FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Corned beef dishes that are uniquely 'ours'
By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Food Editor
One day when I was in college on the Mainland, I invited a study group from an afternoon class over for a quick dinner so we'd have time to prep for a project together. It happened to be St. Patrick's Day, and I told them I'd just whip up some corned beef and cabbage. They looked at me very strangely.
When I placed a wok full of stir-fried corned beef and cabbage on the table that evening, the looks on their faces informed me that I was having another we-do-things-differently-in-Hawai'i moment. Turned out none of the group had ever eaten canned corned beef — let alone canned corned beef flavored with shoyu and served over rice!
This led to a lively discussion about Hawai'i's postwar love affair with canned meats (they didn't understand Spam, either) and of the merits of "real" corned beef and cabbage vs. the Island-style dish.
I place this homely favorite in the "whack 'em" category — old-style pidgin for "eating it all up": The cook whacks up the ingredients and the guests (or more likely the 'ohana) whacks 'em. Afterwards, all you gotta do is rinse the cleaver and the wok and pau ka hana!
Grandma Duarte used to make this on a night when she stayed too late watering the ginger patch. Or when Grandpa brought home unexpected company and whatever she'd planned for dinner wouldn't stretch. She always had corned beef in the pantry, and we grew our own Portuguese-style cabbage (a little different than the closed heads you find in the store, but interchangeable in this dish).
All you need is 1 can corned beef (Hereford is best, I think; cheap corned beef is excessively greasy and short on meat), 1 round cabbage, 1 medium onion, oil or butter, pepper and a splash of shoyu. And a wok or big frying pan. First break up the corned beef into small chunks. Slice the cabbage and the onion not too thin. Put some oil or butter in the wok, melt it over medium heat and add the onion. Fry the onion until translucent. Add the cabbage and stir-fry until it begins to wilt. Add the corned beef and a few good cranks of pepper and a splash of shoyu. Stir-fry until done; the cabbage will release juice and go limp. Don't overcook. Serve over hot rice. Broke da mout'!
From time to time, Grandma would make a from-scratch corned beef in a huge oval baking pan with a rack on the bottom. She called it "boiled dinner" and it included corned beef and vegetables steamed in the oven with their "feet" in an increasingly rich broth. Jeff Apaka told me the other day that his grandma used to cook rice in this broth. Muito bene!
I now think that Grandma's corned beef was a classic case of old-country Portuguese technique meeting up with Terra Nova ("new land") ideas.
All over Portugal, including the Atlantic islands from which most Hawai'i Portuguese hailed, the cozido "boiled dinner" was a common feature, made by boiling together different cuts of meat (chicken, pork and beef on the bone), vegetables and often garbanzos. The pot would bubble gently on the stove for the better part of the day, with ingredients added in order of time needed to cook them to a tender state.
The meal would be eaten in two courses: the rich broth served first as a soup (sometimes with added macaroni or rice), the meats and vegetables following as an entrée. In Hawai'i, old-time community cookbooks offer recipes for sausage cozido — garlicky linguia steamed with potatoes and carrots. In New England, housewives made boiled dinners with salt cod, a technique that does not seem to have been common here.
But Portuguese don't appear to have used corned beef. I'm thinking Grandma read a recipe for a New England-style boiled dinner, which is often built around corned beef, and adapted it. But as the old priests at St. Anthony used to say, there's no way of knowing, my friend — it's a mystery.
Happy St. Paddy's Day anyway.
