On St. Patrick’s Day, this Irish American craves green supermarket cupcakes and Shamrock Shakes
In Central Massachusetts in the 1980s, to be an Irish American kid was to know which pub had the best bacon cheeseburger. Your job was to throw your weight behind your favorite apostrophe restaurant — Mickey’s, Slattery’s or Donnelly’s — when your parents chose among them.
My parents are second-generation Irish, descendants of Kennedys, Murphys and Fallons. On reflection, it seems unfair to my ancestors that my haphazard assimilation of their heritage eschewed Aran sweaters, Gaelic and fiddle music in favor of green-frosted cupcakes on St. Paddy’s and the feeling that every Irish pub is my living room.
But come St. Patrick’s Day, one thing would crack my resolve: The local Market Basket would sell little plastic clamshells of green cupcakes swathed in white frosting, with fat jellied shamrocks and green sprinkles studding their tops. Mom baked cookies only about once a month — God forbid we buy the kind in bags — and to me, those little shamrocks represented the best sweets could possibly be. How good does green taste? I had to know.“Oh, yeah, they were so gross,” Mom remembers.
These days I live in New York City, where you can go to an Irish pub across from a huge Chinese food court and expect to see packets of soy sauce, chopsticks and black vinegar on every table in the bar. The taverns here are as eclectic as the neighborhoods and a vast improvement on the monoculture in which I grew up.
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