Irish and Jewish cuisine exchanges?

Naomi over at Will Tell Stories For Food posted earlier today on a curious culinary coincidence, “Ethnic Food”, prompted by the upcoming St. Patrick’s Day

The story starts out with the odd corned beef tradition on the holiday, which apparently started in the States, a dish which the Irish didn’t have back in Ireland. A cuisine that does have corned beef (or brined brisket at least) is Jewish.

Not that American Jewish cuisine doesn’t include plenty of things they didn’t eat in the Old Country. Let’s take lox, for example. Lox is smoked salmon, sliced thin, eaten cold, preferably on top of bagels with lots of cream cheese. Do you suppose they had ready access to salmon in the shtetls of Eastern Europe? Not likely. And yet in the U.S. it is quintessentially Jewish, much the way corned beef is quintessentially Irish.

The plot thickens, too. Guess who likes lox.

Who ate lox — smoked salmon — back in the Old Country? The Irish, as it turns out. At least, the modern Irish do — when we were there in 1998 it was readily available as pub food. […]

This has always puzzled me. Did someone host a multi-ethnic recipe-swap night in New York City decades ago, or was this pure coincidence?

One of those cool cross-cultural stories with a lot of history attached, plus the extraordinary origins of seemingly ordinary traditions.