What part of the cow does the corned beef come from

[dianeduane]

We've had about twenty queries about this today. We always get these this time of year.

(sigh) I surrender.

Corned beef comes from the brisket and silverside (just under the topside) of the cow. Both of these are tough cuts requiring either long, slow cooking, or pickling in brine, or both -- hence their use in corned beef. See this article for lots more information.

And I don't know anyone in my part of Ireland who will be eating it tomorrow. It's usually seen as poor people's food. It's a pain to cook properly, and most people don't have the time or inclination, these days. The above article will tell you more about that, too. (Once again I checked the supermarket to see if I was possibly mistaken about this. And once again I found the usual result: three packages of corned beef, eighty packages of assorted pork and boiling bacon.)

To all those of you about to go Drown The Shamrock: Yes, yes, for tomorrow you're all Irish. Enjoy. (But be warned: when you get over here, no matter how many Irish ancestors you have, even this one, twenty years won't be anything like enough to make you really Irish. And don't think an Irish passport will matter: the neighbors won't be fooled. ..But you knew the job was dangerous when you took it.)

Enjoy anyway. And don't dye the beer green. That's one of the things really Irish people really don't need to do. The green is either in your heart, or it's not. Putting it in your liver won't matter a bit. :)

Tags: corned beef, Irish, Ireland, St. Patrick's Day, St. Paddy's Day, St. Patty's Day, who the heck is Patty, Patrick, Irish food, what do people eat on Saint Patrick's Day, what part of the cow does the corned beef come from

Comments

[amberfox.livejournal.com]

I just like the taste of corned beef. I lobby for it whenever it turns up at the local store. I think it's the spices or something. Anyway, it's tasty, especially with mustard, and not that hard if you have a crock pot.

As for the other, well, I'm not fond of beer at the best of times, but even I know that green beer is an abomination. Unless you're just playing with coloring, in which case I want to see some other colors, too. I wonder if you could get a good purple, or if the yellow tint would interfere....

[feorag.livejournal.com]

You miss the point! We always did a dyed green beer ('Emerald Oil' - blame [Unknown site tag] for the name) for St. Patrick's because we knew lots of English pubs would buy it. It was really just our best bitter with food colouring in it, and a jolly nice pint it was, too.

[dduane.livejournal.com]

Not arguing the tastiness of it at all. (Or how that tastiness can be subverted. Turns out one of our local producers started making some just now: I bought some to turn it into back-door pastrami.) And in ancient Ireland it was seen as a great delicacy (mostly due to the expensiveness of the salt, and the fact that most people didn't get beef: unless you were a chieftain or petty king, and could afford [figuratively speaking] to light your cigars with fifty-Euro notes, no one killed a cow until it was too old to give milk. The article linked to above has more on this.)

But it has nothing traditional to do with St. Patrick's day in its native land (see the article). And what really gets up my nose is that too many of my own people think that's a Really Commonly Eaten Food over here: like the hamburger in the US. SO wrong.

(sigh)

[dduane.livejournal.com]

(grin) That's OK. That just gets filed under Fooling The Non-Celts. :)

You got home OK, BTW??

[keristor.livejournal.com]

My sister and I have just been working out that we're 1/8 Irish -- but we won't be "doing the day" (neither of us drink beer anyway, whatever the colour). But I do like corned beef, it's one of the foods I remember as a child (when we probably did have it because it was cheap, but unlike Spam it tastes good).

[feorag.livejournal.com]

Flying back after the session in the Porterhouse was interesting, but we got back okay.

[megabitch.livejournal.com]

One of my "we're broke and can't afford to buy food this week, what's in the cupboard?" recipes involves tinned corned beef chopped up with random herbs, tinned carrots (I usually keep tins of stuff in the back of the pantry for "lean times"), worcester sauce/soy sauce/something-similar, topped with cheesy mashed potatoes. It is a cheap'n'cheerful recipe that I generally only did when times were a bit tight.

Much to my husband's disgust apparently... he recently asked why I don't make it more often *grin*

[dduane.livejournal.com]

I betcha. Good to know you're back safe, though. I was a little concerned about the snow.

[dduane.livejournal.com]

But this sounds (perversely) like a good thing. Then again, I like Kraft Macaroni & Cheese for the same purposes.

Corned beef hash, also, is something of a weakness. Always with double fried eggs.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

Snow never hangs around Edinburgh for long. There was no trace of it by the time we got back.

[genmaicha.livejournal.com]

My boy loves his Guinness, so any excuse he can get to down more of it is happily taken. Considering that it's a Friday this year, I imagine that he'll be chewing his way through a lot of it tomorrow. Maybe he'll even save some for me. ;)

*1/8 Irish, 1/2 Scandinavian*

[cjmr.livejournal.com]

Great! Now you have me craving corned beef hash! And the night before a fast day, too! I'll just keep telling myself, "Monday, you can have some Monday" all weekend. Unless by some random quirk that's what they're serving for breakfast at the retreat center on Saturday or Sunday.

[akicif.livejournal.com]

[waves] - I've still got the t-shirt. Maybe I should wear it tomorrow?

[feorag.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a Plan.

[cjmr.livejournal.com]

I was just commenting on my own LJ a few hours ago that I may only be 1/4 Irish (and part of that Scots-Irish) but I was Irish enough to know that dyeing things green doesn't make them more Irish.

[ursulav.livejournal.com]

Any Irishness I may possess is long lost in the white trash mishmash of my geneaology (my grandmother did used to sing "Did Yer Mother Come From Ireland" whenever the opportunity presented itself, but only about half of it, and in no particular order or tune.)

But green beer? That's just...nasty.

[ca-bookwyrm.livejournal.com]

Great! Now you have me craving corned beef hash!
That makes two of us. *sigh* And I don't have any at home. Guess I'll just have a cookie instead.

[janeway216.livejournal.com]

Chicago, however, has yet to figure this out.

[interactiveleaf.livejournal.com]

As usual, I shall be wearing a Bright Orange tee tomorrow.

I'm a REAL traditionalist.

[phoebesmum.livejournal.com]

I shall continue to be happily English and perplexed by the whole business. Not least as to why we had a St Patrick's Day parade in London this year.

Last Sunday.

[ailbhe]

Hahahahahahahahahaha! *wheeze* That's funny.

[ailbhe]

I could kind of understand having the UK parades on the Saturday *closest* to the day itself. But a whole week away? *baffled*

[posicat.livejournal.com]

I don't think the color is so much trying to be Irish, but more be a reminder of the celebration. It's the same reason people decorate for any occasion, it sets the day apart in our minds seeing everything changed.

(Lives near Chicago, about an hour North.)

[janeway216.livejournal.com]

That was more some wry humor and less a slam on Chicago. I like Chicago quite a bit and honestly, dyeing the river is just plain fun. Irish? Who cares! It's a green river.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Go back a little bit, and I think I'm actually more than half Irish.

But I'm English. Sorry. I may have cousins in Co. Louth (never met them, though clanwilliam's mother knew them), but Irish though my family may have been, I don't consider that to last for ever.

(At one point, my family had both a Free State Senator and an English MP, simultaneously. We now only have the MP.)

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

It's to try to confuse you ex-pats over here.

And it's working, mwahahaha!

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

St. Patrick's Day falls on a Friday in Lent this year.

My pastor wrote in the parish bulletin this week that it's okay to shift your day of abstinence from meat to a different day, if you feel a need to consume corned beef & cabbage on the Seventeenth. Hadn't heard that one before.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

One of my Australian friends has just mentioned to me that they have green Guinness over there. The mind boggles. Though, as the chap is blind, I do wonder if someone's been playing a cruel trick on him.

[jilumasam.livejournal.com]

Uhmm...yes every year we get the same articles on the news trotting out green guinness. I don't drink and thought Guinness was black, so it's probably a joke played on everybody.

Now...Corned beef, cooked properly (in a big sausepan with the vinegar, nutmeg, cloves and brown sugar), with smashed taties and white sauce is what I call a comfort meal. Now when was the last time I had it????

Lizzy

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Unless someone with clout objects (like the passport people), I'm Cornish. If pushed I put 'British'. OK, it's my mother's side which is mostly Cornish/Breton (and that side has the Irish as well), but my father's side is just "generically English", and to the Cornish I'm a 'cousin' (they only have two groups, 'cousin' and 'furriner') so they get my allegiance.

It's interesting how some cultures keep the family connection through as many generations as can be traced whereas others seem to want to disavow any connections apart from those still living.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

I agree with your husband *g*, it sounds wonderful. At one of the companies I worked they had a small room as a 'canteen' run by a local family, and they made something similar, it reminded me of meals I enjoyed as a kid when my mother made "shepherd's pie" with corned beef. I ought to make some...

[clanwilliam.livejournal.com]

Oh, we were taught that one as kids - we were always allowed sweets on St. Patrick's Day even though we'd given them up for Lent.

And the day of abstinence isn't compulsory anymore...

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Drop a green food dye into Guinness, and I suppose the head might turn green.

But I'm not about to adulterate it that way, even if Guinness is no longer the best stout brewed in Dublin.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

It's an interesting point, yes. When you live in a community, do you belong to it to the exclusion of all else, or do you term yourself an exile from some other community?

One extreme case of the latter is the stereotypical Irish American, the one who has a single great grandparent who emigrated from Killarney sometime in the late 19th century. The one who has never been to Ireland, nor either parent, nor any grandparent, but who is nonetheless Irish, and who will donate money to the cause of the ejection of British troops from Dublin, and so on.

(I think we should have a Tom Lehrer song here.)

What I do find most irritating in such cases is actually not the claim to be Irish, but the inherent denial of whatever other heritage they have.

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

I just can't quite see why one would take a perfectly good brisket and perfectly good salt and then ruin them both by making corned beef.

(one grills the brisket, very rare, slices it thin, and turns it into chilli)