Michael Moynihan: The tradition of spiced beef in Cork goes a long way back
Tom Denis Cork Picture: Minihane The In Durcan English Beef Spiced Holds Market,
If you have lived somewhere in Ireland beyond the borders of Cork then you will be familiar with a Christmastime sidle, a stealthy approach which occurs at roughly the same point in December every year.
Whether soi-disant sophisticate or avowed Neanderthal, all outlanders are fascinated with one of Cork’s long-standing Christmas traditions. Eventually their curiosity gets the better of them, and they just can’t hold out any longer.
“What’s this thing in Cork with spiced beef?” It should take superhuman restraint to hold back from condescending grandly to these poor people, but such self-control comes naturally to us.
When your columnist was exiled in Dublin this happened on a regular basis, and the odd time I played fast and loose with the known facts (“ . . . spiced with what? Recipes vary, ground Kerry people, that kind of thing.”) However, while vague awareness and outrageous falsehoods might suffice in the capital, I felt it would be no harm to clear up any certainty for the official record, particularly given the time of year.
So last weekend I dropped in to see Tom Durcan in the English Market, and I slipped past the crowds surging for his butchershop counter for a chat.
Why Tom? Whether it’s Blas na hEireann awards, which he racked up annually from 2010 through to 2022, or the various gold medals from the Craft Butchers of Ireland, I felt he’d put me on the right track. I had a vague idea about the origins of the spiced element of the beef, but he fleshed it out, no pun intended.
“The tradition of spiced beef in Cork goes a long way back, to when there were merchant ships going out of Cork.
“That's where it originated. And of course, when people saw it they didn’t always wait to get on board, they ate it in port, and eventually people started eating it in Cork who had nothing to do with the shipping trade. That's how it originated in Cork.”
I read a fantastic book about the American War of Independence a few years back — Rick Atkinson’s — and he sketched a vivid portrait of the teeming commercial life of Cork when the city provisioned British forces about to sail to the colonies in order to put down Washington’s rebellion.
“War was good for Cork” is the way he starts the chapter, adding: “In late fall, eighty thousand bullocks had plodded through the markets north of Blarney Lane and then to the city's abattoirs, where carts day and night hauled away the slaughtered beef for packing in barrels made by sixty master coopers and a thousand journeymen.
“So much preserved beef came from ox-slaying Cork, much of it intended for the Royal Navy and army regiments abroad, that slaughterhouses used four hundred barrels of salt a day, mostly imported from Portugal.
“Each British soldier deployed to America needed a half ton of food every year to sustain him, and much of it would come through Cork, where the blessed Saint Finbar had built his monastery on the braided river Lee in the sixth century.
“The city stank of blood and livestock excrement washed into the same Lee, but to the brokers, shippers, and army contractors who crowded Cork — nearly all of them British Protestants — the smell was of money.” (The rest of the book is just as good as that part, by the way. ) Gas to think of the Redcoats discovering the attractions of a particular Cork delicacy a thousand miles out into the Atlantic.
Anyway, back to Tom. If we accept that spiced beef is a treasured gem of the Deep South, surely it deserves to be known and appreciated all over Ireland, in places where it remains unknown — “It’s spread across the country,” he told me.
“We're selling it in SuperValu shops nationwide, pre-packed and sliced all across the country in Centra shops and the like. And it’s really popular, it’s a product that’s really grown recently, there’s a huge demand for it.
“I'll be 40 years of this game next March. Since I started, it's been increasing and increasing. The interest in spiced beef is huge, and we really start preparing in September for the Christmas market, when it peaks, to be able to fill all the orders. And those orders go to every county in Ireland, literally.”
So not just the odd Cork expatriate who feels a bit homesick in Belfast or Mayo or wherever?
“No, and not just customers in Ireland, either.”
Tom took out his phone and logged onto the shop’s sales portal, and showed a fairly dizzying array of addresses for delivery: Australia, New Zealand, Greece, Britain. He opened up a storeroom door nearby and I saw packages of spiced beef stacked floor to ceiling, ready to be dispatched around the globe.
The fact that it was developed in the first place to counter the lack of refrigeration has a further resonance now. Developments in packaging and delivery mean the long-lasting food product can survive a journey of ten thousand miles and emerge, fresh and tasty, on a dinner table in Sydney or Christchurch.
After a bit of dancing around I asked the most obvious — and most awkward — question.
What goes into Durcan’s spiced beef?
I needn’t have worried. It wasn’t like a Western where the entire saloon falls silent at a greenhorn’s gaff. Tom was open about the process.
Up to a point.
“It’s involved enough — you have to cure the beef first. And after curing it, then you lay it down in spices for a month or two, which kind of dries it out and preserves it.
“The recipe itself . . . in Crosshaven, where I'm from, the old butcher shop was owned by Jimmy Kidney, and he had a recipe for spiced corned beef. I use that, though I tweaked it a bit for our own purposes.”
Jimmy Kidney? Surely he never heard anyone say that was a good name for a butcher?
“I’d say he got used to it fairly early on.
“We do tons of spiced beef. Literally. We do it and we do it right, and it sells itself. The interest in it as a product is huge.”
The chat certainly stoked my interest. Off I went to the Long Valley for a spiced beef sandwich.
Enjoy Christmas.