The tradition of eating corned beef and
cabbage on St. Patrick's day is relatively new, but the dish itself goes way back. So today we're making corned beef and
cabbage as it might have been eaten in early Medieval Ireland. So thank you to Hellofresh for sponsoring
this video as we celebrate St. Paddy's day with Medieval corned beef and
cabbage, this time on Tasting History. So finding a historic recipe from
Ireland is really, really hard and finding a Medieval historic recipe from
Ireland is downright impossible, but I did find a description of corned beef and how it
was prepared in a poem from around the year 1100. It's called 'The Vision of Mac Con
Glinne' and I will talk about it in depth later but in one scene there is a feast with "tender corned-beef, and honey
in the comb, and English salt. He rubbed the honey and the salt
into one piece after another." That's really all that we have to go on,
though he does say that it was roasted, but we don't really get a description of the whole
process so we'll probably boil it first because that is traditionally how it's done, even when
it is roasted just to get some of the salt out. And it's that salt that gives
corned beef its modern name. Corned beef refers to the corns or very large
grains of salt that are used to preserve the beef. Though in early Medieval Ireland
they would have used something called sea ash which is the product that's
left over after burning seaweed, but as they do mention English salt
in this recipe, in this description, I think we're okay to go with the
more modern version of corned beef. So I'm going to use a four pound
or two kilogram piece of corned beef, then a quarter cup or 85 grams of
honey, and a half teaspoon of salt. As for the cabbage, again no Medieval Irish
recipe, but there is a Medieval English recipe and we know what ingredients they would
have had available in Ireland at the time, so with that we can extrapolate a
recipe for Irish cabbages in pottage. Take cabbages and quarter them, and
seed them in good broth with onions minced and the white of
leeks slit and carved small." The recipe goes on to mention several
spices that really weren't popular this early in the Medieval age, but would have come around very soon
after but we're going to leave those out, but they did have pepper so we will include that. So it's a little bit different
from what we usually do because we are making two full dishes. A full meal just like the ones that you would
get from today's sponsor Hellofresh. Making a meal with Hellofresh has become one
of our favorite things to do on weeknights mainly because after cooking all day for the show
or even just writing and researching for the show I rarely want to go out shopping for ingredients, and really rarely just want to even think
about what I have to make for dinner, but with Hellofresh that's all done for
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at hellofresh.com. Now back to Ireland. So for the cabbage portion of
this dish what you'll need is one large head of cabbage,
one large onion, two leeks, two cups of beef broth, one teaspoon of
salt, and an optional teaspoon of pepper. So corned beef is always rather salty, but you
can reduce the saltiness to an edible level by putting it in a pot of water, and then boiling
it for a minute. Then drain it and then do it at least once again. This is actually how they
de-saltified meats back in the Medieval age, so it is appropriate. Then mix the salt into the
honey and slather it all over the corned beef. Then wrap the corned beef in some foil and
place it on a baking sheet or in a roasting pan, and set it in the oven at 325
degrees Fahrenheit or 165 Celsius, and you're going to cook this
for about an hour a pound. So interesting note about corned beef is
that its association with Saint Patrick's Day is more of an American
invention than an Irish one. See while corned beef was incredibly
popular in Ireland in the Middle Ages its popularity eventually waned in favor of pork partly because cows take up
a lot more room than pigs do, and they're a lot more expensive to maintain, but also because a lot of the good corned beef
was being shipped across the sea to England, surprise surprise. So in Ireland the dish became
cabbage and bacon. Well then in the 19th century mainly due to the Irish potato famine, a lot
of Irish people ended up immigrating to America but in the neighborhoods where they tended
to be the butchers were kosher butchers so they didn't have any bacon to give. What they did
have was plenty of wonderful corned beef brisket, and so that's what the American Irish
population began making on St. Patrick's Day. I'm guessing that they didn't realize
that they were actually going way back to their old old Irish roots by switching
over to the corned beef. As for the cabbage, well every place has cabbage so
that probably didn't really change, and to make the cabbage
you're going to quarter it, and then chop the onions fine and
chop the leeks into half rings. Then put everything into a pot, sprinkle with
a little salt and the pepper if you wish, and then pour in the beef broth and
set it on the stove until it's boiling. Then reduce the heat until it's just simmering,
and cover it letting it cook for 20 to 30 minutes, and while it cooks make sure to hit the
Like button and Subscribe. I promise it'll give you the luck of the Irish and
let's go back to Medieval Ireland a time when cows dominated the landscape of Hibernia. Now when it comes to the cuisine of Medieval Ireland it can really
be broken up into two periods, before the Norman invasion and after, and for
our purposes we will focus on the before times. A time of warring clans and kingdoms and of
bustling viking cities like Cork and Dublin. It was a fascinating time but like I
said they didn't leave us any recipes, but that doesn't mean that they didn't
leave us some wonderful writings on food because a lot of the poetry and the
law books of the time had a lot to say about food because it was the cornerstone
of society. Food was actually how many people paid their rent and what you ate
determined your place on the social ladder, or rather your place on the social ladder
often determined what you ate. Even the mythical cauldron of restitution on the Hill of
Tara made sure to keep people in their place. Essentially this cauldron was
a never-ending bounty of food and you would stick your fork
in and pull out some food so that "no party ever went
away from it unsatisfied..." But even then what came out was "sufficient for
the company according to their grade and rank." Yes even a mythical cauldron made sure
to keep everyone on their rung of the ladder. So let's start on the bottom rung.
The bottom rung was actually seven rungs, seven different levels of peasant and the law books were very specific on what
everyone would get when food was being handed out. Now everyone had the basic diet of grains, usually
barley and oats and dairy products, which they called white meats and even the lowliest level
of peasant was due their grains, milk, and cheese but "he is not entitled to butter." That's right butter was a clear
indication of where you fell in society. Did you get butter? How much butter did
you get, and what kind of butter was it? There are actually stories of
people showing off their wealth by buttering their bread on both sides which seems a little excessive, and frankly not very
practical, but there it is. So no butter at the lowest rung but as you move up you do at least
get some additional side dishes. A wooden mug 12 inches tall filled with thickened sour milk,
and a full-sized loaf of bread. Though the word loaf here is kind of misleading, it was probably
more like a flat bread made of oats and barley. It was a foot wide and "a man's little
finger measures it in thickness." Another rung up and you received
"two loaves of a woman's baking" and if you were lucky these might be made of
wheat or rye. One legal text describes them as "two fists in width and a fist in thickness." Another rung up and you get five loaves and
a choice of milk or butter, though the choice was not yours but that of your lord
or whoever was handing out the butter and milk. Also this butter probably wouldn't have been much
to write home about because the peasants were not entitled to fresh butter, but rather heavily
heavily salted butter for preservation purposes. Another way that they preserved
butter was by making bog butter. Essentially it was butter that was pressed into a
wooden container and then buried in a peat bog and even without salt it would stay edible
if not maybe a little funky for years. Now these peasants had a lot of uses for butter
other than just putting it on their bread. In one story a viking named Ingolf was
desperately thirsty but they had no water around so his "Irish slaves formed the plan
of kneading meal and butter together, and said it would quench his
thirst. They called it minatak." Though in the story as soon as
they make it it ends up raining, and so he doesn't need it anymore, though in other writings from the
time they talk about this mixture of butter and flour or meal being
used as a roux to thicken porridge. It was also often put on bread
along with some salted onion relish, and the next level of peasant would get
that onion relish but only on Sundays. On other days they would get vegetables and
some form of salted meat, usually venison. Now mind you all of this is only when
there was food to go around because if there was a famine, and there was often famine, then the peasants were always
the first to feel its effects. "Great famine in the spring so that a man
would sell his son and his daughter for food and men would even eat one another, and dogs. All land was almost emptied and scattered
throughout Ireland on account of the famine." But provided you weren't starving and you were at the top of the peasant ladder then you
got everything I've already mentioned, but just more of it. Eight loaves of bread,
salt on the side, onions, butter, and "salted meat on the third, fifth,
ninth, and tenth days, and on Sunday." And the meat started to vary.
Sometimes it would even be fresh. It'd usually be venison but
goats and sheep and pigs were also available. Pig was especially
popular during the festival of Samhain and there was even a specific dish
called the Piglet of Samhain. And in one 9th century love poem a young man
woos his lady love with the promise of pork. "O woman, if you come to my firm folk,
a crown of gold will be on your head; fresh pork, ale, milk and drink shall
you have with me there fair Lady." Though the gold crown might be a little
more enticing than milk and bacon, though I do love bacon as did Medieval Irish
monks, though they preferred theirs wild. At the Monastery of Tallaght the monk Máel Ruain
claimed that "Not a morsel of meat was eaten in Tallaght in his lifetime unless it were a deer or a wild pig." Another interesting tidbit that the monk gives on their eating or rather drinking habits was what they were drinking but also how they were supposed to drink it. See they usually
drank either ale or this whey water which was just watered down whey left over from the cheese making
process, but in either case they were instructed to sip it. For "a man finds less sensual pleasure
and satisfaction in sips when he is thirsty." So no gulping your whey water while you enjoy your
wild pig, and wild animals were on the menu for a lot of people not just monks. Pine martin, badger and boar were some of the most popular as were a number of fresh fish, lampreys, and shellfish though the fishing rites and rivers was very closely guarded especially by the Church so be careful where you go fishing. There is also a great deal of hunting with birds of prey going on but again you got to be careful where you do it. Stay away from any lands owned by the nobility
or the Church. You want to stick to the land of the commoners because if you do catch something then the owner of the land is due one-fifth of the meat and two-fifths of the feathers but you get to keep everything else, that's not a bad deal. So all of these law books that talk about what people are
allowed to eat had multiple purposes. One of course as I said was to keep people on the social ladder but another was to lay out what you had to give a person to eat if you injured them. Basically if you hurt someone you had to feed them until they got better, and what you had to feed them depended on who they were and there's a lot of talk specifically about if they were women. In general a woman got half of what her husband would get, and a concubine would only get a third or even a
fourth of what whosoever concubine she was got, and there were some women who if they were injured
got nothing. These included "a sharp-tongued woman, a vagrant woman, a werewolf in wolf's shape, an idiot a lunatic." Big werewolf problem in Medieval Ireland, huge. Now if you were sick there were also some foods that you had to stay away from: no salted meat, no honey, no whale meat, and
no horse meat. The law also dictated how you were to feed a pregnant woman, or rather it just
dictated that you had to feed a pregnant woman. One set of laws makes it very clear that if your wife is pregnant you have to feed her or else you will be fined, and speaking of pregnant women in old Ireland there is a story in the 10th century life of Saint Patrick
where a pregnant woman becomes ill and Patrick asks her to diagnose herself. Why are you ill he
asks. "The woman answered 'I beheld an herb in the air; and on earth I never saw its equal; and I shall die, or the child that is in my womb will die, or we shall both die unless I eat that herb." And just like husbands everywhere go out in the middle of the night to get pickles and watermelon for their pregnant wives, Saint Patrick decided to placate the lady by magically turning the rushes
into that herb which depending on the translation is usually leeks or chives. Now once a lady
gave birth then you would take care of the child for a while, usually about seven years, and
then you would give that child to another member of the clan that you were in to raise and educate.
It was done as a way to keep the families close together. It was a system known as fosterage, and
along with the child you would send some cows. If you were a farmer you would send three cows
with your son or daughter, and if you were a king up to 18 cows. These cows could then produce an income which would be used to take care of the child in fosterage and to feed the child, and of course what the child was fed depended on who they were. The base diet for your average kid was known as the soft fare of fosterage, and included "the yolk of eggs, butter, curds, and gruel." Though again not all the butter was equal. Common children got salted butter, and noble children got fresh butter. They also usually got some honey, but fresh butter and honey was just the beginning for a noble child because once they grew up things got real good. Instead of salted meat nobles were
due fresh meat at least from Samhain to new year's. The rest of the year it was kind of a toss-up,
usually salted meat simply because cows with their milk producing capabilities were so precious that you didn't turn them into meat until you absolutely had to no matter who you were, but even if you did get salted meat as a noble you also got honey, fresh garlic, and an unlimited amount of celery. Now just like peasants, nobles had a strict hierarchy as well that was also shown in the food. One would be simply how close to the King you got to sit when you were eating, and the other was the higher up on the nobility ladder you were then the higher up on the cow your meat came from. A king might get rib or tenderloin, while the royal doorkeepers got flank and shank. Now a fair amount of what we know about royal food at the time actually comes from this poem the one that our corned beef description is from today. It's about a scholar named Mac Con Glinne who
finds himself the guest of some monks in Cork, but the monk's hospitality is lacking. They give him "a small cup of the Church whey-water, and two sparks of fire in the middle of a wisp of Odin's straw and two sods of fresh peat." So naturally he mocks this meagre ration and the monks not ones to take criticism well decide to crucify him for it. Literally crucify him, but the night before the
crucifixion he has a dream or a vision from god of a land filled with food. A boat formed of lard
takes him across a lake of milk to where he sees a fort "With works of custards thick, beyond the
loch. Fresh butter was the bridge in front, the rubble dyke was wheaten white, bacon the palisade." The place was surrounded by streams of beer and mead and there was even a well of wine and he goes inside and the columns are made of cheese, and all of the people are wearing cheese and tripe around their necks and the king is wearing a mantle made of beef, and that king was Cathal MacFinguen. Well the blood thirsty monks realize that this vision somehow is what is going to cure the real King Cathal MacFinguen of the demon that's inside of him, the demon
of Gluttony, so they release Mac Con Glinne, and Mac Con Glinne goes to the King but the King only able to think about food isn't paying attention to him. Until finally Mac Con Glinne grinds his teeth against
a stone so loudly that everyone including the King has no choice but to pay attention and it reminds me of that scene in Jaws where Quint scratches down the chalkboard. I'll catch your Gluttony for you but it ain't going to be easy. Bad demon. Not like going down to the pond and catching Lust
or Envy, and it wasn't easy because even after he got his attention it took Mac Con Glinne a long time to get the king to even share an apple. But it was the first time that the King had shared
any food in three and a half years. The next step was to get him to fast for a couple days
and then he makes a huge feast with roast meat, and then ties the King to the wall and tells him
about this vision of the land of food that he had. Until "the lawless beast that abode in the inner
bowels of Cathal MacFinguine came forth, until it was licking his lips outside his head." Gluttony falls onto the ground and Mac Con Glinne takes a cauldron and puts it over him and tells everyone to evacuate the castle. Then he lights the place on fire but the demon escapes and goes up to the roof, but Mac Con Glinne has one final trick up his sleeve. He reads the gospels to the demon and Gluttony
goes to hell. So if you have any friends that are possessed of a demon the first step is to get them to share an apple. Then a couple days of fasting and finally make them a wonderful dish
of Medieval corned beef and cabbage. So 30 minutes before your corned beef is done open up the foil and then raise the temperature of the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit or about 205 Celsius just to let the top darken up a bit, and once it does it and the cabbage are ready. And here we are Medieval corned beef and cabbage. It slices up so nice. Also I wanted to thank Akiva from Metalwork by Meola who made me this gorgeous custom knife. He is a fan of the show and reached out and said hey do you want a wonderful custom knife and I said yes and he made it. It's amazing, it can cut pretty much everything. I think it's going to be my main knife from now on, and I'll put a link to his Instagram in the description if you want to check out what else he does, or get yourself a custom knife. Now let's get to this corned beef. It smells delicious. I mean it smells like corned beef but that honey really like there's this almost burnt honey smell, but in a
pleasant way. I'm excited to try it. Here we go. Mhm! That's a good- that's good. Super different from a modern corned beef because honey I feel like is not something that is usually mixed in with corned beef, so you get the saltiness of the corned beef and a lot of times they'll add like
brown sugar, but that is a very different flavor. This is honey and salt and corned beef, it's
really wonderful and the texture is fantastic. Just falls apart kind of a little chew
at the beginning and then it really just falls apart it's going to be perfect for sandwiches this week. Now the cabbage I mean it's cabbage. It's not- it's not super
complex but it also has the leeks and the onion in there which give it a little bit of- a little bit of heat so it does kind of add something some depth to it, but it's okay
that it's it's not too complex because the the meat is, so together they go really well. So whether you have Medieval corned beef and cabbage or not I hope you have a wonderful Saint Paddy's day, make sure to follow me on Instagram @ tastinghistorywithmaxmiller and I'll see you next time on Tasting History.
Great channel. All his videos are interesting and well researched (as far as I can tell).
Tasting history is an absolute gem and it's nice to see Max get some attention here.
hard tack sound
Anybody from Ireland ever had corned beef and cabbage? It's always ham joint. corned beef is a deli meat. Also the 'luck of the Irish' has traditionally been a fucking nightmare.
I always loved how tasty feasts look in medieval movies. Sometimes when i was little i would pretend i was a peasant and would eat slowly and tiny portions lol
Tasting history is a lovely channel, and the host is very nice.
If you liked this videos, the channel has many more in the same style.
As an Irish-American Jew from NY, the idea that corned beef and cabbage has a Jewish influence bc of kosher butchers makes me smile :)
I found this to be very interesting. Thanks.
the only recipe is one line in a poem about covering meat with honey and roasting it. i appreciate this guy's work but this is like those people who make food from cartoons.