Burning Question: Why do we have corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick's Day?

“We’re making some right now.”

Ron Mendoza is speaking about an Irish staple. At Ad Astra in Seaside, he and his team prepare it every year, just for St. Patrick’s Day—and it sells out.

If you’re curious why the area’s finest bread bakery is stooping to corned beef and cabbage, rest assured. He’s not.

Soda bread is one of Ireland’s signatures. However, Mendoza reserves it for the holiday for a reason.

“People aren’t sure what it is,” he observes. “I don’t know that we could sell it all the time.”

Following traditional recipes, soda bread is comparable to an oversized scone. The version from Ad Astra is a departure, using whole grain, as well as a stout brewed by Other Brother Beer Co. to lend a darker pitch and earthier bite.

But it’s still soda bread, a nod to St. Patrick’s.

Of course, it’s far easier to find corned beef and cabbage today. It’s the featured dish at Peter B’s Brewpub and Melville Tavern. London Bridge Pub is also celebrating with corned beef and cabbage, as well—even though the British and Irish haven’t always been so tight. The Great British Bake Shop in Salinas…well, their special is steak and ale pies.

No matter. One can stock up on corned beef at Grove Market in Pacific Grove or The Meatery in Seaside.

Evidence would suggest that corned beef and cabbage is a common meal on the Emerald Isle. But in actuality, smoked salmon, oysters, trout, lamb potato dishes like colcannon or boxty, and more are classics, as well as one essential protein.

“Pig meat in the form of pork, ham and bacon has been one of the most traditional of Irish foods since prehistoric times,” writes Mairtin Mac Con Iomaire of Technological University Dublin in “The Pig in Irish Cuisine Past and Present.”

A more likely dinner at an Irish pub would be bacon—or lamb, the proper meat for an Irish stew or shepherd’s pie (as shepherd’s didn’t really tend to cattle).

So how did a dish that is not symbolic of Ireland come to represent the land of Blarney? Credit the Brits, a potato blight and immigration to the new world in equal measure.

As Mac Con Iomaire points out, in the Gaelic world owning cattle was a symbol of wealth. They were used for milk and as work animals, slaughtered only when too old to milk or yoke up.

An English traveler visiting Ireland in the 1600s observed that “they feede most on Whitemeates.” As for cattle “they watchfully keepe their Cowes, and fight for them as for religion and life; and when they are almost starved, yet they will not kill a Cow, except it bee old.”

For a couple of centuries, Ireland was the hub of corned beef, but as producers rather than consumers—for the most part; beef was a celebratory meal in wealthy households. Otherwise, beef produced in Ireland fed the British navy, as well as the colonies. This was heavily salted as a form of preservation—“corned” referred to grains of salt. During England’s oppressive rule, few Irish could even afford to dine on red meat. 

Of course, they had pigs and potatoes. As Mac Con Iomaire observes, the Irish were the first in Europe to accept the potato. “The potato transformed Ireland from an under populated island of 1 million in the 1590s to 8.2 million in 1840, making it the most densely populated country in Europe.”

But that was about the change. In 1845 a form of mold—Phytophthora infestens, not that we need to get that detailed—spread through the fields, wiping out entire crops. Historians say at least a million people died in “The Great Hunger” and at least as many migrated to America.

Side note: Following the 2022 census, Ireland’s Central Statistics Office reported a population of 5.1 million, touted as a record number, though still well below the 1840 mark. 

Also immigrating to the new world were Jews from Central and Eastern Europe. They arrived in an increasingly urban and industrial America. In “Irish Corned Beef: A Culinary History”—a paper the helpful Mac Con Iomaire authored with Pádraic Óg Gallagher, a purveyor—it is explained that Irish immigrants in American cities purchased corned beef from Jewish butchers and delis. Writing in Smithsonian magazine, Shaylyn Esposito wryly notes that “what we think of today as Irish corned beef is actually Jewish corned beef thrown into a pot with cabbage and potatoes.”

So Eastern European corned beef became an Irish staple in American eyes. Mac Con Iomaire and Gallagher suggest that the Irish American desire for corned beef had to do with the eventual rising fortunes of the immigrants.

“Corned beef was widely available at a reasonable price,” they write. “Irish immigrants aspired to better themselves in America and part of this betterment was the consumption of foodstuff they might not have been able to afford at home.”

Ironically, St. Patrick’s Day, as we know it, has been transported back to Ireland—without the green beer, but with the celebratory pints. Pubs in Ireland closed in observance of St. Pat’s until laws were relaxed in 1970.

So all in all, there is some Irish to the corned beef connection. And you can find it just about anywhere today. But soda bread at Ad Astra, it goes pretty quick.

“We don’t make huge amounts,” Mendoza says.