White Sauce and Corned Beef

Today is St Patrick's Day and is celebrated in Australia by wearing green, drinking schooners or disgusting green Guinness and being a lay about gutter drunk by 3 pm. Today so far I have seen Green Pancakes and revellers drinking in the pub while I scurried to get a coffee at 10 AM.

I had a thought while watching morning television on why St Patrick's Day revellers all seem to be wearing green. I assume the colours of the flag have some link to the colours they wear but on the flag also is Orange and White. I figure the link between the Green on the flag, the clover and little leprechauns gives the day a green feeling. If everyone celebrated by wearing orange it would be a day where everyone appeared to be Oompa Loompas and that would just be silly, as silly as the remake of Charlie and the Chocolate factory with the highly ecentric, crazed gentlemen by the name of Johnnie Depp.

Today as every day I go to Google Trends and find out what is searched for most at a particular point in time, today was a heavily themed Irish Day including searches for Irish Soda Bread, Irish History and also Corned Beef recipes. The last of the trends which appeared on Google made me salivate a little, a favourite food of the Irish and is served with onions, carrots, potato and cabbage. The history of corned beef started by Irish-Americans. Corned is a term used to describe the rock salt or corns of salt which were added to the broth when cooking the beef. The salted meat could then be kept for days without refrigeration when people would travel long distances by horse.

The memory of Corned Beef for me is one which I relate to my deceased Grandmother or Nanna as I called her throughout my childhood. She was a master in the kitchen with meals and delightful deserts always simmering or fresh from the oven ready to be served whenever we visited. I remember helping her in the kitchen and watching as skilful hands knew a recipe without looking it up could make perfect biscuits with the right amount of ingredients. She was a particularly good cook and St Patrick's Day remind me of her cooking Corned Beef. I assume she knew how to cook well since much of her family were stockmen and who similarly travelled by horse for long distances with no refrigeration.

The smell of corned beef would permeate my nose before I even walked through the door, the tinge of cloves and the combination of cabbage, carrot and potato in a large metal pot boiling on the stove. The meat would look to be an off brown colour simmering in a brownish broth and would look particularly unappealing to the untrained eyes of a corned beef amateur. However to the trained eye it was a most amazing sight for below that brown, bubbling broth was a large piece of meat which when sliced revealed a ruby red, flaking meat flavoured with hours of patience, cloves and an age old family tradition. In a smaller pot beside the stove was a white thick mixture, which had an intoxicating rich smell and would only go on the heat in the final hour before the meal was served, this white sauce was the sauce of choice which would run in large drips across a piping hot plate of traditional Irish American fare.

Sitting on my Nanna's small patio with the hose running; cooling the pavement and it washing over our feet we would eat plates of the delicious fare while the heat radiated off the roof. This memory seems like so long ago, I sometimes think I see her or I feel her near by, sometimes I watch elderly ladies together at cafes eating toasted sandwiches and drinking tea and wish I could sit and join them and hear their wonderful stories and admire there wit and timeless humour. I yearn to have her back to say one goodbye, but I see her in my dreams and I know she is somewhere close by watching and guiding with a gentle hand.

When I cook my next meal of corned beef I will remember her and the time I spent beside her in the kitchen watching the pot bubble and the smell of cloves and the hand stirring the end of the white sauce, ready to serve it in a thick layer over a hot lunch. I know today there will be Irish folk spewing Guinness on footpaths and yelling Irish limericks at each other but today brought a different memory for me, a chain of memories held together by white sauce and Corned Beef.