Corned Beef, no... Irish Stew

Last year for St. Patrick’s Day, I did a look around to find corned beef.  All I could find was something that was in the meat for lunches section or something that was in a can near the Spam.  Um, no thanks.

I thought, how odd and wondered what in the world was wrong with the British?  Did they not eat the traditional Irish meal?  Were the Irish disliked that much or what?  I don’t remember what I ended up serving for dinner, probably beef stew since I was very unsure about cooking with lamb.

Fast forward to this year... I asked my Facebook friends where I could find corned beef.  Let’s just say I got some ‘smart’ answers.  It was obvious to me that I was using the incorrect term if that was what they though corned beef was, so I went to my friend wikipedia and read about corned beef.

It turns out that what I really wanted was something that the British call salt beef.  It is found at some of the local butcher, not in the grocery store where I had been searching in vain.

It turns out that salt beef is known in many cultures around the world. It got the name corned beef from an old English word.  They called any small hard particle or grain, a corn. In the case of corned beef, corn referred to the course salt that was used to cure the beef.  The salted beef became known as corned beef.  During the Industrial Revolution, the British industrialized the production of salt beef.  Because of it’s non-perishable nature it was used by the naval fleets, it was also sold to the British public and the colonies.  In the colonies, it was looked upon with disdain as it was widely used in the slave trade and associated with poverty.  It was also traded to Spain and France and the English salt beef production made them quite wealthy.

It is a sad tale for the Irish really.  The wealthy English lords that owned all the Irish land grazed cows.  All the Irish beef was sent to England which served to worsened the effect of the Great Potato Famine.

The Celtic grazing lands of...Ireland had been used to pasture cows for centuries. The British colonized...the Irish, transforming much of their countryside into an extended grazing land to raise cattle for a hungry consumer market at home...The British taste for beef had a devastating impact on the impoverished and disenfranchised people of...Ireland. Pushed off the best pasture land and forced to farm smaller plots of marginal land, the Irish turned to the potato, a crop that could be grown abundantly in less favorable soil. Eventually, cows took over much of Ireland, leaving the native population virtually dependent on the potato for survival.

—Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef^[6

So, even though most of the beef used was produced in Ireland, the Irish did not eat it, they were to poor.  So, It turns out that corned beef is not really a traditional meal in Ireland.

"In North America corned beef dishes are associated with traditional Irish cuisine. However there is considerable debate about the association of corned beef with Ireland. Mark Kurlansky, in his book Salt, states that the Irish produced a salted beef around the Middle Ages that was the "forerunner of what today is known as Irish corned beef" and in the 17th century the English named the Irish salted beef, corned beef.^[7] Some say it was not until the wave of 18th century Irish immigration to the United States that much of the ethnic Irish first began to consume corned beef dishes as seen today. The popularity of corned beef compared to bacon among the immigrant Irish may have been due to corned beef being considered a luxury product in their native land, while it was cheaply and readily available in America.^[5]

In Ireland today, the serving of corned beef is geared toward tourist consumption and most Irish in Ireland do not identify the ingredient as native cuisine."

On St. Patrick’s Day in the US it is considered very traditional to eat corned beef and cabbage and to drink green beer.  Green beer is another American tradition as well.  They don’t drink green beer on St. Patrick’s Day here in the UK or Ireland.  The Irish immigrants started eating corned beef and cabbage after they arrived in the US.  Corned beef was substituted in the dish for pork (bacon) in the dish probably due to the low cost.  In the US it is traditional to prepare it as a boiled dinner, cooking it with cabbage and root vegetables such as carrots and potatoes.

In light of my inability to procure corned or salted beef in time for our St. Patick’s Day celebration, I resorted instead to making an Irish stew with lamb.  Happily it turned out well.  Unhappily, the Irish soda bread did not. I used a combination of recipes, if you want to know what I did, the recipe is below.

My recipe:

Crock pot Irish Stew

About 1.5 lbs of lamb, cut into pieces
flour
salt
pepper
oil
large chopped onion
4 cups water
Thyme
4 bay leaves
Guinness
Red Wine

Coat the lamb with flour and season with salt and pepper.  Oil the bottom of the pan and heat.  Brown the lamb in the pan.  Take out as browned.  When all the lamb is browned, add some more oil to the pan and then saute the onion.  When it is almost done, add the water to the pan and scrape off the brown scrapings off the bottom.  Add all to the crock pot.  Take the thyme and peel the leaves off the stem.  Chop and add to the stew.  Add the 4 boys leaves.  Open a bottle of Guinness beer and add a little (I added about 1/2 cup).  Add 1/2 cup of the red wine.

I cooked this all afternoon and then switched the crock pot off overnight. I have been told by many that the stew is better if ate the second day.

Potatoes
Carrots
Parsnips
Parsley (flat leaf)
Oil
3 cups of water
3 bullion cubes

Cut the vegetables into bit sized pieces.  Oil the bottom of the pan and cook the vegetables together for about 10 minutes.  Then add the water and 3 bullion cubes.  If you are in a hurry (I was) cook until the vegetables until the are soft.  Add to the rest of the crock pot.

Chop the flat leaf parsley and sprinkle on top.  After we had dinner I dumped the rest of the parsley into the crock pot.