Corned Beef and Cabbage

 There's an interview in this morning's Guardian with Jennifer Grant, daughter of the actor Cary Grant. There is apparently to be a TV series based on his life and starring Jason 'Zhukov' Isaacs as the mature Grant. I can't see the resemblance myself, but what do I know? It's an interesting article - though obviously not interesting enough to make me want to watch the programme - and contains a fair bit of detail about the actor's early life in England. Ms Grant states that whilst her father re-invented himself in a very American way, he remained a Brit at heart. Her chosen evidence for this is a bit odd though. Others might have pointed, for example, to his playing for the Hollywood Cricket Club, but she chooses to highlight his apparent fondness for Corned Beef and Cabbage.

No doubt British readers are at this point saying to themselves both that they have never heard of Corned Beef and Cabbage and also that whatever is on that plate next to the cabbage it sure as hell isn't corned beef. If I might be allowed a short digression here, back in the day when I sold weapons of mass destruction for a living I regularly had to travel to California. I happened to be there one St Patrick's Day. The day started oddly when the apparently intelligent young lady who managed the finance function out there for me said that she assumed that this was a big event back in London. I looked at her and asked if she was aware that Ireland was an independent country and had been for a long time. She wasn't. I was then invited out to a bar where the draught beer had been turned green in celebration, an idea which I had naively assumed was a spoof when I had previously seen it in an episode of Cheers. Then, one of the senior managers said he had to leave because his wife was preparing Corned Beef and Cabbage specially. After he left I asked our general manager - a Scot by birth - what on earth the chap had been talking about. The explanation, which I shall repeat here despite having never bothered to check it subsequently, is that Bacon (*) and Cabbage was a traditional Irish dish in the nineteenth century, but emigrants to the US found it easier to get Salt Beef and so that, coupled with cabbage, became a traditional Irish-American dish. Sounds plausible.

Anyway, any US readers please note that Corned Beef and Cabbage is unknown throughout the British Isles, and British readers please note that when Americans refer to Corned Beef they are talking about something that has never been near the Uruguayan city of Fray Bentos, and is probably all the better for it.

* To confuse matters even more, that 'bacon' would almost certainly have been 'gammon'.