Sugar Snap Peas, St. Patrick's Day, and the Slow Food Movement

I’m doing two things to get ready for St. Patrick’s Day – ordering sugar snap peas to plant (since it is good luck to do so on St. Patrick’s day) and corning my own beef (following this Cooks Illustrated recipe – the picture to the left is the beef right after it got it’s salt rub (ala the finer spa treatments)). Doing both of these has led me to an epiphany about slow food (that is, local seasonal food you process yourself).

Food is better if you have to plan for it, wait for it, and work a little for it.

I can get sugar snap peas right now at Whole Foods. They are from Chile, and while not as sweet or crunchy as the ones we’ll start picking in May, I could have them immediately without any intervening period of crawling in the frozen mud or fretting over vines that come off the trellis during rains or picking for hours in one spot without making any dent in the pea population.


But during all that crawling, fretting, and picking, I’m also anticipating that first crunch and spurt of sweet. I’m thinking about the way the farm will be when I eat those first peas – warm, green, noisy with baby animals. The Chilean peas are easy and available, vegetable sluts, really. But they also come without sensory baggage, the good kind. They aren’t special; they are just food.


I could also buy corn beef – and the cabbage and potatoes I’ll serve with it (instead of using the cabbage and potatoes from last Fall I have stored). But I wouldn’t do that, mostly because I don’t really like corned beef, or I didn’t think I did.

The recipe for making corned beef came to my email this morning, and I decided to use the sirloin tip roast I was going to braise for this instead (not the cut the recipe calls for, but I bet the Irish didn’t just use the brisket, since, like flank steak, there just isn’t that much of it in a cow). While getting the beef ready, I thought about St. Patrick’s Day when I was a kid. We always had corned beef, cabbage, and boiled potatoes – the only time we ever had it. I remember not really liking it, but appreciating the shot at potatoes with butter, a rarity in my house where my mother practiced a strict anti-starch religion.


And I can see my Dad tucking into it, relishing it like a memory of the Old Country, claiming he loved it and why didn’t we have it more often. My father was not Irish, though he did resemble a happy Leprechaun. And he did enjoy a good holiday designed around food and drink. Opera night he was Italian, tears running down his face at arias he didn’t understand and plates of spaghetti washed down with Bolla Valpolicella at Chicago’s Italian Village. Oktoberfest it was beer and brats at the local Kicker’s Club. His birthday, he became a good ol’ boy, eating my Texan grandmothers lard fried chicken with Pinot Grigio (which my grandmother pronounced “pee-nee-oo gree-gee-oo” In an “ee-i-ee-i-o” rythmn).


And St, Patrick’s Day, beer and corned beef cabbage, a meal I am, to my surprise, eagerly anticipating next Wednesday. The more we slow our food down, the more it gives us in taste, context, and pleasure.