Believe me, she was on my list of bad Irish cooks. I try to limit these things to 2,000 words, so calling out bad Irish cooks would have been a encyclopedia.
My grandmother was a certified Irish cook in some rich guy's house on the Main Line in Philadelphia where she had to learn how to cook French food and supposedly thought very little of it. But my favorite quote about Irish cooks from Irma Rombauer's Joy of Cooking intro to hash recipes: "The Irish cook, praised for her hash, declared: "Beef ain't nothing. Onions ain't nothing. Seasoning's nothing. But when I thro myself into my hash, that's hash!"
That's a great quote! I think a lot of those young Irish women eventually became decent cooks, although the reputation of the Irish cook never really recovered from that first big wave of teenagers arriving in the 1870s.
Great post! I've heard there's a more Jewish connection to the cured and boiled brisket that we credit to the Irish-Americans, but that's a whole separate essay I'm sure.
And you didn't even include Typhoid Mary Mallon who had to be forcibly quarantined for two decades to keep her from pursuing her cookery career.
Believe me, she was on my list of bad Irish cooks. I try to limit these things to 2,000 words, so calling out bad Irish cooks would have been a encyclopedia.
My grandmother was a certified Irish cook in some rich guy's house on the Main Line in Philadelphia where she had to learn how to cook French food and supposedly thought very little of it. But my favorite quote about Irish cooks from Irma Rombauer's Joy of Cooking intro to hash recipes: "The Irish cook, praised for her hash, declared: "Beef ain't nothing. Onions ain't nothing. Seasoning's nothing. But when I thro myself into my hash, that's hash!"
That's a great quote! I think a lot of those young Irish women eventually became decent cooks, although the reputation of the Irish cook never really recovered from that first big wave of teenagers arriving in the 1870s.
Great post! I've heard there's a more Jewish connection to the cured and boiled brisket that we credit to the Irish-Americans, but that's a whole separate essay I'm sure.