Britain and Ireland · Volume 36, The Grass, the Grain and the Border That Doesn’t Cut the Table
Bacon and Cabbage
The Republic and Ulster
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 1 hour 30
- Researched
- 1 source cited
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
This contrast is worth stating plainly rather than as a footnote. Bacon and cabbage, sliced back bacon boiled with cabbage and potatoes and finished with a parsley white sauce, was a practical, everyday dish precisely because Irish families reared their own pigs and grew their own vegetables. Corned beef and cabbage is a different, later, and genuinely American invention: nineteenth-century Irish immigrants to the United States found corned beef cheaper than the bacon they were used to at home, and cabbage cheap and available, and the resulting dish, close in shape to a New England boiled dinner, became identified with "Irish" food in America even though it was never the dish eaten at home. This is one of the few claims behind this chapter solid enough to state without a hedge: it is corroborated by the United States' own Department of Agriculture and consistent with the documented Irish-side history of the dish it displaced.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 1.5 hours.
Ingredients
- 900 g back bacon joint, unsmoked, soaked if very salty
- 1 green cabbage, cut into wedges
- 40 g butter
- 40 g plain flour
- 500 ml whole milk
- 4 tbsp a large bunch of parsley, chopped
- to taste white pepper
- to serve boiled potatoes, to serve
Method
- Cover the bacon joint with cold water, bring to the boil, and simmer 1 to 1.25 hours, until tender, adding the cabbage wedges for the final 8 to 10 minutes.
- While the bacon simmers, melt the butter, stir in the flour, and cook out 2 to 3 minutes to lose the raw flour taste.
- Whisk in the milk gradually to a smooth sauce, simmer until thickened, stir through the chopped parsley off the heat, and season with white pepper.
- Slice the bacon, and serve with the cabbage, boiled potatoes and the parsley sauce poured over.
What a modern chef changes
The bacon actually cured at home, and the sauce given the same discipline this atlas insists on wherever a butter-and-flour sauce appears.
Rung 4, and Rung 1 for the sauce
Method
- Cure your own back bacon, weighing the salt precisely against the joint's own weight rather than salting by eye, and holding it in the fridge for the calculated cure time before rinsing and cooking, the direct home equivalent of the small hard-cure producers this dish was always built around.
- Cook the roux out fully, a genuine 2 to 3 minutes, never rushed: an undercooked roux tastes of raw flour no quantity of parsley disguises.
- Finish the cabbage on a Big Green Egg with a light char before adding it to the pot, for a bitter, smoky edge the plain-boiled version never develops.