Eight score and three years ago, President Abraham Lincoln brought forth on this continent the proposition that all corned beefs are created delicious.
Scholars and food historians suggest that Lincoln, corned beef connoisseur turned commander-in-chief, was a catalyst behind the salt-cured meat's rise to become the signature dish of St. Patrick's Day celebrations in the United States.
"Mr. Lincoln enjoyed oysters, venison, corned beef and cabbage, and the Midwestern foods, including beef, pork, chicken, potatoes and corn," the National Park Service writes in a profile of domestic life at Abraham and Mary Lincoln's family home in Springfield, Illinois.
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His family enjoyed corned beef as well, the NPS claims.
Lincoln's taste for corned beef gained national attention during his first inaugural luncheon at The Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. on March 4, 1861, just two weeks before St. Patrick's Day.
The celebratory menu for the nation's top dignitaries "consisted of mock turtle soup, corned beef and cabbage, parsley potatoes, blackberry pie and coffee," the NPS reports.
The choice of corned beef may have been made for purposes of politics as well as palate.
The potato famine forced the Irish to flood the United States in shocking numbers in the late 1840s and 1850s.
About 1.2 million immigrants arrived from Ireland in just eight years, from 1847 to 1854.
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The election of 1860 was the first presidential election in which new Irish-American citizens were a major political force.
And corned beef would have been an instantly recognizable product of Ireland, authors Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Pádraic Óg Gallagher wrote for the Technological University of Dublin in a 2011 treatise, "Irish Corned Beef: A Culinary History."
Corned beef is simply meat preserved in salt brine.
The name "corned" is, according to multiple sources, simply a reference to the large kernels of salt used to cure the beef.
Ireland, despite centuries of poverty, possessed two things in abundance: cows and salt.
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"With the large quantities of cattle and high-quality salt, Irish corned beef was the best on the market," Iomaire and Gallagher write.
"Irish corned beef had a stranglehold on the trans-Atlantic trade routes, supplying the French and British navies and the American and French colonies."
But, the authors note, "the ones producing the corned beef, the Irish people, could not afford beef or corned beef for themselves."
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Irish fortunes changed when they arrived in the United States.
"The Irish could afford meat for the first time," write Iomaire and Gallagher. "And the beef they could afford just happened to be corned beef, the thing their great-grandparents were famous for."
As the authors suggest, "Perhaps the proximity to St. Patrick’s Day influenced President Lincoln’s consumption of corned beef, cabbage and parsley potatoes at his inauguration dinner."
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