Dartmouth Fire Department

I have never heard of gravy and a jig dinner had jig. Dinner is not with gravy. It’s just a liquid off the vegetables.

THE SURPRISING STORY BEHIND NEWFOUNDLAND’S JIGGS DINNER 🍽️

Ask almost any Newfoundlander where the name “Jiggs Dinner” comes from and you’ll probably hear one of several stories. Some say it’s because the vegetables were “jigged” out of the pot with a fork. Others believe the meal was traditionally served after community dances, or jigs. They’re great stories, but the historical evidence points somewhere completely different.

The name “Jiggs Dinner” didn’t begin in Newfoundland at all.

It began with one of the most popular newspaper comic strips ever published.

In 1913, American cartoonist George McManus introduced readers to Bringing Up Father, a comic following the lives of Jiggs and his wife Maggie. Jiggs was an Irish immigrant who had suddenly become wealthy, but despite his fortune, he never lost his love for the simple meals he grew up eating. His favourite was corned beef and cabbage.

The comic became an international sensation. Before long, restaurants, church suppers, community fundraisers, and newspapers across North America were advertising “Jiggs Dinners.” By the 1920s, the phrase had already appeared in Newfoundland newspapers, and over time the name became attached to the province’s own version of the meal: salt beef, cabbage, potatoes, carrots, turnip, pease pudding, and, in many homes, figgy duff.

Here’s what makes the story even more interesting.

Versions of this meal were already being cooked long before anyone had ever heard of Jiggs. Similar boiled dinners existed in Ireland, England, New England, and throughout Atlantic Canada. What Newfoundland did wasn’t invent the meal. Newfoundland perfected it, embraced it, and made it part of its identity.

Today, if you mention a Jiggs Dinner almost anywhere else in North America, many people won’t know what you’re talking about. In Newfoundland and Labrador, however, it’s much more than a meal. It’s Sunday afternoon at Nan’s house. It’s steamed-up kitchen windows in the winter. It’s the smell of salt beef filling the house before dinner is even on the table. It’s family, tradition, and generations of memories served from the same pot.

Sometimes the most fascinating part of our history isn’t where a tradition began.

It’s why one place chose to keep it alive when almost everyone else forgot.

How many Newfoundlanders do you think know that one of our most iconic meals got its name from a newspaper comic strip over a century ago?

And while we’re at it… settle another Newfoundland debate. Do you put gravy on your Jiggs Dinner, or is that absolute sacrilege?