Irish-American Dining
March 16, 2015 6:41 AM   Subscribe

Irish-American Dining
Just in time for St. Paddy's Day, an ongoing project looking at food that is explicitly Irish-American. With recipes!

Among the entries:

Apple Mary: The humble apple was once so associated with older Irish women selling them on docks that the "apple Mary" became a cultural touchstone.
Mulligan Stew: There was a thin line between Irish-Americans and hobos, apparently.
Irish Potato Candy: It's actually made of potatoes!
Shamrock Shakes: A fast-food holiday tradition with a shocking tragedy hidden in its past.

And, of course:

Corned beef and cabbage: The Irish like to remind us that they never ate it. Of course they didn't. It's an Irish-American meal.
Role: author
posted by maxsparber (14 comments total)
This project was posted to MetaFilter by The Whelk on March 17, 2015: "...hollow out a heel of french bread and stick a whole onion into it"

I started with "potato casserole" and kind of wish I had never known of these recipes.

Perfectly timed, though. I'm working on a book chapter about the convolutions "traditional" recipes go once in America, corned beef and cabbage being a big player.
posted by Miko at 8:53 PM on March 16, 2015 [2 favorites]


I'd love to read that when you're ready to show it.
posted by maxsparber at 4:32 AM on March 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


The whole site in general is brilliant, and I have Definite Thoughts about adding "session" to the "Irish Language" section. "Session" is taken from "Seisún", a sort of half-gig/half-jam session done by trad musicians at a pub.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:29 AM on March 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


As for the they never ate it for people in Ireland and corned beef and cabbage, the story is complicated by the fact that both parts, separately, are traditional here. But the cabbage is the normal accompaniment for cheap bacon, so it's bacon-and-cabbage that's found all over Ireland, while corned beef was always more expensive, and there are a lot of class and regional variations as to whether people remember it as normal food in their family or not. It was certainly traditional special-Sunday-dinner food in my Dublin family, but if they were going to the expense of buying high quality grass-fed beef, people were inclined to serve it with a variety of vegetables rather than everyday cabbage.

So yes, the combination of corned beef and cabbage is a classic Irish-American dish, not an Irish one, but corned beef itself is normal enough here.
posted by Azara at 7:42 AM on March 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


The whole site in general is brilliant, and I have Definite Thoughts about adding "session" to the "Irish Language" section. "Session" is taken from "Seisún", a sort of half-gig/half-jam session done by trad musicians at a pub.

Oh, that's excellent.
posted by maxsparber at 8:34 AM on March 17, 2015


But isn't "Seisiún" another word like "Craic", where the modern Irish usage is a back formation from the English? - "The crack" and "Session" are older usages than the Irish spellings.
posted by Azara at 10:30 AM on March 17, 2015


but corned beef itself is normal enough here.

I totally get that - but in the US, things get complicated because we're working with the realities for Irish-Americans who immigrated between 1847 and about 1910. And for those people, particularly those who came in the first wave after the famine set in, corned beef was not something they ate at home. They couldn't afford to. Even then, Ireland had abundant beef, but almost all of it was marked for export by landowning absentee British colonizers. The Irish peasants themselves were not entitled to it, though they packed and shipped it in great bulk around the world - especially to the Caribbean, where agricultural land was devoted to growing sugarcane rather than subsistence protein. It fed slaves, and slaveowners. In the US, corned beef had been common fare for Irish, German, Dutch, Eastern European and even some English immigrants since before the founding - but it just wasn't something that showed up on the plates of the mostly desperately poor immigrants that came here in the decades following the famine. So most Irish people who arrived in the US in that period had never, in fact, even tasted beef. Or if they had, only rarely, at holidays, when landowners dispensed it. They encountered corned beef in restaurants and delicatessens, and they loved it, because it represented something the New World gave them that the Old World couldn't.

Of course we can all appreciate that that all changed after World War I and that the Irish now, today, have plenty of corned beef and every other kind of meat. But for most of us of Irish descent in America, it represents a food our ancestors first had access to here, not something they were privileged to eat at home in Ireland.
posted by Miko at 7:07 PM on March 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


They couldn't afford to. Even then, Ireland had abundant beef, but almost all of it was marked for export by landowning absentee British colonizers.

Being so poor themselves, the Irish immigrants to the US don't seem to have passed on any memory that at home in Ireland there was always a middle class who could afford rather better food. The poor might not have been able to buy beef themselves, but they could certainly see it for sale in butcher's shops.

I have no doubt at all that the post-Famine immigrants first tasted beef when they reached the US - what I object to is the common corollary that because those particular Irish people didn't have something, it couldn't be found in Ireland at all. I think this is one point where the Irish and the Irish-American experience diverged: the traditions that carried forward to modern Ireland were a mixture of different strands, including a lot more urban and middle class influences than seem to have survived among Irish-Americans.
posted by Azara at 1:37 PM on March 18, 2015


In my article on corned beef, I do find evidence that the stuff was eaten in Ireland, even by the lower classes on special occasions. Example:

I first find reference to corned beef as an Irish meal in 1830s in the book “Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry” by William Carleton, where writes that corned beef made a regularly appearance during Christmas and Easter in Ireland, and also describes it as a food serving at a wedding.

The site isn't really about the Irish experience, so I didn't empty the notebook on this one, but there's plenty of evidence that corned beef was pretty well-known in Ireland, although I didn't find any reference to it being combined with cabbage, so that combo might be uniquely Irish-American, as you say.
posted by maxsparber at 1:48 PM on March 18, 2015


But isn't "Seisiún" another word like "Craic", where the modern Irish usage is a back formation from the English? - "The crack" and "Session" are older usages than the Irish spellings.

* shrug * Maybe? I'm not an ethnolinguist, I'll be first to admit.

I just know that every time I've heard guys in US pubs say it, they pronounce it "session", like in English, rather than "Seisiún"; and the only place I've ever heard such a club gig be referred to as a "session" rather than just "music", it was in at an Irish bar and referred to Irish trad music (or at least Celtic music). And that, to me, says that it was the Americans who borrowed it from the Irish, and started calling it "session" because "Seisiún" looks like that's how you pronounce it if you're an American unfamiliar with Irish pronunciation.

If you're saying that "Seisiún" itself came from the longer English phrase "jam session", that's plausible, but then I still come back to the fact that the Irish bars don't have the "jam" part of that phrase when they refer to their music gigs, so it may have been a borrow and then a borrow-back.

But I admit to talking out of my ass and making guesses right now. Guesses based on observation, but guesses nonetheless.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:48 PM on March 18, 2015


Looks like the words derive from a common source: Old French session, from Latin sessiō (“a sitting”), from sedeō (“sit”). Apparently the word has been used in Ireland for centuries, but I'm not clear whether it predated the English use of the word or if both are derived from the Old French use of the word. I'll investigate further.
posted by maxsparber at 1:52 PM on March 18, 2015


what I object to is the common corollary that because those particular Irish people didn't have something, it couldn't be found in Ireland at all

I've never heard or read this statement taken to that extreme, personally.

the traditions that carried forward to modern Ireland were a mixture of different strands, including a lot more urban and middle class influences than seem to have survived among Irish-Americans.

Well, this is true - most immigrants were not from cities and from the middle class of Ireland during the peak period. There are strong analogues in Italy, where the immigrant class was also almost completely drawn from the impoverished working classes. Most middle-class Irish people didn't leave Ireland 1850-1910. Immigration is often driven by what's called the push-pull effect; it's not enough for there to be somewhere nice to go, it also takes a "push" from conditions that are poor at home. People who had only the pull, not the push, were less inclined to so totally overturn their lives and emigrate. That does necessarily mean that entire swaths of life experience were missing in the people who made up the vast majority of first-generation Irish immigrants during that era, and that the people who tended to stay and carry on were generally already better off even during the post-famine era.
posted by Miko at 3:27 PM on March 18, 2015


Like, not a ton of middle-class Mexicans are dashing across the Texas border by night and wandering for weeks in the desert these days. American will have the descendants, and the expat culture, of those who did do that, not those who didn't. They will probably eat a lot of things here they never got to eat at home.
posted by Miko at 9:38 PM on March 18, 2015


They may not like it.
posted by maxsparber at 5:24 AM on March 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


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