The Luck of the Jewish
A New Scroll of LA Jewish News
Folks,
Demonstrating once again to our lucky readers that MegilLA is not your average Jewish publication, here is a special issue for St Patrick's Day. You don't need to be green to see that it's revealing to look at national holidays from a Jewish point of view, and I am hoping that this issue brings MegilLA much mazel, Irish or otherwise. Can you send in a little green to help support our delving into new areas of Jewish interest? Please subscribe today.
Edmon J. Rodman
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Tracking the flavors of
'Cohn' beef and cabbage
Edmon J. Rodman
Nothing quite hits the green spot on St. Patrick’s Day like corned beef and cabbage. Many restaurants will feature it as a menu special that day, and cooks around the U.S. will be boiling up pots of water to prepare what they think is strictly a traditional Irish dish.
Little do they know that this must-have meal of St. Patrick’s is an American dish born of a dash of Irish economic hardship, and a pinch of Jewish flavor.
According to a 2013 article in the Smithsonian magazine (Read it HERE),
Irish immigrants when they came to America in the early years of the 20th Century found pork and bacon to be out of their budget and turned instead to corned beef, a salt cured form of brisket that was popular with their Lower East Side Jewish neighbors.
My parents, Murray and Pearl Rodman, born in 1922, and who grew up in the Bronx between the wars, were quite familiar with this milieu, living in a neighborhood with both Irish and Jewish households. This explains why my very Jewish mother, whose father was a delicatessen counterman, who sold a lot of corned beef, had such a knack for preparing it every March 17, a day which as luck would have it was also my father’s birthday.
My mother’s brother, Alex Singer remembered in an interview several years before his passing: “The part of the Bronx where we grew up was one third Jewish, one third Irish one third Italian,” he said. “I played with Irish kids who had parents with funny accents. I also had parents with funny accents,” said Singer, a movie and television director who won an Emmy for directing in 1972.
Growing up in Southern California, I didn’t know from Irish neighbors. I thought the wonderful smells that came from my mother’s kitchen the night before my dad’s birthday were Jewish. When one year March 17 fell on a Shabbat, my Jewish association with this most American culinary aspect of St. Patrick’s was fully cooked.
Others are aware of this Jewish-Irish connection as well.
According to Hasia Diner, historian, professor, and director of New York University’s Goldstein Goren Center in her book "Hungering for America: Italian, Irish and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration," in "the 1920’s corned beef and cabbage came to have some association with Irish American cooking.”
Lara Rabbinovitch, a writer and historian specializing in immigrant food cultures further explained the connection further. "Irish American immigrants did prepare the dish, most likely influenced by their Jewish counterparts in early 20th-century New York City," she said in an interview with the Toronto Star.
My Irish-Jewish connection to March 17 continues to this day. I discovered that my across-the- street neighbor, John is of Irish descent, and his parents grew up and lived in the Bronx about the same time as my folks. Turns out, for two years, his father, John McCarthy and my mother went to DeWitt Clinton High School in the South Bronx, and John’s mother, Cathleen liked to make corned beef and cabbage just like mine did.
Today, to stay in touch with the holiday, and remember my father’s birthday, we shop at a nearby kosher market for a pickled brisket for the main course for our March 17 dinner. While putting our peppercorn-covered purchase in the refrigerator, I wondered: All those years ago back in the Bronx, could John’s mother have bought her corned beef from my grandfather?
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Homegrown green
This year, in part to get ready for St. Patrick’s Day, we grew our own cabbages. Over the months, we have battled with white butterflies (which find the developing cabbage heads a great place to lay eggs), and though we lost a few, today,on harvest day, we can declare victory.
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Seen on the Way: At your local market
They might be magically delicious and gluten free, but several sources, including the Orthodox Union have categorized Lucky Charms as not kosher. According to PETA, “Lucky Charms cereal features marshmallow hearts, stars, horseshoes, clovers, blue moons, unicorns, rainbows, and red balloons that are made with gelatin, which is obtained by boiling the bones, skin, and connective tissues of pigs.” A WordPress site isthiskosher.com agrees about the origins of the cereal’s gelatin, and has a letter from General Mills to prove it. However, kosher, or at least vegan, Lucky Charm lovers could be charmed again.PETA is sponsoring an initiative to make Lucky Charms vegan.
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