Irish repasts and revelry of the past

My Dublin-born brother-in-law and thousands of others who emigrated from the Emerald Isle, will swear to you that corned beef and cabbage was not traditionally served on St. Patrick's Day.

Indeed, "a good many authorities these days take pleasure in announcing that corned beef and cabbage isn't a real Irish dish at all," says Colman Andrews, a food and wine expert with more distant Irish roots.

"I don't believe that for a minute," he says.

Andrews, the author of The Country Cooking of Ireland (Chronicle Books, 2009), and Darina Allen, who runs the esteemed Ballymaloe Cookery School in Cork and wrote the introduction to Andrews' book, even suggest the briny classic is poised for a comeback.

Allen says corned beef, now almost a forgotten flavor in Ireland, was extremely popular with all classes, not just the poor, as early as 1600 and continuing through the early 1800s. In the days before refrigeration, beef was slaughtered and corned before winter and then served with the first fresh spring cabbage to break the Lenten fast on Easter.

Early Irish immigrants brought corned beef and cabbage with them to the United States, where it became "sort of a cult food," Allen says. "I think what happens sometimes when people emigrate is life stands still. Their memories of a country and of the traditions stay as it was when they left."

Now, with so many chefs looking to the past for inspiration, Allen and Andrews agree that corned beef and cabbage could make a comeback in its country of origin (see accompanying recipe).

Its easy to imagine the roots of this dispute about authenticity, given that attitudes probably changed over time.

Yet one tradition holds here in America. And that is, a single drop of Irish blood entitles one to participate in all manner of folderol, especially drinking, every March 17.

In Ireland, St. Patrick's Day was a religious holiday, says my brother-in-law, Barry Kinsella, a photographer who spent his formative years (all 36 of them) in Dublin.

"There was a parade, but nothing like the things here," says Kinsella, who moved to Florida 29 years ago for my sister's sake.

Pubs operated on Sunday hours and families feasted as on our Thanksgiving, says his brother John Kinsella, a certified master chef (one of only 61 in the U.S.) at the Midwest Culinary Institute in Cincinnati.