This week: The best St. Patrick’s Day eats, cookbook giveaways, previews and more

Corned beef, you either love it or hate it. I fall in the latter category but my husband loves it. Every March 17th, you will find me boiling a corned beef (or salt beef in the UK) and sauteing cabbage as any good Irish lass should. But just how did corned beef become the meal for St. Patrick’s Day in America?

The corned beef dinner didn’t originate in Ireland as beef was considered a luxury. Traditional Irish meals centered around ham and bacon. But when the Irish entered America it was quite the opposite. Corned beef was easily (and cheaply) acquired and, so, this cut of beef that has become the meal of choice for generations of Irish Americans.

Corned beef is a salt-cured brisket of beef. The term comes from the treatment of the meat with large-grained rock salt, also called “corns” of salt. Sugar and spices are also added to some corned beef recipes. When the first Irish landed on our shores, a tradition of having a boiled dinner was popular in New England. For this dish, the corned beef, cabbage, and root vegetables such as carrots, turnips, and potatoes were cooked together. In our home, we prefer our cabbage to be sauteed with bacon drippings separately and boil (or sometimes oven roast) the other ingredients. (Photo above: Taste of Home Easy corned beef)

In the United Kingdom, corned beef is called salt beef. The name corned beef is applied to beef that is minced with gelatin and fat and canned. It can be served cold or heated up as a hash with potatoes. To read more about salt beef, this article is very interesting.

We have almost 1,500 recipes for corned beef in our library with 300+ online recipes. Other typical St. Patrick’s Day fare includes colcannon (online recipes), Irish soda bread (online recipes) and a Hartin family favorite Brown bread that we serve with butter and orange marmalade.

Other articles and recipes of interest:

• 5 obligatory foods for St. Patrick’s Day
• Recipes for leftover corned beef
• Our St. Patrick’s Day Pinterest board
  • Green velvet cupcakes from Food Network
  • How to make the perfect colcannon from The Guardian Feast Supplement
  • Treacle and oat soda bread from Delicious Magazine (Aus)
  • St. Patrick’s Day shamrocks and horseshoe cookies from Bake at 350 by Bridget Edwards
  • Instant Pot Guinness beef stew from Simply Recipes by Coco Morante
• Taste of Home corned beef and cabbage recipes
• Irish cookbooks in our EYB library
  • Most popular titles: Darina Allen’s Ballymaloe Cookery Course, The Country Cooking of Ireland, Irish Traditional Cooking, The Complete Irish Pub Cookbook: The Best of Traditional and Contemporary Irish Cooking
  • Newest title: The Irish Cookbook by JP McMahon (pub date 2/27/2020) Please remember EYB members receive 30% off Phaidon titles when using the link provided.

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Since our last roundup, Darcie has written articles that include a piece on Bonus recipes, those little hand-written or clipped recipes you find tucked in used cookbooks, how to stock up for a quarantine, the rise of private restaurants, the cookbook ‘Classic Indian Cooking’ turns 40, Food Network’s new reality baking show and how the Sugarcraft Guild made a historic cake replica. Darcie’s weekly food news antipasto is shared every Sunday (#foodnews brings up these information-packed posts).

My second Quick Bites features food writer and cookbook author Paula Forbes. I have updated our 2020 preview post with more cookbooks and author event links including dates for Sami Tamimi, Ottolenghi (UK) and (US) and others. Samin Nosrat continues her lecture series and is joined by Ottolenghi and I’ve added Lindsay-Jean Hard’s “scrappy” events at Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Recently Indexed Books

 

• The Pastry School: Master Sweet and Savoury Pies, Tarts and Pastries at Home by Julie Jones
• Monday Morning Cooking Club: Now for Something Sweet by Monday Morning Cooking Club (Events)
• The Austin Cookbook: Recipes and Stories from Deep in the Heart of Texas by Paula Forbes
• My First Cookbook: Fun Recipes to Cook Together…with As Much Mixing, Rolling, Scrunching, and Squishing As Possible! by America’s Test Kitchen
• Vegan JapanEasy: Classic and Modern Japanese Recipes to Cook at Home by Tim Anderson
• Meals, Music, and Muses: Recipes from My African American Kitchen by Alexander Smalls and Veronica Chambers

Member Photo of the Week

Whole grain pull-apart rolls from Pastry Love: A Baker’s Journal of Favorite Recipes by Joanne Chang submitted by member Zosia

This book is one of our cookbooks in the EYB Cookbook Club for March.

Have you uploaded any of your own photos yet? Learn more!

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Featured Online Recipe

Parsee scrambled eggs from Diana Henry at The Sunday Telegraph by Diana Henry

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EYBDigital Previews

Recently we uploaded our 633rd EYBDigital Preview and shared some insight into members’ questions. A selection of full sample pages is available for the following cookbooks.

Learn more about EYBDigital Previews.

Note: To learn why you cannot add all EYBDigital Preview recipes to your Bookshelf, please read this Help page.

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• 3 recipes from The Vegetarian Silver Spoon: Classic and Contemporary Italian Recipes by The Silver Spoon Kitchen Pub date 4/29/2020
• 1 recipe and sample pages from The Silver Spoon: Recipes for Babies by The Silver Spoon Kitchen Pub date 4/29/2020
• 3 recipes from Fire & Wine: 75 Smoke-Infused Recipes from the Grill with Perfect Wine Pairings by Mary Cressler and Sean Martin Pub date 4/28/2020
• 3 recipes from The Hot Chicken Project: Words + Recipes | Obsession + Salvation by Aaron Turner Pub date 4/21/2020

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Cookbook Giveaways
Click on the Blue Link Below to Enter

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• Enter our US giveaway to win a copy of Cool Beans: The Ultimate Guide to Cooking with the World’s Most Versatile Plant-Based Protein, with 125 Recipes by Joe Yonan with one grand prize winner receiving a Circulon Symmetry 5.5-Qt. Covered Straining Casserole in Merlot Expires March 30th, 2020
• Enter our US giveaway to win a copy of Beyond the North Wind: Russia in Recipes and Lore by Darra Goldstein Expires March 31st, 2020
• Enter our US/CA giveaway to win a copy of Rage Baking: The Transformative Power of Flour, Butter, Sugar, and Women’s Voices by Kathy Gunst and Katherine Alford Expires April 2nd, 2020

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Be sure to enter all our current giveaways!

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