Comic Strip History - Jiggs Dinner
This is a short follow-up to my previous post.
Last month, while researching Dinty Moore specifically and Bringing Up Father generally, I came across a phrase I hadn’t heard before, “Jiggs Dinner.” Like Dinty Moore, it was apparently also derived from the work of George McManus. Unlike Dinty Moore, it’s not very widely known outside of a very specific area, that area being Newfoundland, Canada, but it is quite well known within that area, among other places.
Jiggs Dinner (or sometimes Jiggs' Dinner), in current day Newfoundland, is a dish consisting of a base of corned (or salt) beef and cabbage and some other greens, various root vegetables such as potatoes, carrots, and turnips, and a side of pease pudding. Other vegetables of various sorts can also be added if one wishes. Similar dishes can be found in the United States, such as New England Boiled Dinner, which is essentially the same but without the pease pudding, and in Ireland, where they have Bacon and Cabbage, which again is essentially the same but with a different meat. The Irish variety was most likely the precursor to these types of meals, as it’s thought that Irish immigrants to the United States and Canada, not being able to afford bacon, would substitute the more readily available corned beef, and thus invented the American version of the Irish classic. Newfoundland has a large population of people of Irish descent, so it stands to reason that such a meal would endure as a tradition among them.
Of course, it also stands to reason that, in the early 20th century, they would be quite fond of a newspaper comic about an Irish immigrant who loves corned beef and cabbage.
As stated in the previous post, Bringing Up Father was known worldwide in its heyday, and its two main leads, Jiggs and Maggie, were so well known that most people referred to the strip by their names rather than by its title. Jiggs' penchant for going to Dinty Moore’s cafe and having a bite of corned beef and cabbage was also well known, of course. To the consternation of the cartoonist, George McManus, it was also assumed that he was just as fond of it as Jiggs was. This was only partially true. In the Collier’s Magazine article referenced in the previous post, he states that, “It is true that, like Jiggs, I have some fondness for this simple and succulent dish. But I can take it or leave it. Through the years, I have become rather selective about it, because it has been rammed down my throat on every possible occasion from Maine to California. Does McManus come to town on a King Features promotion tour? Every place he visits has stockpiles of corned beef and cabbage waiting.”
Due to the clear association between Jiggs and corned beef and cabbage (or “C.B. and C.” as I often saw it abbreviated in old newspapers), it didn’t take long for people to start referring to the dish as simply “Jiggs Dinner.” The earliest article I could find which referenced Jiggs Dinner was from a New Brunswick, Canada newspaper in 1918, where it states that a certain business executive had been “host at a Jiggs dinner at his summer home.” The lack of explanation of what a Jiggs dinner is implies that readers would have already been familiar with the term by that time, which is interesting, given that Bringing Up Father had only debuted 5 years prior.
However, the term was not confined only to Canada at this early stage. I found the term in many American newspapers across the country in the 1920s, either reporting that someone had hosted a Jiggs dinner or was planning one, or advertising meat markets, grocery stores, and restaurants where one could buy one (my favorite of these being from a restaurant in Norfolk, Virginia which advertised a Jiggs dinner “of surpassing excellence”).
Of course, at that time the term referred only to the corned beef and cabbage itself, not necessarily to a meal with corned beef and cabbage in it. Still, it’s fairly easy to see how, given that the dish is centered around corned beef and cabbage, Newfoundlanders would also refer to their traditional dish in the same way. Since the 1930s and 1940s, I found that the term began to be used less and less outside of Canada generally and Newfoundland specifically, though it hasn’t gone away entirely. Judging by current newspapers at least, it’s still a popular way to refer to corned beef and cabbage in the Midwestern United States, most especially Ohio.
Jiggs Dinner in the Canadian Encyclopedia
Jiggs Dinner at the Grammarphobia blog
“My First Jiggs Dinner” at Parts Unknown
“Jiggs Dinner for Beginners” at the official Newfoundland and Labrador tourism website