Jiggs dinner facts for kids
Jiggs dinner, also called boiled dinner or cooked dinner, is a traditional meal commonly prepared and eaten on Sundays in rural Newfoundland. Corned beef and cabbage was the favorite meal of Jiggs, the central character in the popular, long-running comic strip Bringing Up Father by George McManus and Zeke Zekley, after whom the dish is likely named.
The name of the dish is also occasionally rendered as Jigs dinner or Jigg's dinner. In the rendering "Jigg's dinner", the apostrophe is incorrectly placed if in reference to the McManus character. Sometimes referred to colloquially as "JD", "Jiggs dinner" is the most common of all renderings.
Ingredients
The meal most typically consists of salt beef (or salt riblets), boiled together with potatoes, carrot, cabbage, turnip, and cabbage or turnip greens. Pease pudding and figgy duff are cooked in pudding bags immersed in the rich broth that the meat and vegetables create. Condiments are likely to include mustard pickles, pickled beets, cranberry sauce, butter, and a thin gravy made from the cooking broth.
The leftover vegetables from a Jiggs dinner are often mixed into a pan and fried to make a dish known as "cabbage hash" or "corned beef and cabbage hash", much like bubble and squeak.