St. Patrick’s Day recipes & tips

Green Salad

The salad dressing recipe was from a British web site adapted with my memory of smooth house dressings at Robaire’s French Restaurant. The almond oil was from Robaire's. The turmeric was added for color.

half a cup of sherry vinegar

one cup of olive oil

half a cup of almond oil

tablespoon of Dijon mustard

salt & pepper

tablespoon of dried parsley

teaspoon of dried chives

half teaspoon paprika

half teaspoon of turmeric

Whisk together and set aside for at least four hours.

The salad was butter lettuce and mixed organic greens served with Asparagus and pickled beets and onions

The asparagus were trimmed, cooked in boiling water then blanched in ice water. The beet salad was simplicity itself, two cans of pickled beets with two small red onions thinly sliced. After four hours, the pickled beet juice mellowed and turned the onion bright red.

The Corned Beef

Many years ago sitting at the counter at Langer’s Deli near downtown LA, my wife and I talked to one of the cooks and he told us how to cook corned beef at home. At Langer's they put the corned beef into steam cabinets that hold the meat at about 190 degrees for six to eight hours. The key to keeping it tender and juicy is never to let it boil.

At home a crock pot is ideal to match this deli slow cooking. Ten hours before dinner put two pieces of corned beef about 4 pounds each into the crock pot plus a quarter cut of mixed pickling spices. In my family we pour in two cups of Apple Cider vinegar or if you have it black malt vinegar. The cider vinegar give a bit of brightness, the malt vinegar is strong and sweet. Then fill the crock pot with cold water up to half an inch of the rim, cover and put on low. Turn the meat two or three times during cooking. When the meat is done (usually around eight hours) you can turn the crock pot off.

To cook the vegetables take about half the cooking water from the crock pot and ladle it into a large pot and add water to cook the carrots, parsnips, turnips and onions and potatoes and cook them on the stove. Bring to a boil and then let simmer until they are cook to your taste. The old country Irish cook them soft, but today most of us prefer them with some texture but not Al Dente. This is up to you.

Tips & suggestions

Don’t peel or cut the onions, the skins will come off and the whole onion will not fall apart while cooking. While you are carving the corned beet put in a whole cabbage cut into eighths, or quarters if you have two small cabbages. Do not cut off the core. It will hold the cabbage wedges together.

Serve the sliced corned beef on a platter along with a platter of the vegetables.

I use an electric knife to do the slicing. Since very few home cooks have professional grade knives or the skill to keep them sharp, the electric knife is the most reliable way to carve the meat. They are less than $20 at Target. Emeril Lagasse , Elton Brown, Bobby Flay and other Food Channel headliners recommend them for home kitchens.

To be traditional small white rose potatoes would be cooked with the other root vegetables. Parsnips and turnips are optional, but traditional in Ireland if you have them. In Irish slang Turnips are called “nips” while potatoes are called “spuds” or “praties" (pray'tee's). Most Irish families serve horse radish and mustard with the corned beef.

Tastes vary widely but I served the corned beef with a hot sweet Russian style mustard, a strong German style mustard and a whole grain Dijon mustard. Gulden's Spicy Brown or "Chicago Style" mustard is not surprisingly very close to tangy German Mustard. In Ireland they use Coleman’s English Mustard which is very very sharp, too sharp for American taste. But you can find Coleman's in most supermarkets is you want to be authentic and fearless.

In Los Angeles, we have a famous and ferocious local mustard, Phillipe’s house made mustard is available at the restaurant by the jar. This summer a French college student we took there told us he loved the mustard and the double dipped beef made him feel at home. He was from Grenoble and I later discovered so was the founder Phillipe. The sandwich is not called the "French Dip" for nothing. The name of the place should be pronounced Fil-LEAP in the French manner, but this being LA we pronounce it like the Spanish Filipe. ¿Porque no?

St. Patrick's Day and our Corned Beef dinner

The St. Patrick's Day menu of corned beef and cabbage is an American traditional meal like the Turkey Dinner of Thanksgiving Day, the grilled hot dogs and hamburgers of Forth of July and the barbecue with potato salad lemonade and watermelon on Labor Day. There are also other regional or national ethnic festivals like Cinco de Mayo with tacos and margarita, Columbus Day with Spaghetti and meat balls, in Chicago and the Midwest you have von Stueben Day with bratwust and Beer and Pulaski Day with kilbasa and beer, in Texas you have June Teen with big day long family barbecues and soul food, and Puerto Rico’s national day with the big parade and pork sandwiches in New York. There are of course many many other local or regional ethnic festivals like the sequence of Holy Ghost Festivals in small towns in central California with boiled beef dinners and other dishes brought from Portugal’s Açores Islands, the annual Lutefisk Dinners in Minnesota’s Scandinavian Parish Halls, Crab Feeds in San Francisco, Shrimp Boils in Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, Lobster Boils in New England and cedar planked salmon in the Pacific Northwest.

Like the Turkey Dinner, the Corn Beef and Cabbage dinner is American. While identified with the Irish and Jews, neither group ever ate the stuff in the “old country.” In Ireland a dinner of cured pork shoulder was the tradition while corned beef didn’t exist at all in Poland’s Jewish communities. However, both adopted this American product when they got here. Both today consider it their favorite party meat. The only significant difference is that Jews often add cloves of garlic to the cooking water for an extra bite. The Irish don’t add garlic.

As close cousin of the Corned Beef & Cabbage is New England Boiled Dinner. Not much seen here in California, in this meal corned beef is replaced with a pork shoulder ham often called Picnic Ham. Otherwise the dish is much the same with potatoes and a number of root vegetables, onions and cabbage. My Grandfather Mellow preferred this to corned beef, he didn’t like because it got stringy and got caught in his teeth. My Grandmother made this often in winter. Although born in California herself, her parents were born in New England and brought this recipe with them.

We had a St. Patrick's Day dinner the saturday before and followed the tradition with one exception, one of the couples are great fan’s of my late wife’s home fried potatoes which we made instead of boiling them root vegetables. The other California change to the menu was a big green salad served with pencil thin asparagus which had just come into season and was a real delight. In my family we always preferred the thin fresh asparagus to the thicker stalks restaurants seem to prefer. The thin ones are more tender and more vibrant in flavor.

In the next post are cooking tips and recipe’s for our version of the St. Patrick's Day meal. And so until next year, ERIN GO BRAGH -- Ireland forever in the Gaelic. That is one of the two Gaelic phrases most American Irishmen know, the other is Pos’ ma hone! -- kiss my ass.