Corned Beef & Cabbage Day

What the day is

Corned Beef and Cabbage Day is observed on March 17, alongside St Patrick's Day. The dish is salt-cured beef brisket simmered slowly with cabbage, potatoes and root vegetables.

The standing argument about whether it is authentically Irish has a clear answer: it is authentically Irish-American, which is a real tradition in its own right and a different one.

Origin and background

In Ireland, the traditional dish was bacon and cabbage, using cured pork. Beef was not the everyday meat. Cattle were valuable for dairy and for export, and most rural households could not afford to eat them, while pigs were kept cheaply on scraps.

The substitution happened after emigration. Irish immigrants arriving in American cities in the nineteenth century found beef far cheaper than it had been at home, and in New York many settled beside Jewish neighborhoods where kosher butchers sold salt-cured brisket. That corned beef was closer in texture and saltiness to the bacon they knew than anything else available, and it cost less. The dish that resulted became a fixture of Irish-American life and then of St Patrick's Day.

The name has nothing to do with maize. Corns here means coarse grains of salt, the large crystals used to cure the meat. The pink color of commercial corned beef comes from curing salts containing sodium nitrite, which preserve the meat and fix the color; a home cure without them produces a gray-brown brisket that tastes the same.

How to take part

• Cook it low and slow. Brisket is a hard-working muscle and needs hours at a bare simmer; boiling hard makes it stringy.
• Rinse the brine off first and taste the cooking water as you go, adding unsalted liquid if it is fierce.
• Add the vegetables late. Cabbage and potatoes need a fraction of the meat's cooking time.
• Slice across the grain, which on a brisket changes direction partway along. Cut the wrong way and it is chewy regardless of cooking.
• Keep the leftovers for hash or a reuben, which is arguably the better meal.