Corned beef and cabbage is a traditional Irish meal that your family prepares each year to celebrate St. Paddy’s Day, right? Actually, while this is a meal that many American-Irish eat with gusto each March 17, it’s actually an entirely American invention that got a little help from the British.
Most traditional Irish meals are centered around ham or bacon and while you make think potatoes as well, Smithsonian points out that potatoes were actually introduced to the Irish culture by England despite common belief. The magazine also reports that cows were used for their dairy products in Ireland, as well as in the fields, meaning that beef was only consumed when a cow became too old or injured to carry on working on the farm or if a very wealthy family was celebrating a special occasion. And even in those situations, it wasn’t corned beef and cabbage that the wealthy Irish were eating.
England, on the other hand, loved to eat beef, and when they conquered most of the country, they encouraged the market to shift into trading cows as a commodity. Tens of thousands of cattle were exported from Ireland to England each year until the Cattle Acts of 1663 and 1667, which prohibited the sale of live cattle to England.
By then, Ireland was left with a surplus of cattle, and since Ireland had a very low salt tax at the time, it became clear that the best way to sell the meat was to salt it. The name “corned beef” came from the size of the salt that was used to cure the meat – granules of salt the size of corn kernels – but the Irish in Ireland still couldn’t afford to buy the beef.
Fast forward to early America, a time when working-class Irish immigrants lived a different lifestyle entirely. These immigrants were able to make more money than their ancestors and their families back in Ireland, so when St. Patrick’s Day rolled around, they bought corned beef and served a celebratory meal of potatoes and cabbage – the cheapest vegetable around at the time – thus giving us the “Irish” meal many of us love each March.
i wouWhile the origins of the traditional meal of corned beef and cabbage are decidedly American, the way we eat this meal today and the reason we eat it on St. Paddy’s Day is all thanks to the Irish after all – the early immigrants in America, who first cooked that meal to honor their Irish heritage.
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