Dinner (the main meal, meat and vegetables on a good day)
Boiled Bacon and Cabbage (Cork-style)
FestiveDocumented🧂 🍄moyen2 h
A fine piece of mild-cured bacon simmered in water until tender, then cabbage cooked in the salty bacon broth, served with potatoes and a little mustard. The festive dish of the Irish home, generous and fragrant.
Dinner (the main meal, meat and vegetables on a good day)
A fine piece of mild-cured bacon simmered in water until tender, then cabbage cooked in the salty bacon broth, served with potatoes and a little mustard. The festive dish of the Irish home, generous and fragrant.
Here is the dish of good Sundays, as it is served in our Cork homes. The bacon is put into cold water and left over a gentle fire for hours, for patience alone draws out all its sweetness; when it is tender, the cabbage soaks up this savoury broth. I confess frankly: a man of figures also has his appetite, and a shared table is worth all the theorems of the day. Serve hot, with good potatoes, and let each help themselves abundantly.
Ingredients
- •Mild-cured bacon (shoulder or hock) — a piece for the household (meat, base)
- •Green cabbage — a fine head (vegetable)
- •Potatoes — as many as needed (side)
- •Peppercorns — a few (flavouring)
- •Mustard — a little (condiment)
How it was made : Before the New World potato was widely adopted in Ireland, cabbage boiled in the cooking water of salted bacon was already a meal for both poor and bourgeois. Salt preserved the pork all year; the meat was boiled to desalt it partly, and the broth then flavoured the vegetables — nothing was wasted.
Sources : Isabella Beeton, The Book of Household Management, 1861 · Florence Irwin, The Cookin' Woman: Irish Country Recipes (collection of 19th-century traditions)