St. Patrick’s Day in 20th and 21st Century American life has developed a really curious character. For many younger adults, it’s a two or three-day drinking binge; for families with young children it’s become a potentially wearisome obligation to stage leprechaun hunts or some other form of celebration. For older people, it might just be a day to wear green. For Americans with some kind of link, however vague or imaginary, to Ireland, it’s a chance for some lightly phony kind of ethnonational schmaltz (to mix my ethnic references) with a vague side of political muscle-flexing in a small set of cities where Irish-American neighborhoods were or still are an important constituency.
To some extent, it has provided a sort of template for the spread of ethnic and immigrant festivals in major American cities, though none of the various days or weekends that have been declared over the years have quite been able to capture the same kind of cultural real-estate at the national level. (Italian-Americans would be wise to just rebrand Columbus Day altogether with a more palatable Italian-American figure to memorialize or celebrate—Da Vinci Day or something like that.)
Anyway, in my household, yeah, some of the schmaltz makes an annual appearance. I did leprechaun hunts for my kid (honestly, if you are now finding this is an expectation with your young children, it is not my fault: when I was doing this almost two decades ago, I was the only one I knew who did. Something happened in the culture.) We often watched a film that was at least sort of about Ireland. (I am lifetime-tapped-out on “Darby O’Gill” and “The Quiet Man”. Never again.) We wear green, we buy gimmicky green things.
And I cook some standards. In this case, corned beef, cabbage and boxty (basically, the same at latkes).
Before I did that, I made a few other things heading into the day itself. I was pretty happy with an egg-mushrooms-and-sausage affair I made late last week, a kind of breakfast-for-dinner sort of thing. We have a little teeny omelette pan I should use more often—it doesn’t so much make omelettes as it does little round cooked eggs for something like a breakfast sandwich. (The sausages were the Irish bangers I mentioned in last week’s column, so there you go: the whole theme was off and running before we even got to the weekend.)
Then I made some char siu style pork to go over noodles and stir-fried vegetables. I’ve gotten to the point where I improvise some on char siu—I know what’s got to be in it and what elements can be subbed in or out. (And I’m sticking to my determination to never ever coat it with maltose again.)
I follow the NYT corned beef recipe for the cooking, if not the pickling mix, so it was three hours in beer and ginger beer. In the meantime, I puzzled about how to do the cabbage and how to do the boxty.
Cabbage is one of those staple ingredients that restaurant chefs seem to have suddenly discovered. It reminds me a bit of the slow burn where brussel sprouts kind of redeemed their foul reputation via the Thanksgiving side dish of roasted sprouts, bacon, chestnuts and maple syrup and then suddenly exploded into culinary popularity, to the point that you can hardly go to a gastropub that doesn’t have them fried and coated with soy sauce, fish sauce and sweet syrup of some kind. Cabbage was often either boringly cooked or a component of a big salad like cole slaw or “Asian salad” and now I see it a lot on menus with different techniques and flavor profiles.
I decided to broil some savoy cabbage with a light coating of olive oil and then to add a bit of fennel tops, watercress and pea shoots on top. Then I put a bit of chili crisp and some spicy pistachios on that. Looked good and tasted good, actually.
The boxty worried me—I’ve half-assed it and had it come out terribly, but I’ve also used recipes and had those come out terribly. You’d think it wouldn’t be so hard—they’re just potato pancakes! But they have been for me. So I found a recipe I liked that combined mashed potatoes and grated potatoes and insisted strenuously on squeezing all the moisture out of the grated ones, an instruction I’ve seen on some latke recipes as well. And voila! they came out beautifully.
So did the corned beef, but I knew that was going to work.
Which really left only two remaining things to do:
Have a glass of whisky.
Watch the rest of “Godfather 2”. Hey, Tom Hagen’s Irish, right?