St. Pat's Day in America: Rambunctiousness reigns

By CLAIRE HOPLEY

Published on March 07, 2008

St. Patrick's Day celebrations take two forms: a rather quiet religious version typical in Ireland, and the more rambunctious Irish-American form with parties and parades, drums and dancing, men in leprechaun suits and shapely girls in tight outfits.

This is St. Patrick's Day as we know it in Massachusetts, and you don't have to be Irish to celebrate. Almost everyone remembers to wear something green, shamrock motifs swing from ceilings and prettify doorways, and if you want a box of cupcakes, better plan on having them with green frosting.

Locally, the parades in Holyoke and Boston are the biggest, but other towns in other states also attracted the Irish immigrants, whose longing for home got American St. Patrick's Day celebrations started. Chicago and New York are well-known for their parades, but Savannah, Georgia also goes into green overdrive on March 17th - a bit of a surprise until you remember that the woman at the heart of "Gone With the Wind" was Scarlett O'Hara, and that she lived near Savannah on a plantation her father had called Tara after the Emerald Isle where he had been born.

Last year Irene Nelson of Amherst shared the Savannah festivities while visiting her son Seth. A Scotswoman with Irish roots, she says that she had never seen a St. Patrick's Day Parade until she arrived in America and watched the Holyoke Parade with an elderly aunt, who was bowled over by the celebration of Irish Catholics.

"As for Savannah," she says, "It's a true cultural mish-mash, with good ole boys in vintage cars, and African-American school bands, and the usual fire trucks and veterans' associations and local pols and radio stations and real estate companies.

"There's Confederate flags and Orange tunes like The Sash My Father Wore,' which you'd never hear in the Irish Republic, but anything seems to go."

She said there's also a hint of Mardi Gras, with vendors selling strings of bright green beads, floats full of dancers and drinking along the route. "It's allowed out of doors in Georgia," Nelson said, "so people swig away, watching the parade go by."

Its many varied elements notwithstanding, Nelson said, "There's no trace of the saint. I think that's partly because the south was dominated by the Scots-Irish from Ulster, who were Protestant, rather than Catholic and St. Patrick was not celebrated publicly in Ulster."

Growing up south of the border in Tipperary, Marese Dolan Hutchinson, now of Amherst, highlights the differences between Irish-American celebrations on this side of the Atlantic and those back home. She said that in Ireland, the day is a Holy Day of Obligation, meaning that Catholics must go to Mass. Nonetheless, it was beloved by children.

"It falls in Lent, but because it is an Irish holiday, we could eat candy, which we had always given up for Lent," Hutchinson said.

Recalling her first American St. Patrick's Day in the mid-'80s, she said, "The thing I noticed was the color green everywhere. We don't have that, though when I was growing up everyone wore shamrock."

Hutchinson also remembers families stocking up on small boxes from the post office. These were to send bunches of shamrock to relatives in America. "Everyone did that, though I understand now that it was often dead when it arrived. No one told us at the time."

As for parades, she explains, "We have parades in Ireland, especially in the larger cities, but nothing like as big as the parades here. You don't have so many groups and people marching and so many bands."

With the Irish celebration still distinctly religious and the American form a nostalgic reflection of the old country, the food for the day is different.

"We don't drink green beer or dye the carnations green," said Hutchinson. As for the big meal of the day, it was not the corned beef, cabbage and root vegetables that are a must in America, but bacon and cabbage - the bacon not in slices but in a big piece for boiling.

"We would always make a point of having something Irish like that," she said, adding that for desserts, off-limits for many people during most of the days of Lent, families would pick a favorite. "Apple pie was always big with us," she said. "A steamed pudding would be another common choice."

The St. Patrick's Day meal would not be a big communal event or have a boisterous party-like atmosphere, she said. Typically, it was a family affair with parents and children enjoying the special treat of a day off work and school and freedom from Lenten restrictions. "Often there'd be an evening of Irish music or dancing at a local community hall," recalls Hutchinson, "And after supper we'd all go out to that."

In America, such sober family pleasures are replaced by big bash parties, and the boiled bacon or ham typical of Ireland has been replaced by corned beef. One explanation offered for the switch is that the many Irish immigrants who came to the States in the late 19th century lived in areas where Jewish immigrants also settled. Pork products were thus harder to get, and corned beef, which has the same rosy color as ham or bacon, easily filled the gap. Certainly, the same dish of corned beef with root vegetables and cabbage was well established as New England boiled dinner long before Irish immigrants arrived in large numbers in the 19th century.

Beyond this meal - as canonical for St Patrick's as turkey is for Thanksgiving - the rule in America is anything faintly Irish or anything that can take a green dye: green beer, green bagels, green doughnuts.

"In a way, like a lot of imported or invented cultural expressions of the immigrant, the forms and content of St Patrick's Day have been set free from the actual culture being celebrated, so you have this slightly discombulating mix of commerce and culture," said Irene Nelson.

Whatever form of St Patrick's you prefer, the traditional or the-green-as-green-can-be, here are some recipes that could fit into your day.

CORNED BEEF DINNER

5-pound piece corned beef

1 onion stuck with 3 cloves

8 peppercorns

6 large carrots

1 small rutabaga

6-8 very large potatoes

1 small-medium head white cabbage

2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley

freshly ground black pepper

Rinse the corned beef and place it in a large Dutch oven or other large casserole. Cover plentifully with enough water to cover it by at least an inch. Add the clove-stuck onion and the peppercorns to the water and bring to simmering point. Keep it simmering very gently.

Meanwhile, scrape the carrots and peel the rutabaga and potatoes. Cut each carrot into 3-4 pieces and the rutabaga and potatoes into chunks. After the meat has simmered for 1½ hours add the carrot and rutabaga to the pan and cook another 20 minutes.

Remove about 2 cups of the broth to another pan. Cut the cabbage into wedges and put in the pan, cover with a lid and simmer for 20-25 minute or until tender.

At the point the cabbage begins to cook, add the potatoes to the meat and vegetables, and let cook for another 20-25 minutes or until tender.

To serve, remove the corned beef to a board and slice across the grain. Remove the potatoes and other vegetables with a slotted spoon and serve alongside, sprinkled with the chopped parsley.

Put the drained cabbage in a serving bowl and grind some black pepper onto it. Other vegetables that can be included are beets (boiled separately and often later used in Red Flannel Hash), purple top turnips (added with the carrots and rutabaga), a handful of frozen peas (added about 5 minutes before the end), and navy beans or black-eyed peas (cooked separately and served as an accompaniment - an old New England partner rather than an Irish one.)

CORNED BEEF HASH AND EGGS

2/3 tablespoons oil

½ cup chopped onion

3 cups diced cooked potatoes

3 cups chopped corned beef

coarsely ground black pepper to taste

4 eggs

In a large cast iron or nonstick frying pan, heat 1½ tablespoons of oil over moderate heat and cook the onion in it for 3-4 minutes. Stir in the potatoes and cook for another 2/3 minutes, then stir in the corned beef and grind the black pepper on top.

Stir everything over the heat to mix it well and cook for a minute or two, then make four "holes" in the mixture. Add a little oil to each hole then crack an egg into each one. Reduce the heat to low, cover the pan and cook for 3 minutes for eggs with a runny yolk, 4-5 minutes if you want the yolk to completely set. Serve straight from the pan.

GREEN SALAD WITH GREEN GODDESS DRESSING

By the time St. Patrick's Day comes on March 17, Ireland is well into spring, so everything is as green as green can be with shamrock growing everywhere and daffodils nodding in the breeze. If green food is your St. Patrick's Day theme, try this simple salad with its prettily colored dressing.

The greens can be of your choice, but it's good to include radicchio or a few leaves of red lettuce to add a contrasting highlight. Green Goddess dressing was named after a hit play of the 1920s, so it has no real connection with Ireland except that on St Patrick's Day anything green must be Irish.

For the salad:

6 cups shredded romaine or other lettuce or mesclun

1 small radicchio, leaves broken into bite-size pieces

For the dressing:

1 cup mayonnaise

½ cup sour cream

2 scallions, finely chopped

¼ cup finely chopped parsley

½ teaspoon anchovy paste or ¾ teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

1 tablespoon lemon juice

about 1 tablespoon white wine or cider vinegar

salt and white pepper to taste

For the salad, wash and dry the salad leaves and put in a bowl.

For the dressing, stir together the mayonnaise, sour cream, scallions, parsley and anchovy paste or Worcestershire sauce. Add the lemon juice, taste and add wine vinegar a little at a time until you get the level of tartness you like. Season to taste with salt and white pepper.

Trail a little of the dressing over the salad and toss at the table. Serve the rest of the dressing on the side so people can help themselves.

MARLBOUROUGH PIE

Apple desserts of many sorts are popular in Ireland, and indeed, all over Europe. This apple pie was known in parts of the British Isles in the 17th century. Some early immigrant brought it to Massachusetts, where it became a Thanksgiving favorite known as Marlborough Pie. Actually it's a tart filled with apple custard.

4 apples, preferably Northern Spies or Cortland, peeled

grated zest and juice of half a lemon

¾ cup sugar

3 eggs, lightly beaten

1 tablespoon rum (optional)

½ teaspoon nutmeg or a large pinch of mace

4 tablespoons butter,

½ cup whole milk or half and half

1 baked 9-inch pie shell

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Grate the apples. You should have 1½ to 2 cups grated. Grate an extra apple if necessary to achieve this.

Quickly mix the grated apples with the lemon juice and zest, then stir in the sugar. Add the eggs, rum and nutmeg or mace to the apple mixture. Melt the butter and stir it into the apple mixture. Finally, stir in the milk or half-and-half.

Pour the mixture into the pie shell. Place in the center of the oven and bake for 15 minutes. Reduce the temperature to 350 degrees and bake for a further 15-20 minutes or until the filling looks puffed and a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean. Cool on a rack. Serve warm. Serves 6.