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Ask an American what to eat on St. Patrick’s Day and there is a good chance the answer will be corned beef and cabbage.
Ask someone in Ireland and the reaction may be rather different.
That has produced a familiar correction: corned beef and cabbage isn’t Irish at all. Irish immigrants supposedly discovered corned beef from Jewish butchers in New York and invented the dish in America.
There is some truth in that story.
But “corned beef isn’t Irish” is also wrong.
Ireland was once one of the great producers of corned beef in the world. Cork became an international centre of the salted-beef trade, supplying ships, armies and colonies for more than two centuries. Corned beef was also eaten in Ireland, including as a festive food.
The peculiarly American part is not corned beef itself.
It is how an expensive Irish product, largely produced for other people, became an inexpensive immigrant food in America — and eventually the national St. Patrick’s Day dinner.
What does “corned” beef mean?
There is no corn involved.
“Corn” once meant a small hard particle or grain. Beef preserved with large grains or “corns” of salt therefore became known as corned beef.
The English term became established during the seventeenth century.
The process itself was much older. Salting meat was one of the basic ways of preserving it before refrigeration.
Ireland had plenty of cattle.
And during the seventeenth century, it developed the ingredients for an enormous salted-beef industry.
Ireland really was famous for corned beef
The transformation followed the destruction of the old Gaelic political order and the expansion of commercial cattle farming.
England initially provided a major market for Irish cattle. But English landowners complained about the competition, and Parliament passed the Cattle Acts of 1663 and 1667, restricting imports of live Irish cattle.
Irish producers responded by processing the cattle instead.
Rather than shipping live animals to England, Ireland increasingly exported preserved beef.
Cork became the centre of the industry.
The city had several advantages: an excellent harbour, a productive agricultural hinterland and access to imported salt. Ireland’s relatively favourable salt duties helped producers obtain high-quality salt from places such as France, Portugal and Spain.
By the eighteenth century, Cork’s salted beef was an international commodity.
Barrels of Irish beef provisioned the British navy for more than two centuries. Irish beef also supplied French and British military forces, merchant ships, colonies in North America and plantations in the Caribbean.
So the idea that corned beef has no connection with Ireland is plainly false.
Ireland was producing it on an enormous scale.
The strange part: the Irish weren’t eating much of it
The paradox was that the people producing all this beef were generally not the people eating it.
Cattle had long been extremely valuable in Ireland, but historically much of their value came from milk and dairy production rather than everyday consumption of beef.
By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, high-quality salted beef was a valuable commercial product.
Poor Irish families could not routinely afford it.
The meat more closely associated with the Irish household was pork.
A family could raise a pig relatively cheaply. Pork could be cured into bacon, and a piece of boiled bacon accompanied by potatoes and cabbage became a familiar Irish meal.
Hence the genuinely traditional combination:
bacon and cabbage.
Not because Irish people had never heard of corned beef.
They were helping produce huge quantities of it.
They simply had better uses for an expensive export product than eating it themselves.
Corned beef was not completely absent from Irish tables
This distinction is important because the story is often pushed too far.
Food historians Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Pádraic Óg Gallagher examined the historical evidence specifically because of the widespread claim that corned beef was never really Irish.
They found evidence for corned beef consumption in Ireland, including its use as a festive food.
There are references to salted or corned beef going back much further.
The medieval Irish satire Aislinge Meic Con Glinne — The Vision of Mac Conglinne — contains what has been interpreted as an early reference to corned beef, presented as a desirable food in its fantastical world of eating.
The point is not that medieval Irish peasants were eating modern New York deli brisket.
They weren’t.
It is that preserved beef has a genuine place in Irish food history.
What Ireland lacked was the later American custom of treating a large plate of corned beef and cabbage as the obvious national meal for March 17.
Then millions of Irish people went to America
The Great Famine transformed Irish America.
More than a million Irish people emigrated during the famine years and many more followed during the rest of the nineteenth century.
In America, the economics of meat were different.
Foods that had been expensive in Ireland could become affordable.
And Irish immigrants adapted their cooking accordingly.
The familiar explanation is beautifully simple.
Back in Ireland:
bacon + cabbage
In America:
corned beef + cabbage
Corned beef replaced the bacon while the rest of the boiled dinner remained recognizably similar.
There is considerable truth in this.
But exactly where the substitution happened is harder to establish than many accounts suggest.
Did Jewish butchers invent the Irish-American dinner?
This is probably the most repeated explanation.
Irish immigrants living in New York shared poor immigrant neighbourhoods with Jewish immigrants.
Jewish butchers sold kosher brisket that had been cured with salt.
The Irish recognized a cheap cured meat that could be boiled much like the bacon they knew from home.
They bought the beef, boiled it with cabbage and potatoes, and an Irish-American classic was born.
The interaction between Irish and Jewish communities in New York is real, and cured brisket from Jewish butchers almost certainly contributed to the development of Irish-American corned beef.
But the wonderfully neat story — Irish immigrants walked into Jewish delis on the Lower East Side and invented corned beef and cabbage — should not be treated as a precisely documented origin event.
Even the academic historians who have studied the subject caution that the standard Jewish-butcher explanation can be too simplistic.
Irish immigrants encountered several American traditions of salted and boiled beef.
Corned beef was already American food
Salt beef was hardly an exotic product in nineteenth-century America.
American ships carried it.
Workers ate it.
And New England boiled dinners combined corned beef with cabbage and root vegetables in a form strikingly similar to the later St. Patrick’s Day meal.
There is evidence from New York’s waterfront that poor Irish immigrants could buy leftover salted beef cheaply from ships returning to port.
So Irish-American corned beef probably emerged from several overlapping influences:
the Irish tradition of boiled bacon and cabbage;
Ireland’s existing familiarity with cured beef;
cheap American salt beef;
New England boiled dinners;
and, particularly in New York, contact with Jewish cured brisket.
Rather than being a completely new American invention, it was an immigrant adaptation.
Why was beef suddenly affordable?
This is central to the story.
In Ireland, beef had represented wealth.
In the United States, the enormous expansion of cattle production made beef increasingly accessible.
Irish immigrants who could rarely have afforded beef at home could now eat it.
That made corned beef almost aspirational.
A poor immigrant population could celebrate by putting a large piece of beef on the table.
The food therefore carried a very different meaning in America than it had in Ireland.
What had largely been an export commodity became an immigrant feast.
That is a much more interesting transformation than simply saying Americans got Irish food wrong.
How did it become a St. Patrick’s Day food?
St. Patrick’s Day itself was undergoing the same transformation.
In Ireland, March 17 had historically been primarily a religious feast.
In the United States, Irish immigrants and their descendants increasingly turned it into a public celebration of Irish identity.
Parades grew.
Irish societies held dinners.
Political organizations used the day to demonstrate the size and power of Irish communities.
Families celebrated at home.
Food became part of that new Irish-American St. Patrick’s Day.
Corned beef was relatively affordable but still substantial enough to feel celebratory. Cabbage and potatoes were inexpensive and familiar.
The combination was almost perfectly suited to the occasion.
Smithsonian’s account describes Irish Americans using corned beef as a celebratory meal as St. Patrick’s Day developed from a religious feast into a wider celebration of Irish heritage.
By the twentieth century, corned beef and cabbage had become one of the defining foods of Irish America.
Meanwhile, Ireland kept eating bacon
This created the modern cultural divide.
Irish-American families handed down corned beef and cabbage as an Irish tradition.
They were not making that up.
It genuinely was the food their Irish-American parents and grandparents had eaten.
But families remaining in Ireland had followed a different culinary path.
Bacon and cabbage remained the more recognizable Irish dish.
Consequently, modern visitors to Ireland can be surprised to discover that the meal Americans consider indispensable on St. Patrick’s Day is not particularly common there.
Both sides are right about their own traditions.
They simply developed on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
Cork never completely lost its beef tradition
There is another wrinkle.
Corned and spiced beef did not vanish completely from Ireland.
Cork, the old centre of the salted-beef industry, retains a particularly strong tradition of spiced beef, especially around Christmas.
The preparation is not identical to the standard American St. Patrick’s Day brisket, but the relationship is obvious: beef is cured with salt and spices before cooking.
Cork’s continuing taste for cured beef is a surviving reminder that the connection between Ireland and corned beef was never imaginary.
What disappeared was Ireland’s enormous international salted-beef industry.
Its memory survived much more strongly overseas.
The other uncomfortable history of Irish corned beef
There is a darker part of the story that rarely makes the St. Patrick’s Day menus.
Irish corned beef was not only feeding sailors and soldiers.
It was exported to European colonies, including the French West Indies, where historical research has found it being used as food for enslaved Africans on plantations.
That places Irish corned beef within the wider Atlantic economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Cattle were raised and processed in Ireland.
Beef was salted in places such as Cork.
Barrels were loaded aboard ships.
The product travelled through imperial military and commercial networks around the Atlantic and beyond.
The history of Irish corned beef is therefore considerably older — and considerably more global — than the St. Patrick’s Day dinner.
So is corned beef and cabbage Irish?
The best answer is:
Irish-American.
But that requires an important qualification.
The claim that “corned beef isn’t Irish” is false.
Ireland had a major corned-beef industry from the seventeenth century onward. Cork became one of the great centres of the international salted-beef trade, provisioning fleets, armies and colonies for generations.
Corned beef was also eaten in Ireland, although it was too expensive to be an everyday food for most of the population.
The traditional everyday Irish pairing was much more likely to be bacon and cabbage.
After Irish immigrants arrived in the United States, the economics changed. Beef became affordable, American salt beef and Jewish cured brisket were readily available, and corned beef could take the place occupied by bacon in Ireland.
Then St. Patrick’s Day itself became an enormous celebration of Irish-American identity.
Corned beef and cabbage went with it.
So Americans did not invent an imaginary “Irish” food from nothing.
They did something immigrants have always done:
they took an old food tradition, adapted it to the ingredients and prices of their new country, and created a new tradition of their own.
Corned beef is genuinely part of Irish history.
Corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick’s Day is part of Irish-American history.