"My grandmother was perplexed that Americans associate corned beef with being Irish. In Ireland, most people ate pig. Lots of bacon, lots of sausage (lots of trichinosis).

…Corned beef was made popular in New York bars at lunchtime. The bars offered a 'free lunch' to the Irish construction workers who were building NYC in the early part of the 20th century. But there's no such thing as a free lunch. You had to buy a couple of beers or shots of whiskey to get that free lunch. And that's how corned beef became known as an 'Irish' food. My grandmother hated the stuff and wouldn't allow it in her home. I myself first tasted corned beef when I was in my thirties at some non-Irish-American person's 'St. Paddy's Day' party."

Dismayed, I sent that letter to a friend from Dublin. "Every word of that post is pure gospel," she wrote back. "We NEVER eat corned beef and cabbage. We mock Americans and their bizarre love of that 'meat'."

Irish people denying corned beef and cabbage! Shocking! Like if Italians denied pizza and Chinese denied General Tso's Chicken. Wait, they have? OK, well, let's move on.

Theories abound as to why Irish Americans wear the corned beef and cabbage mantle. There's the "Irish drink a lot in bars" theory, above. And then there's the "they got to New York and couldn't find their beloved bacon, so they started eating their Jewish neighbors' corned beef instead" theory.

First, let's settle one thing: Ireland knew how to rock the corned beef. According to Irish food experts Colman Andrews and Darina Allen, corned beef was, in fact, a major export of Cork from the 17th century, shipping it all over Europe and as far as the sunny British West Indies, where they still love their corned beef in cans.

Most of the Irish who came in massive waves to America during the Potato Famine in the late 1840s were from around Cork, so they probably knew corned beef well enough. But, as the historian Hasia Diner argues in "Hungering for America," they may have been trying to forget altogether what they were and weren't eating back in Ireland.

By the 1900s, she writes, there was a movement in Ireland to revive Irish culture, flagging after decades of emigration and centuries of English colonial rule. The Irish were embracing their language, their dance and music, but there was little mention of traditional cuisine. "Food lay at the margins of Irish culture as a problem, an absence, a void," Diner writes. "The Irish experience with food -- recurrent famines and an almost universal reliance on the potato, a food imposed on them -- had left too painful a mark on the Catholic majority to be considered a source of communal expression and national joy."

While many Irish Americans found livelihoods running inns and groceries, few sold any food they called "Irish." Her research turns up many early Irish American St. Patrick's Day banquets that celebrate Irishness with menus tricked out with "harps, shamrocks, Celtic-style lettering, Celtic crosses, all potent reminders of Ireland. [But] the Irishness of the food amounted to little." The dinners featured French-sounding dishes, like "Cotelletes de pintades a le Reine." Even potatoes got washed through the de-Irishizer: "Pommes de terre persillade," which anyone could tell was just boiled potatoes with parsley.

So there was a culinary hole in the culture of the Irish immigrants, one partially filled with that great filler of food holes: bacon.

"Only 'Irish bacon and greens' appeared yearly as a food meant to convey the homeland. Bacon may have been the perfect food vehicle to link their Irish and American selves. Americans, on the one hand, had been savoring [exported] Irish bacon for a century or more. On the other, Irish farmers who had long produced massive amounts of it, only began to regularly eat it themselves by the end of the 19th century. By the time these menus were being printed up, bacon had become a ubiquitous item on the dinner tables of modest Irish farm families. Hence, unlike potatoes, bacon carried no stigma of shame. It rather announced the successful progress of Ireland…"

So why aren't we all getting sloshed on green beer and eating bacon and cabbage today? The problem, according to Marion Casey, clinical assistant professor of Irish-American studies in the Glucksman Ireland House of New York University, was perhaps that the Irish loved their pig a little too much. (Yes, food blogosphere: This is apparently possible.)

Many farmers in Ireland raised pigs for sale to help pay the rent, but somewhere along the line in America, that tradition mixed with the bitter cocktail of prejudice and xenophobia to turn it  into a slur: "Paddy with his pig in the parlor." The phrase may have had rhythm, but it wasn't pretty. (I mean, the postcard in the picture above is hardly flattering, now is it?)

By the 1910s, pigs were all over St. Patrick's Day cards and novelties, including a game called "Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Pig" for kids. "Irish Americans," Casey wrote me in an e-mail, "vigorously protested an alignment of their ethnicity with an animal that carried all sorts of connotations about dirt and disease."

But "by this time," she continued, "much of Irish America had moved beyond mere survival. They ate pork and beef, salted or not. It was just as easy to claim corned beef as their choice for holiday meals as it was to claim pork. When the latter became stigmatized, one became preferable to the other." Of course, by this time, old memories of the corned beef back in Cork may have bubbled back to the surface. In 1960, we had the first St. Patrick's Day card reference to corned beef and cabbage, and before we knew it, little Chinese boys in the suburbs would be pretending to be Irish in the middle of March.

But is that any weirder than Irish people pretending to be Irish? Each of the experts I spoke to would agree on one thing: that there isn't really a point in arguing about authenticity, because authenticity always changes. People make up traditions all the time, so why is it that only traditions old enough for you to forget how they got made up in the first place are the "real" ones? This year, instead of corned beef, I'm going to serve bacon and cabbage stir-fried. But I'm keeping my name. 

 

Oh wait, sorry, I meant this one:

I often come across recipes that say things like, "use a medium onion" or "a large leek." But what do "medium" and "large" mean? The organic onions at my Whole Foods are enormous; the red onions are the size of soft balls. It's a frustrating thing, especially when it comes to ingredients like onions, an overdose of which can really kill a dish. Do you have any advice on how to handle these ambiguous instructions?

— Beans&Greens

Dear Beans&Greens,

Recipes are a bit of a paradox. We want to think of them as the definitive word on a dish — if you have a great chef's recipes, you can make a great chef's food. But deep down inside, all recipe writers know that's not really true: Reading a recipe doesn't give you a great chef's hands, eyes, nose and palate. True precision, fixed in print, just isn't possible in a world full of variables. If the recipe writer's stove is different from your stove, maybe that ends up being the difference between a good dish and a marry-me-now kind of dish.

So, in order to keep sane, most recipe writers accept a certain level of imprecision, a range of acceptable variation, and they'll write their recipes with that range built in. What I'm saying is: Almost every one of the thousands (OK, eight) recipe writers I contacted for you — from Gourmet (RIP), Food & Wine, Saveur, Bon Appétit, and Cook's Illustrated — had pretty much the same idea of what a small, medium and large onion means, but they all also said some variation of, "It kinda doesn't matter too much."

So knock yourself out! Be the master of your own kitchen! But in case you'd like a little guidance, here's what the pros said anyway:

Small onion = 4 ounces by weight or about ½ cup chopped

Medium onion = 8 ounces, or about 1 cup chopped

Large onion = 12 ounces, or about 1½ cups chopped

Jumbo onion = 16 ounces, or about 2 cups chopped

Small and medium carrots = These are the size, generally, of the carrots that come in bags at the grocery store, unless the recipe specifically calls for baby carrots. (The precision-obsessed Cook's Illustrated defines "medium carrot" as weighing six to a pound.)

Large carrots = Also called "horse" carrots, presumably because they're the kind you might feed a massive animal, these are the kind usually sold in bulk — thick old boys sometimes with cracks down the side.

And if the quantity of these ingredients really matters to the final outcome, often the recipe will give, in addition to the descriptor, the specific weight or chopped volume to drive home the "pay attention!" point.

But even still, it's impossible to get it perfectly right. As the ever-fabulous Maggie Ruggiero put it: "Obviously, as everyone chops differently. It's like asking people to measure chopped mercury. At Gourmet we called for medium leeks and didn't specify ... I guess that's why we closed. The jury remains out on whether size matters."

If you have any food questions we can sleuth out for you, send them to food[at]salon[dot]com. Or just leave them in the comments while you make fun of us.

All you need is salt, pepper and olive oil and two things to keep mind: HEAT and SURFACE AREA. Heat and surface area. Heat and surface area. There are no more typographical ways for me to emphasize this, but imagine there are, and imagine I'm using them. Because the relationship of heat and surface area pretty much define 75 percent of cooking, and 100 percent of the time you're talking about browning something.

Heat: Heat, of course, cooks your food. At a very high temperature, sugars will caramelize (and proteins will brown), which is really what you want out of roasting vegetables. (And at an even higher temperature, of course, they will burn, which is what you really don't want out of roasting vegetables.)

Surface area: The more surface area you have directly touching the roasting pan or the hot air of the oven, the more caramelization you're going to get, because it's the outside of a piece of food that gets the most intense heat. So this means two things: 1) don't pile your vegetables on top of one another — lay them out in one layer. And 2) how you cut your vegetables really matters. Tiny pieces will have more exposed surface area relative to their insides than big chunks. And an elongated shape, like a domino, for instance, will have more surface area than a cube.

So, keeping these two things in mind, you can always adjust what you need to do get the results you want. You'd like more browning? Turn the heat up or cut your vegetables smaller. You'd like your vegetables more cooked and tender? Cut your vegetables smaller and turn the heat down. Like that roasted flavor, but not too much? Cut your vegetables bigger and/or turn the heat down. You're smart people. You're picking up what I'm puttin' down.

OK, so what vegetables can I roast?

I really think most any specimen likes a nice, high-heat zap in the oven. Very few come to mind that don't: mainly very watery ones like celery or leafy greens, or dense, tough ones that need extended cooking time, like mature beets. And potatoes kind of deserve some special attention and particular tricks I'll get into another time.

But here's a list of some of my favorites, and how I like to cut them for optimal browning and tenderness:

Asparagus: Leave whole; peel if necessary.

Bell peppers: If not roasting over an open flame, cut these into 1-inch chunks.

Broccoli: Cut into 1- to 1½-inch diameter individual florets, the tips of which get charred beautifully crisp. Peel, then halve or quarter thick stems (which are delicious!).

Brussels sprouts: Halve them.

Cauliflower: Treat like broccoli.

Corn: Cut into kernels; will cook very quickly and you may only want to brown one side.

Carrots: Cut a 1-inch chunk off the top end at a 45-degree angle. Roll the carrot a quarter turn and repeat. This weird oblique shape gives you lots of surface area to caramelize its abundant sugars. ½-inch coins or half-moons also work well.

Eggplant: Cut into 1½-inch chunks.

Fennel: Cut into 1-inch pieces.

Green / string beans: Really! They're great. Just make sure they're tender; old, tough ones get tougher in the oven. Leave whole, stems removed.

Onions: Cut into 1½-inch wedges, and break apart into individual layers.

Parsnips: Treat like carrots.

Radishes: Leave whole if small, about 1 inch in diameter; otherwise cut in 1-inch pieces.

Sweet potatoes: Cut into 1-inch pieces.

Tomatoes: Cut 1-inch-wide wedges or ½-inch slices. They won't really brown well but can have a nice concentrated flavor.

Turnips: Cut into 1-inch chunks.

Zucchini / summer squash: Cut into 1-inch chunks, or oblique-cut like carrots.

OK! Get to the method, already!

1. Preheat your oven to, say, 425. Again, you can go hotter or cooler, depending on what ratio of browning-to-tenderness you want, but this is a good temperature to get started with.
2. Cut your vegetables
3. In a big bowl, toss them with plenty of salt and pepper and good extra-virgin olive oil. Taste a piece. There should be enough salt for you to taste it fairly sharply, enough pepper to your liking, and enough olive oil to give every piece a nice sheen and for you to really taste it. The oil will conduct heat, giving you an even browning rather than little dry, scorch-y bits.
4. Spread the vegetables out on a baking sheet, making sure they're all in one layer. You don't necessarily need a lot of space in between pieces, but definitely don't crowd them on top of each other. Use multiple sheets if necessary.
5. Put in oven, in the middle or top rack. Hang out. After a while, you should hear sizzling, and it should get pretty intense after about 10-12 minutes if your pans aren't fully loaded and if you cut you according to my sizes above. Quickly, take your pan out and close the oven door to preserve the heat. Lift a few pieces and check the undersides to see how they're browning. If it's a light color, stick them back in and let them go. But if they're nicely browned, flip them over on the pan before returning them to the oven; most of the browning will take place on the side that touches the pan.
6. Listen again for the sizzle to build back up; you want to check on the vegetables while they're still sizzling — if the sound builds, then slows down, it probably means that the liquid is all sizzled out ... and you might be burning. But as long as you're checking on them about every 5 minutes after the flip, you'll be great.
7. Taste a piece. Is it tender and cooked through? Is the browning lovely? If the vegetables are softened but not brown enough, take them out, fire up the broiler and stick them in there to get good color. If they're as brown as you want them to be, but not yet tender, turn the heat down to 350 and sprinkle on some water, maybe a few tablespoons' worth, to cool the pan and to help create a little steam. And next time you can adjust your heat or surface area.

And to serve:

Mostly I'll just serve roasted vegetables as is, but you should feel free to fancy it up. A sprinkle of good vinegar is always nice, a brightness to contrast with the deep, dark caramelized flavors. Or toss in some toasted nuts for richness, or maybe some raisins for a little sweet-tart action. Fresh hearty herbs, like thyme and oregano, are killer; adding them while the vegetables are still hot will help to bring out their flavor. And shaved Parmigiano, of course, is a strong move.

Biggie's rhymes hum with complicated life. He took the invisible details of his world -- the cry of a killed rival's baby daughter; a lover's orgasmic shouts of "You chicken gristle eatin' motherf**ker!"-- and made them glow so that, in between head-nods to sick beats, anyone could see his stories. And for me, never having killed a man, never having had sex good enough to require that kind of name calling, it was the little things Biggie shared that invested me in the lives lived in his rhymes. "Born sinner, the opposite of a winner, remember when I used to eat sardines for dinner," he rapped in his breakout hit "Juicy." The scenes and characters he crafted were vivid and real.

But when I heard him rap about cookies in "Sky's the Limit," Biggie Smalls became to me something truly greater than a just a wit and storyteller:

Here comes respect:
His crew's your crew, or they might be next
'Look at they man eye! BIG, man, they'll never try.'
So we rolled with 'em, stole with 'em.
I mean loyalty: n**gaz bought me milks at lunch.
The milks was chocolate; the cookies, buttercrunch.

He was bragging about being harder than you, tougher than you, even when he was a child in school. But he was still a child. He loved his chocolate milk. He remembers the flavor of his favorite cookies. The Notorious B.I.G., this spinner of murder rhymes and playboy fantasies, made himself vulnerable. "Sky's the Limit" is a song about how far he'd come from the street life, but it's also a song about the innocence he lost even when he was trying hard to never be innocent at all. Under all his bluster, under the killer braggadocio of "Hunt me or be hunted: I got three hundred fifty seven ways to simmer, sauté" ("Unbelievable"), he still had his throat exposed to the world. Usually you couldn't tell because he was rapping, straight-spittin', but sometimes, you could see underneath and it was fleshy and soft.

There's much more in that song -- stories of how he sewed fake Izod logos onto his shirts to seem richer than he was -- but it was the cookies, buttercrunch, that made me understand food's potency as a symbol, its ability to bridge enormous gaps between him, his characters, and the listener, whether that listener hustled on his corner or was a Chinese kid from the suburbs. Everyone can imagine the horror of hunger, the anger it can engender. Everyone, no matter how hardened, can remember the foods that defined their childhood. And everyone knows, whether you are eating sardines or lobster, that what you eat and what you want to eat says much about you.

For years, I tried to listen to other tapes in my little suburban family sedan, but I would just keep going back to the Black Rhinoceros of Rap, listening to him drop unexpectedly like bird shit. He died 13 years ago today. He was 24. I knew then I would never get to see him grow as an artist, and only years later would I realize how I'd learn from him. I just kept playing him in my car, and I let my tape rock until my tape popped.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A collection of Biggie's finest food rhymes

Biggie was a funny man, and he mastered the silliness of sex and food. Back to "Juicy":

The Moet and Alizé keep me pissy
Girls used to diss me
Now they write letters 'cause they miss me
I never thought it could happen, this rappin' stuff
I was too used to packin' gats and stuff
Now honies play me close like butter played toast
From the Mississippi down to the East Coast

And he built a legacy in masterpieces of carnal seduction like "Big Poppa":

We can rendezvous at the bar around two.
Plans to leave, throw the keys to Lil' Cease.
Pull the truck up front and roll up the next blunt,
So we can steam on the way to the telly. Go fill my belly –
A T-bone steak, cheese eggs and Welch's grape.
Conversate for a few, 'cause in a few, we gon' do what we came to do.
Ain't that right, Boo? (True.)

I mean, if he can make your girl leave you for that level of romance, what couldn't he do? Outside of sex appeal (when "b**ches used to go, 'Ewww!'") Biggie also rapped often about his fabulous wealth, invoking culinary luxuries, like here, in "Hypnotize":

I can fill ya wit real millionaire shit: escargot.
My car go
160, swiftly. Wreck it, buy a new one –
Your crew run run run; your crew run run.

And just imagine him, all 300-plus pounds, lazy eye and top hat, rollin' through his English gardens, contemplating seafood as he does in "I Love the Dough":

Country house, tennis courts, and horseback
Ridin', decidin': cracked crab or lobster?
Who says mobsters don't prosper?

His language was his weapon against the world, and so he bragged with ferocious skill. No detail, no material, ever escaped his eye or its place in his quiver. He was a rapper who didn't have to rely on street slang because his eye for detail in the larger world was so acute. This is from a freestyle with DJ Mister Cee:

All it's taking, is some marijuana and I'm making
MCs break fast, like flapjacks and bacon.

But he was always clear on his relationship with hunger. This is from "Things Done Changed":

If I wasn't in the rap game
I'd probably have a key, knee deep in the crack game
Because the streets is a short stop
Either you're slingin' crack rock or you got a wicked jumpshot
Shit, it's hard being young from the slums
Eatin' five-cent gums not knowin' where your meal's comin' from. 

"Two hours!" she barks, then shouts something in Cantonese into a tiny microphone attached to the register.

I edge outside, mystified. It's hard to believe I've just made a reservation at a Michelin-starred restaurant. It feels more like dropping off a shirt at the dry cleaner's.

A dry cleaner's? Really? You went to a Chinese restaurant and got treated so bad you thought you were at Ching-Chong Chan's No-Tickee-No-Washee Laundry? C'mon, you couldn't find any socially awkward computer geeks in Metaphorland?

I'll be honest. It's not really big enough a deal for me to be actually offended: no one's getting passed over for a job, no one's getting beaten in the street. Maybe the writer happens to go to a traumatizingly gruff dry cleaner, and the racial stereotype wasn't even intended.

The (coincidentally) Australian arm of KFC took serious heat a couple of months ago for an ostensibly racist commercial that had a white man making peace with hostile black Caribbean cricket fans with a bucket of fried chicken. It wasn't really a fair controversy -- the racial stereotype of blacks as going goo-goo for fried chicken doesn't really exist in Australia or in the Caribbean. Sometimes totally innocuous jokes go over poorly in other parts of the world. Baggage sometimes gets found in translation.

But early Chinese immigrants in Australia did, in fact, work in clothes washing before graduating to other industries. (In the UK, as well; the piece was originally published by the London Telegraph.) Someone out there's going to be unhappy about this. I mean, could you imagine, "The cooks in that Jewish deli were so bad, it's like they were busy making loans, not pastrami!"?

 

And as a bonus, they're about the easiest things on the planet to cook: They take just minutes, they tell you when they're done, they make their own broth, and you can dress them up or down. And if you just remember a basic framework, you can make them in any number of variations.

Below is a phenomenal recipe, clams hot and fragrant with more black pepper than you ever thought possible, rounded out with a touch of sugar and Chinese oyster sauce. It's a presentation inspired by a traditional Malaysian way to serve crab, a dish I learned from Susan Feniger and Kajsa Alger, the chefs of Los Angeles' wonderful, globally inspired restaurant Street.

But the lesson of this recipe is in its basic elements: fat, aromatics, liquid, acid and fresh herbs, each of which does its own trick with the saline, earthy flavor of clams. The fat rounds the edges of the saltiness, the aromatics give fragrance and context, the liquid creates steam to cook the clams and dilutes their salty brine, the acid cuts through the heavy earthiness, and the herbs give the dish freshness, a brightness that lifts the flavor. In this case, we're using oil and butter for fat, garlic and black pepper for aromatics, water for steam, lime juice for acid, and cilantro for the herbal note.

But you can sub in whatever ingredients you want. A classic Italian way to steam clams, for instance, is to go with olive oil (fat), garlic (aromatic), white wine (liquid and acid), parsley (freshness), and sometimes a touch of hot chilies for more of the fresh, elevating effect. The dishes taste continents apart, but both follow the same basic principles. Once you read through (and, I hope, make!) the recipe below, you can pretty much make amazing steamed clams however you want, using this framework.

One last note about flavor: Like any bivalve, clams will taste different depending on where they're from, how much rain there's been, how they've been purged of sand after harvest, etc. One batch might be very mild and another very salty. So, while I usually believe in adding a little salt all through the cooking process, with clams I try to keep as much salt out of the dish until after they've given up their liquid and I know how salty it's going to be. If "Cuisine or Death" is the chef's motto, "taste and fix" is the cook's.

Malaysian black pepper clams
Serves 2 as a main course with steamed rice or noodles

2-2¼ pounds small clams, like little necks (If you're using little necks, that's about 2 dozen)
4 cloves garlic, minced (about 2 tablespoons)
2 teaspoons black pepper, freshly and finely ground. Measure after grinding. Yes, it's a workout
½ cup water
1 tablespoon sugar (palm sugar is great, if you have it)
2 teaspoons oyster sauce (usually available wherever you get soy sauce)
1 lime, halved
1 tablespoon butter, cold, cut into 2 pieces
4 sprigs cilantro, roughly chopped
1½ tablespoons vegetable oil

1. First, clean the clams: OK, so after I did my best on selling you on clams, I have to tell you that I live in constant fear of biting into one and finding sand. It's harrowing. Luckily, most commercially harvested clams these days are already purged of grit, so you can forget all those bits of advice like soaking them with cornmeal. But there will likely still be grit on the shells; soak the clams in cold fresh water for a few minutes, scrub or rub them with your fingers to get them clean, and pour off the water. Rinse a few times, and drain.
2. Choose a heavy pan with a snug-fitting lid, wide enough to fit most of the clams in one layer. In it, heat the oil over the highest heat until it's shimmery and nearly smoking-hot. Add the garlic and stir or toss. As soon as it gets golden, which will happen in a few seconds, add the pepper, stir to release its flavor to the oil, and right away add the clams. The water clinging to the shells may sputter for a moment, but be brave and toss the clams until they are all coated and glistening with oil.
3. Add the water; it should sizzle and come to a boil very quickly. Add the sugar and the oyster sauce. Cover with the lid and shake the pan. Give the clams about two minutes in their sauna, uncover and remove any wide-opened clams to a separate bowl; they're cooked, and letting them steam further would turn them rubbery. (If they are just barely open, give them a little more time until they really pop.) Cover the pan and give it a shake, which helps the shells open wide. Uncover again after 30 seconds and repeat until all the clams are opened. If there are any really stubborn ones, like, the rest are done and these are just straight loungin' in the steam for minutes, throw them out; they probably died before you started cooking, and aren't safe to eat.
4. Turn off the heat, squeeze half a lime into the sauce, and stir in the butter, giving the sauce a nice sheen. Give it a taste. How is it? Delicious? A bit heavy? Squeeze in more lime. Too salty? Try a little more butter or dilute it with a little water, or add a touch more sugar. You want a sauce that tastes balanced, where no one flavor dominates the others, with a seawater note and a lingering, warming burn of pepper. When it's ready, add the clams back in and stir to sauce them up. Finish with the cilantro and serve with plenty of steamed rice or noodles.