COLCANNON NIGHT IN NEWFOUNDLAND
The famines of the 1730s and 1740s in Ireland brought waves of Irish immigrants to Newfoundland, and with them, dishes like colcannon, crubeen, and pratie oatens. Colcannon was first boiled cabbage and mashed potatoes topped with butter. This is clear from the original term in Irish Gaelic cál ceannfionn, literally ‘cabbage fair-headed.’ But it’s a lively little Irish joking reference and was really like calling the dish in English “blonde cabbage,” blonde because of the potatoes.
As different cooks personalized the ancient recipe, colcannon came to be a boiled hash of as many as seven or eight vegetables, sometimes with bits of meat tossed in. Chopped chives, parsley, and a piquant hail of fresh-ground pepper can spice up the basic blandness of the recipe. Like its British sister dish, bubble and squeak, colcannon can also be fried into a kind of cake. In Ireland and parts of England it was traditional to serve colcannon on All Hallows’ Eve.
Colcannon Night
Colcannon Night or Snap-Apple Night are still frequent synonyms for Halloween in many Newfoundland communities. To snap at apples is similar to bobbing for apples. Very ancient custom held this late October evening to be ghost-thick, ghoul-swarmed,ripe for magic and fit for prophesy. For a millennium or two, All Hallows’ Eve has been an evening when properly performed rites might help one discover a lover or find out what marital fate awaited the young. Thus four objects were traditionally hidden in the large dish of colcannon served on Halloween: a ring, a coin, an old maid’s thimble, and a bachelor’s button. So, when
The Folk Etymology The spurious origin of colcannon says the word consists of cole, an old name of cabbage still seen in coleslaw, plus the military weapon, cannon. This compound “arose when Irish peasants turned cannon balls into kitchen implements by using them to pound vegetables into a paste.” So runs a quotation from Cupboard Love: A Dictionary of Culinary Curiosities by Winnipegger Mark Morton. He does not bother to label this supposititious flapdoodle as just that: a wild guess by folk unacquainted with Irish Gaelic and even perhaps, most modern dictionaries. I have shared a flagon of the nut-brown ale with Mark Morton in the eatery attached to Winnipeg’s best bookstore, McNally Robinson, and I can report that he proclaims himself no etymologist. Like all protestations of modesty by academics however, this claim must be taken with a dose of salt. The True Etymology Irish Gaelic cál reflects an ancient Indo-European word for cabbage, literally vegetable on a stalk (IE * kaul ‘stalk’). Related forms are: Old English cal (giving colewort ‘cabbage plant,’ an older name for one loose-leaved variety), Old Scandinavian kal (giving English kale and modern Norwegian kaal), German Kohl (giving Kohlrabi), Latin caulis (think of cauliflower, a plant in the same botanical family as cabbage; think too of various words for cabbage, derivatives of caulis in the Romance languages, for example Spanish col and French chou), Greek kaulos, Medieval Dutch kool (in MD cabbage salad was kool sla, giving modern English coleslaw). Finally, showing the true spread of this cabbage word, a cognate appears in ancient Persian as kelum. Perhaps the most appealing derivative is a French term of tender affection used by lovers and maybe by mothers speaking to small children, mon petit chouchou, a sweet intimacy one might translate as “my little cabbage-wabbage.” Irish Gaelic Colcannon is an Anglo-Irish compression or slurring, a frequent habit in daily speech, of the Irish Gaelic name for this dish cál ceannfionn, literally ‘cabbage fair-headed.’ The adjective comes after the noun in Gaelic. Ceann means head; fionn means white or fair, when describing people it usually refers to a light complexion or to blonde hair. You will recognize the Gaelic word for white or fair in common Gaelic female names like Fiona, and in less common but no less beautiful girl’s names like Finola, Fionnula, or Fenella, all from the Gaelic Fionghuala “with white shoulders.” The initial part of the compound adjective ceannfionn is the Gaelic word for head, ceann, which appears in Gaelic surnames like the Irish O Cannan ‘son of white head,’ that is, son of a founding ancestor who was of fair complexion or blonde hair, and also in its Scottish cousin McCannan, with the same meaning.
© 2007 William Gordon Casselman
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spooks leave a broomy spoor across the night sky, one eats this cabbage-and-potato hash with care. Whoever finds the ring will marry soon. To the coin-holder, riches will accrue, while celibacy awaits both the thimble-getter and button-discoverer. Happily for eaters, one Newfoundland variation reduces the surprises in colcannon to several large buttons. If a girl finds a button, she will marry. If a young man finds a button, he will remain forever a bachelor.
