1998 it was readily available as pub food. They also eat a lot of soft cheeses over there, though they're missing the bagels. (I think the Irish would really like bagels, actually; someone should try opening up a bagel shop in Dublin.)

This has always puzzled me. Did someone host a multi-ethnic recipe-swap night in New York City decades ago, or was this pure coincidence?

According to haddayr, it was apparently more or less the former. The Jewish and Irish mafias got together to try to gang up against the Italians. I'm not sure what the other ramifications were, but apparently the Irish decided they liked well-salted brisket, and the Jews decided lox was the perfect topping for a bagel. (Bagels are a genuinely Jewish-American invention, created to avoid a dietary rule about how bread is baked. You boil a bagel before you bake it, therefore it isn't bread.)

Now, green beer? There's no reasonable explanation for green beer.

Comments

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

I think the Irish would really like bagels, actually; someone should try opening up a bagel shop in Dublin.

Heh. You missed out on the proliferation of bagel shops by, oh, about three years? There's now a 'Bagel Bar' or somesuch thing in every small town.

And no, there is no reasonable explanation for green beer. (The unreasonable explanation is that someone was aiming for unusual colours of vomit, late St. Pat's night/early March 18 morning. This is my theory, anyway.)

[naomikritzer]

I KNEW it. I should have quit my job in 1998 and moved to Ireland to become the Queen of the Bageleria.

My other great business idea was to open an American-style bar & grill in Galway, call it Ed's American Bar and Grill, and throw a big Irish-American style bash every Saturday-nearest-March-17th, complete with "Kiss Me, I'm Irish!" stickers for everyone in attendance. (Anyone noting that they weren't actually Irish -- we ran into a lot of expatriate Brits -- would be reassured that it's okay, at least half of the Americans sporting buttons like this have no Irish ancestry, either.)

Someone's probably done that, too.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Someone's probably done that, too.

I imagine they have. At least here in Dublin, I know there are a few places that sound quite like that.

It's actually kind of amazing how international this place has become in the last ten years. You'd have been right on time to ride the wave. :)

[papersky.livejournal.com]

They do eat corned beef -- the tinned kind, um canned -- in Ireland, they eat it on soda bread. And they eat it mashed into mashed potato. I made that once for my stepmother's father, who poked at it and grumbled that it reminded him of the war. Corned beef (the tinned kind) was also known as "bully beef", so if you've come across that in literature, that's what it is.

The bagels in Ireland -- and Britain -- are about like the bagels you can get in Lunds in bags of six, and cannot compare to the bagels in Montreal and New York. What's funny about them though is that they tend to have US flags and pictures of the statue of Liberty on the bag. They're not Jewish, they're culturally American, like pizza, which also often has such decorations. The best bread in Ireland -- the three best breads in the island of Ireland all come from the same stall in the English market in Cork, and they are rosemary foccacia, brown olive bread, and -- damn, I can't decide, I think the bagette. I don't miss the time when rysmiel lived in Cork at all.

I just read all three of your Freedom books, in the last twenty-four hours. I think they're brilliant. Thank you for writing them.

[naomikritzer]

Ah, I stand corrected. I tend to forget the existence of tinned meats. Intellectually, I know there are people who eat them. There is even a sushi restaurant in my neighborhood that serves spam sushi cut into the shapes of little pigs (the owner and chef is Hawaiian) but since I can imagine eating canned meat only if I had lost my mind and gone on Survivor, or if I survived some sort of apocalyptic plague and were subsisting on the contents of the nearest grocery store, I don't tend to consider it when making sweeping generalizations about foods that aren't eaten various places.

Bagels are totally American, and so is pizza (the pizza of Naples is a radically different dish) so the U.S. flag and Statue of Liberty makes perfect sense to me.

And thank you for the compliment. I'm glad you liked them. When is Ha'Penny coming out? *taps foot impatiently*

[springbok1.livejournal.com]

The British guy that's currently sitting in Chiara's living room claims that they do eat corned beef in England (out of a tin).

[springbok1.livejournal.com]

Also, according to Chiara corned beef is also a staple in certain Polynesian cultures.

[naomikritzer]

I know spam is. That's why the Hawaiian owner of Midori's Floating World does the spam sushi. It doesn't surprise me that canned corned beef would also be popular.

And you know, honestly, it doesn't really surprise me that the British eat corned beef out of a tin. They eat those things they call "sausages," too.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

And mushy peas. Don't forget the mushy peas.

Oh, and marmite.

[trinitysite.livejournal.com]

Isn't marmite more Australian than British?

Or was that vegemite? (is there a difference?)

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

It's called Vegemite in Australia and Marmite in the UK, but as far as I can tell it's the same vile substance not-yet-acquired taste.

[wrenb.livejournal.com]

A week late, but Vegemite & Marmite are definitely related but different. Marmite is lovely, vegemite is disgusting.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

I've seen corned beef in London. It was called "salt beef."

Ethnic food crossovers: Cornish pasties have become a Finnish-American ethnic dish in the Upper Midwest.

[(Anonymous)]

Actually, pasties have been around in Michigan's UP (Upper Peninsula) since Scandinavian & Cornish immigrants started mining copper there in the mid 1800's.

And if you get to Chicago for St. Patrick's day, you can not only drink green beer but see the Chicago River died green.

I grew up in n. IL eating corned beef (often with cabbage). Hated it. All my family's Irish ancestors are at least 7-8 generations back. My dh, who is from Chicago and of recent Irish ancestry, never had it as a child.

[(Anonymous)]

forgot to sign my name above (Sandy D., aka Zea)

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

"Actually, pasties have been around in Michigan's UP (Upper Peninsula) since Scandinavian & Cornish immigrants started mining copper there in the mid 1800's."

What I meant is not merely that Finnish-Americans eat the stuff, but that it's become an ethnic food. Eating pasties is now part of Finnish-American tradition.

[imponderabilias.livejournal.com]

Um, I guess I should have said "dyed" instead of "died", though maybe "died" is more appropriate for the Chicago River.

[naomikritzer]

'bout time you got an LJ account, Zea!

[lilisonna.livejournal.com]

According to my Irish-descended husband, corned beef was the cheap American alternative to some sort of bacon dish that was more expensive and not actually as tasty. Irish "Fancy Food" being pork apparently.

[brightglance.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the traditional Irish "Sunday joint" was boiled bacon (http://www.olhausens.ie/bacon_products_dublin_ireland.htm#2) (like a ham, but more strongly flavoured). The only corned beef I knew growing up was the stuff in a tin, like papersky says, and it wasn't all that popular in my part of the country. I think I was in my thirties when I first saw the other type of corned beef, and the whole Irish-American thing finally made sense. Irish immigrants probably hadn't been well off enough to eat beef much at home - presumably you cooked corned beef just the same way you used to cook your boiled bacon.

[yankee-in-texas.livejournal.com]

Sooooo... there won't be green beer at your St Patrick's Day party, then?

I will stay in Houston and sulkily drink green beer all by myself.

[naomikritzer]

There has never yet been green beer at my St. Patrick's Day party, but we do have some green food coloring in the cabinet, and if you drop by I promise to pour you a glass of our lightest-colored beer and dye it green.