Corned Beef
I’ve decided that I need to show you more pictures of things I’ve cooked and eaten, perhaps with a recipe or two. This is, after all, a FOOD history newsletter, although, it’s also, increasingly, an idiosyncratic record of shiny things that catch my attention.
One thing that always catches my attention, especially on St. Patrick’s Day, is corned beef and cabbage. As I described it in my piece on Irish cooks, it’s the “glory of Irish-American cuisine.” And although that sounded a bit snide in the context of bad Irish cooks, I meant it in all sincerity. Corned beef and cabbage is one of my favorite meals.
So, here for your enjoyment is my most recent St. Patrick’s Day feast from start to finish.
Get into that pot, boy-o.
Yes, I know all about oven-roasting corned beef. Its novelty-crazed proponents are always shoving it in my face. But, I want no part of that. This is a traditional meal, prepared according to an ancient Hibernian method: boiling the heck out of it. Three hours, at least.
This was a smallish flat cut piece of Reuben brand corned beef brisket, bought at the Osborne’s Bi-Rite Market down the street from me. I love Osborne’s Bi-Rite. It’s an old-style, Nashville neighborhood place that has one of the best take-out meat-and-threes in town. It also stocks plenty of old-fashioned things like smoked hog jowls and spiced round at Christmastime.
My wife was away this week visiting her mother, so my teenaged daughters were charged with preparing the Irish soda bread. The final result is, as the food writers say, “rustic”.
Did I mention that my wife is 100% Irish-American? Three of her grandparents were off-the-boat. The fourth, whom everyone called “the American”, was born in the US as the child of off-the-boat Irish immigrants. The two families lived in Queens across the street from each other.
My wife’s grandparents worked as taxi drivers and domestics. Their children, the generation of my wife’s parents, were judges, bankers and chief patent counsels for Fortune 500 companies.
I, meanwhile, am 100% American, a true son of the soil. My ancestors, none whom arrived to these hollowed shores after the American Revolution, were a uniquely American mix of Anglo-Quaker, Pennsylvania-Dutch, Scots-Irish yeoman farmers, ranchers and craftsmen. I have ancestors that fought in the Revolution and on both sides in the Civil War.
My family, born right-wise to this fine land, managed over 14 generations on the continent to lever themselves into the upper reaches of the working class. An American success story 400 years in the making.
Here is the recipe.
That’s my wife’s handwriting. She tells me this recipe is not an ancient family heirloom, that it’s taken from the Joy of Cooking. I choose to believe otherwise.
My one concession to modernity in preparation is that I cook the potatoes in a separate pot, starting about a half hour before dinner time. The water is heavily salted, of course.
Someone on Twitter declared this photo of my cabbage to be their “favorite food preparation picture”. Well, yes, my wabi-sabi, happenstance cutting technique is a thing of beauty. Other than having poor knife control, I think that the thick piece was intended for me, since I’m a much bigger fan of cabbage than my daughters are.
My cabbage game is strong. When the corned beef is done, I pull it out of the pot and let is sit on the cutting board for a few minutes under tin foil. While that’s happening, I put the cabbage into the corned beef pot and cook it for five minutes. I want it to still be crunchy when served.
Once the cabbage is going, there’s just enough time to do this.
Ah yeh.
Assembly of the final delight.
There it is. It’s corned beef and cabbage with boiled potatoes. Not much more can be said about it. It’s the sort of satisfying hearty fare that Americans have been eating for a long, long time.
I will say, this was a very tasty meal. The Reuben’s brand corned beef was good, much better than the “uncured” corned beef brisket we had from Whole Foods last year, which tasted like self-righteousness and was insufficiently corned-beefy. That whole “uncured meat” thing is such a scam, as if the nitrites in celery juice aren’t just as nitrite-y as the nitrites in nitrite salts. But, people enjoy being lied to. I know I do.
The Worst Irish Cook of All Time
Regarding bad Irish cooks, I’m very proud of myself for having conquered the Write-2000-Words-About-Bad-Irish-Cooks-Without-Mentioning-Typhoid-Mary Challenge.
Mary Mallon, “Typhoid Mary”, was actually a very good cook, or so her employers said. Her speciality was desserts. The problem was that she kept inadvertently killing people by infecting them with typhus. The idea that there could be asymptomatic carriers was simply outside the realm of epidemiological thinking prior to George Soper figuring it out.
I bring up Mary not to dunk again on the quality of Irish-American cooking, but to point out that, even in 1900, a generation after the first wave of Irish domestics arrived, good cooks were still hard to find. Mary was working in the best households in New York, often under assumed names after Dr. Soper identified her. Meaning, she was getting hired with spotty or no references, testament to the scarcity of good cooks. Soper, himself, noted this.
“In passing, it is interesting to observe that nobody who hired Mary seems to have inquired personally into her references.”
My wife’s grandmother, a good cook, cooked in a respectable household in Boston, but as soon as she got married, she quit that job and kept house for her husband, a New York City taxi driver with his own medallion. Good cooks often got married and left the work force. Mary Mallon was single.
In fact, Mary Mallon, even while she was locked up in permanent quarantine, was getting proposals of marriage from bachelor farmers in the Midwest, largely based on her reputation as a good cook.
“Yes, she’s a carrier of typhus. But have you tasted her corned beef and cabbage?”
Recommendations
Here are a few things I’ve enjoyed over the past week or so…
From the Austerity Kitchen, Charles Dickens was repelled by American eating habits.
The delightful Ruth Reichl gives us both James Beard and Chuck Williams (of Sonoma) at the same time. After that, scroll down for a fantastic old menu from Disney.
Our friend Arjun Bayu has written an interesting and erudite essay about a trash fish.
Speaking of erudite, this excellent essay in the Spanish-language newsletter Gula about the often-overlooked aesthetic pleasures found in the act of cooking was inspired by philosopher C. Thi Nguyen’s essay, “What’s Missing in Cookbook Reviews”. Both essays are well worth your time.
Until next time, friends. Follow me on Twitter and like this on Facebook. Cheers!
No carrots?? But a wonderful bit of history! Thank you for the cabbage tip. I will be trying this shorter cooking time without waiting for next year.
Love this! What are your favorite corned beef leftovers?