Bacon and Cabbage

The story

Bacon and cabbage, bagún agus cabáiste in Irish, is the standard Irish dinner: a joint of cured pork boiled, sliced and served with cabbage, potatoes and often a white sauce flavored with parsley. Irish bacon is not American belly bacon but cured back or shoulder meat, and the old home-cured kind was hard, yellowish and very salty. The dish grew out of rural life. Most farms, even very small ones, kept pigs, and families rubbed salt into the split sides, trampled it in, then hung the meat, sometimes in the chimney to smoke. The cookery teacher Darina Allen explains that families could hang only one pot over the fire, so the cabbage went into the salty bacon water for the last 30 to 45 minutes, a flavor she says many people still hanker for. The writer John B. Keane wrote in 1963 that the gurgle of the pot would tear the heart out of a hungry man. In the second half of the 19th century, Irish immigrants in the United States swapped in corned beef, and corned beef and cabbage was born. Put the potatoes on when the pork has about 25 minutes left, and keep the leftover meat for sandwiches.