In North America, a traditional St. Patrick’s Day dinner includes corned beef, cabbage, soda bread and boiled potatoes. Which part of this meal would not have been traditionally served in Ireland?
A) Cabbage B) Corned beef ü C) Potatoes D) Soda bread
In Ireland, the meat for the meal was much more likely to have been a “bacon joint” — a piece of cured pork — than a piece of corned beef. Beef was expensive, so corned beef was reserved for the rich and for the export market. When the Irish emigrated to North America, where beef was relatively cheap, they switched to corned beef. The word “corn” in this usage refers to the coarse kernels of salt that were rubbed into the meat to cure it. Nowadays the meat is brined or pickled, not cured with corns of salt, but we still call it corned beef.
