Take twelve yolks of new eggs, mix them very fine like a batter, some chives, parsley, a little grated nutmeg, pepper, and salt: put in your amblet pan a quarter of a pound of fresh butter melted, then put your compound in the pan over a slow fire till hardened.
—from an 18th century Irish cookbook manuscript
Breakfast in Ireland can be the best meal of the day. Staying at an Irish B&B can beguile you into spending longer at the breakfast table than you did at the dinner table, beginning with a bowl of porridge, often topped with cream and sugar, and sometimes an alluring shot of whiskey as well. Then the meal moves on to the full “fry,” sometimes called a “fry-up,” consisting of a fried egg, sausages, rashers, and black and white pudding.
Accompaniments may include a grilled tomato half and heap of little mushrooms fried in butter, as well as brown bread or toast, and more butter. There might be cooked kidneys with your meal as well, or kippers, the little smoked herring that are so savory in the morning, and, in seaside communities, perhaps even a bit of fried fish, fresh caught. It was once common to finish the plate with a slice of bread cut in two triangles and fried in the oil remaining in the pan. The beans you sometimes see alongside a fry are usually put there for lunch or supper, not breakfast, but some cafeterias and restaurants aren’t picky about that—if you want beans at breakfast, you’re welcome to them. (My family always liked a slice of fried plum pudding with our fry on St. Stephen’s Day, the morning after Christmas.) Once you’ve consumed your fry, it’s time to finish the pot of tea and perhaps nibble a little more brown bread or toast with butter and homemade marmalade or jam, if you’re lucky.
A full fry is not a meal for the faint-hearted, nor is it best for those who plan to sit on a tour bus all day! But if you’re headed off hiking, fishing, biking, or plowing a field, perhaps, it will hold you for many, many hours of activity.
As might be expected with a dish called “the fry,” it starts with a generous glug of cooking oil in a frying pan to cook the sausages and the slices of pudding, both black and white. When cooking sausages in large quantities, some restaurants deep-fry them, resulting in sausages that are evenly golden brown all over their exteriors, the ends bursting out slightly from the oil’s heat.
Our rashers are not the fatty bacon slices that Americans know; we would call those “streaky rashers” because they are streaked with fat. Instead, the usual breakfast rasher is a slice of back bacon, a meaty cut with a narrow rim of fat around the edge just to add flavor. It’s cured in salt or brine but not necessarily smoked (freshly cured rashers are called “green rashers”). Rashers are frequently grilled—or broiled in an American oven—to just cook them through but not to brown them.
When your rashers are grilled and your sausages and pudding fried; when the tomato halves have been grilled alongside the rasher or had their cut side browned in the skillet, the mushrooms have been lightly browned in hot fat, and the cooked foods are staying warm in a dish; when the boiling water has just been poured over the tea leaves in the pot; the bread is sliced and ready, the butter in a dish on the table, and the milk in a jug nearby; when all that is done, then everything is set aside to wait while the egg is fried.
It is a free-range egg; that’s a given. We don’t love battery-raised chickens or eggs in Ireland, and it’s not hard to find free-range eggs in most shops—the butcher is often a good source—with dark yellow yolks and, almost always, brown shells. (Yes, I know there’s no taste difference whatsoever between eggs in brown shells and eggs in white shells, but brown-shelled eggs look, and therefore taste, right to me.) There should still be plenty of oil in the pan, including any fats the meats have given off while cooking.
Break the egg into the hot oil. The outer edges of the white will sizzle and crackle, may take on a browned crisp “cuff,” as my English friend, Rust says (if you don’t like eggs with a cuff, like Rust does, reduce the heat slightly). There’s no lid on the pan to cook the egg’s top, nor do we flip it: over-easy is not an egg order in Ireland. Instead, with the edge of the spatula, you used to lift the cooked meats from the pan, flick the hot oil in the pan carefully over the yolk, until it’s lightly filmed in a pale haze of just-cooked white, like a swelling pearl, ready to be lifted onto that plate laden with so many good things.
And then breakfast is ready.
People—not just the Irish—have been eating blood puddings for centuries, in cultures all around the world. No Irish fry is truly complete without at least a slice of black and a slice of white pudding. And it’s not just for breakfast anymore. Talented Irish chefs have found ways to incorporate it into salads and main dishes. Black pudding recipes vary wildly throughout Ireland; some include barley, breadcrumbs, and flour, but oatmeal is the old-fashioned thickener. Be sure it’s steel-cut or pinhead oatmeal, and cook it until just tender. Individual nubs of oats should be visible in the final product. Store-bought versions will always be made in sausage casings, unlike this recipe, packed into a loaf pan.
It is far easier to buy black pudding ready-made, and there are lots of artisan producers making truly worthy black versions. But if you’re able to come into possession of fresh pig’s blood, you’ll be all set to make this recipe. And if not—well, you’ll know precisely what a good black pudding should contain.
Makes about 3 pounds
4 cups fresh pig’s blood
2½ teaspoons salt
1½ cups steel-cut (pinhead) oatmeal
2 cups finely diced pork fat (or beef suet), finely chopped
1 large yellow onion, finely chopped
1 cup milk
1½ teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon ground allspice
1 Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F and grease 2 glass loaf pans. (If you don’t have glass loaf pans, line metal loaf pans with parchment to keep the blood sausage from reacting with the metal and creating an off-flavor.) Stir 1 teaspoon of salt into the blood.
2 Bring 2½ cups water to a boil and stir in the oats. Simmer, stirring occasionally, for 15 minutes, until just tender, not mushy.
3 Pour the blood through a fine sieve into a large bowl to remove any lumps. Stir in the fat, onion, milk, pepper, allspice and remaining 1 1/2 teaspoons salt. Add the oatmeal and mix to combine. Divide the mixture between the loaf pans, cover with foil, and bake for 1 hour, until firm. Cool completely. Seal in plastic wrap and either freeze for extended use or store in the refrigerator for up to a week.
4 To serve, cut a slice about 1/2-inch thick off the loaf. Fry in butter or oil until the edges are slightly crisped and browned.
Drisheen and Tripe
When I used to go to “Irish camp” in the Aran Islands in the summers—where hordes of teenagers were supposedly working on our Irish language skills but were in fact idling without much supervision and hoping to work up the courage to talk to the opposite sex—I first ate drisheen with the family where I boarded. This was rough-and-ready summer camp, and we were spread out among the islanders like so many refugees, sent out to classes in the morning, and left to roam the island or swim all afternoon before we attended a ceilidh every night and eagerly hoped to meet girls. The bean an tí, literally the “woman of the house,” had a large pot of sheep’s blood in a windowsill where it sat for a day or two until it was thick. Not surprisingly, we few teenagers boarding with her affected great disgust. Then she mixed it up with cream, a little oatmeal, and some leaves of tansy (a wild herb with a faintly minty flavor). She packed it into a mold and steamed it, then she sliced it, fried it, and fed it to us for breakfast with a fried egg and buttered toast. And all the complaining stopped. I was hooked—it was the most flavorful, delicate black pudding I’d ever eaten, a gustatory experience that stopped me in my tracks.
When packed into casings and sliced, black pudding is typically served in a rich cream sauce with long-cooked tripe. Drisheen and tripe is a Munster thing, more often seen in Counties Cork and Kerry than in the rest of Ireland. Because it’s made with fewer thickeners and with cream for added fat, the finished sausage is pale and tender. The tansy, a yellow-flowering herb that was a powerful anti-parasitic, had a pleasantly sharp taste, keeping the richness from being cloying. It would be rare now to find drisheen flavored with tansy. These days it’s usually replaced with a hint of fresh thyme or even a bit of mint.
If you’re not keen on the idea of black pudding, white pudding may be a good place to begin. It doesn’t require any blood, but instead has rolled oats, lard, pork liver, and, in old-fashioned versions, “lights,” or ground lungs. Lights are harder to find these days, so it’s fine to leave it out. Good white pudding is quite spicy with white pepper and serves as a real foil to the richer black pudding that it always sits alongside on the plate. It’s also easier to make at home. Again, it would be packed into sausage casings at a butcher shop, but for home cooks, you can pack it into loaf pans to cook it and slice before frying.
Makes about 3 pounds
4 cup rolled oats (not quick oats)
1¾ cups whole milk
½ pound pork liver
1 medium yellow onion, peeled and coarsely chopped
2 cups finely chopped pork fat
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon white pepper
½ teaspoon dried thyme leaves, crushed
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 Put the oats and milk in a large bowl, cover, and leave to soak for at least 3 hours, or overnight.
2 Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F and grease two glass loaf pans. (If you don’t have glass, line metal pan with parchment.)
3 Bring 4 cups of water to a boil in a large saucepan and add the liver and the chopped onion. Cook for 3 to 4 minutes until the liver is lightly poached and firm, and the onion is slightly softened. Drain and cool slightly.
4 Pulse the liver and onions with the pork fat, salt, pepper, thyme, and nutmeg in a food processor until chopped finely, but don’t overprocess into a paste. Turn this mixture into the bowl with the oatmeal and stir to combine.
5 Divide the mixture between the loaf pans, cover with foil, and bake for 1 hour. Chill, seal with plastic wrap, and store in the refrigerator. To serve, fry a slice in butter or oil until lightly browned.
Tips for Pudding Success
Not sure about the salt or spice in your black or white pudding? After mixing it together, but before baking, fry a tablespoon in butter or oil in a small skillet over medium heat until cooked through. Taste and adjust seasoning. You may want more salt, herbs, or white pepper—I like my white pudding very spicy with pepper but only a faint hint of nutmeg.
Baking it simply covered with foil will make a firm, drier pudding, ideal for storing and frying later, but if you want a slightly more tender texture, before baking, place the foil-covered loaf pans in a large roasting tin and pour hot water halfway up the sides of the pans. This improvised water bath keeps the puddings moister and the texture more delicate.
Sausages are a constant throughout Irish society. They turn up at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and they’re served as cocktail food, late-night snacks, birthday party treats, and finger food. They’re everywhere, in sizes large and small. And not only do we eat them with knife and fork on a plate, but we also pick them up in our fingers to dip into sauces, and a personal favorite, we slit them lengthwise and lay them on a slice of buttered toast, with a little mustard alongside, for the best breakfast sandwich I can think of.
Most people buy their sausages, which are typically about ¾ to 1 inch in diameter and about 4-inches long, but there is also a tradition of home sausage making, which doesn’t involve casings. If you have a meat grinder or a grinding attachment on your stand mixer, this is the time to use it. Then you can use a pound of pork shoulder instead of starting with ground pork. Grind the meat twice for a really fine texture.
If you don’t have a grinder, pulse the fat in the food processor until it’s finely chopped, and then mix it with the ground meat and pulse again. You may be able to ask the butcher to grind the meat and fat together for you. Don’t skimp on the fat—it’s crucial.
Roll the sausage mixture into either fingers or patties and fry. They shouldn’t really be at all spicy, but leaving out the spice will make them bland. After you’ve mixed them up, fry a tablespoon and taste to check the seasoning.
Makes 12 sausages
1 pound pork shoulder, cubed (or 1 pound ground pork)
½ pound pork fat
¼ to ½ cup white breadcrumbs
1½ teaspoons salt
¼ to ½ teaspoon ground allspice
¼ teaspoon white pepper
¼ teaspoon dried sage, crushed
1 Grind the meat and fat with a grinder, or pulse the fat in the food processor until finely ground and then mix in the meat. Add the remaining ingredients and pulse, or grind again.
2 Form into 12 patties or fingers, and fry in oil or butter over medium heat until lightly browned and cooked through, 8 to 10 minutes.
Toward the beginning of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom famously buys, fries, and eats a pork kidney, which gave “to his breath the faint tang of urine.” It’s not the way to sell kidneys to a larger audience, but then, James Joyce wasn’t exactly a food writer. Bloom liked pork kidneys, which I find bigger and not as tender as lamb kidneys, my preferred breakfast organ meat. Lamb kidneys are firm-textured and slightly, appealingly, chewy, with a good meaty flavor. They’re readily available at Irish butchers and very inexpensive, but they need to be very fresh. You have to peel the membrane off the outside of each kidney, then cut each piece in half crossways, and peel or snip off any fat or sinew you find inside. Then you’re ready to go. For a milder flavor, soak them in milk for 20 minutes before cooking. If you do, pat them well dry. Kidneys need high heat so they can brown quickly without a lot of moisture leaking out. Cooking them with onions and mushrooms is common, but I prefer the slightly tangier taste of shallot. Hot buttered toast is the ideal accompaniment.
Makes 2 servings
4 tablespoons butter
4 fresh lamb kidneys (6 to 8 ounces), cleaned and sliced as explained above
1 small shallot, finely minced
1 cup small white button mushrooms, cleaned and quartered
Salt and black pepper
1 Heat a cast-iron skillet over medium-high heat for 2 to 3 minutes, then add half the butter. Drop in the kidneys on top of the butter as it melts and sizzles. Cook 3 to 4 minutes, turning them halfway through, until the edges are browned. Remove to a warm dish.
2 Put the remaining butter in the pan and add the shallot and mushrooms. Cook 4 to 5 minutes until the mushrooms are browned and the shallot is softened. (This is a good time to make and butter your toast.)
3 Return the kidneys to the pan just to heat through, and season with salt and pepper.
When I was growing up, my dad made potato cakes as a way to use up leftover mashed potatoes and to try to stave off the hunger of four unfillable teenage boys. With a fried egg, rashers, and sausages, potato cakes made a breakfast that would stick to the ribs all morning. Nowadays, I make mashed potatoes simply in order to have potato cakes. I enjoy them so much, I’ve even cut them into smaller triangles and served them as a cocktail party nibble alongside sour cream flavored with chives for dipping. If you’re using leftover mashed potatoes, remember these cakes work best with mashed potatoes that aren’t too heavy with butter, milk, or cream, so the finished cakes taste floury and potato-like.
Makes 4 servings (basic proportions can be doubled, tripled, etc.)
2 cups leftover mashed potatoes
¾ to 1 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
¼ cup (½ stick) butter
1 Combine the potatoes with the flour and salt, mixing well with your hands, and knead on a lightly floured surface into a smooth dough, adding a little more flour if necessary to stop the dough from being sticky.
2 Divide the dough into quarters. On a lightly floured surface, use your hands to press each quarter into a circle about ½-inch thick and 6 inches in diameter.
3 In a cast-iron skillet over medium heat, melt 1 tablespoon of butter until sizzling but not brown. Slip in 1 cake and fry for 2 to 3 minutes, then flip and fry until browned, another 2 to 3 minutes. Remove to a plate. Repeat for the remaining cakes, adding a tablespoon of butter for each cake.
4 Serve immediately or hold in a 250 degree F oven for up to an hour before serving. Best slathered with yet more butter and lightly sprinkled with salt. Potato cakes can also be stored in the refrigerator for several days and reheated briefly on each side in a hot dry cast-iron skillet.
We love oats in Ireland; they’re an ancient food, and the scholarly monks who once inhabited all the ruined abbeys that still dot this island regularly ate oats with milk or cream: it must be brain food. Pinhead oatmeal is what we call those tough little nubs of oats that you can buy in cans in Ireland and often in upmarket grocery stores in the United States. If you’ve merely boiled it according to package instructions and been unimpressed, try it the old-fashioned Irish way: Soak it overnight. For an even more tender porridge, I like to bring it to a boil in a saucepan, cover it, and let it sit on the back of the stovetop overnight. In the morning, you merely have to heat the porridge through, and it’s ready to eat, no tedious half hour of simmering.
If you use this technique with traditional rolled oats (never quick or instant oats), you’ll get creamy porridge. The top Irish brand is Flahavan’s Progress Oatlets, and the oats are bigger and wider than America’s Quaker Oats. But whatever oats you use, ensure creaminess by substituting milk for some or all of the water when cooking porridge. In Ireland, we often take our porridge with a dash of cream, a sprinkle of brown sugar—and, on special occasions, a tablespoon or two of whiskey.
Makes 4 servings
1 cup pinhead oatmeal
3 cups water
¼ teaspoon salt
1 Before you go to bed, put the oats, water, and salt in a heavy saucepan with a lid.
2 Bring to a boil, then turn off the heat, cover, and let the pan sit on the stovetop all night. It’s not necessary to refrigerate.
3 In the morning, when you’re ready to eat, stir up the oats. They will have absorbed all the water and the mixture will be thickened and stiff. Cook over medium heat, stirring vigorously and pressing any lumps against the side to break them up, just until hot throughout. Eat at once.
Okay, so Ireland likes a meaty breakfast. What do vegetarians do? There are options besides resorting to a bowl of porridge every morning, and one of my favorites is to simply surround a fluffy mound of scrambled eggs with the usual accompaniments of grilled tomatoes and fried mushrooms. Using a little cream in the scrambled eggs makes them particularly unctuous. Add the requisite slice of brown bread and butter, and you have a meal even a confirmed meat-lover will enjoy.
For 1 serving
2 tablespoons butter
¾ cup white button mushrooms, thinly sliced
Salt and pepper
1 medium tomato, halved around the equator
2 eggs
2 tablespoons cream
1 Put one tablespoon of the butter in a skillet over medium-high heat and as soon as it sizzles, add the mushrooms. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and cook, stirring often, until the mushrooms are golden brown on the edges, about 5 minutes. If the heat is higher, the liquid the mushrooms give off will evaporate quickly and you can brown them faster. While the mushrooms cook, put the two tomato halves cut-side down in the skillet and let them soften and brown slightly.
2 Put the mushrooms and tomatoes aside on a serving plate and keep warm. Beat the eggs lightly in a cup with the cream. Add the remaining tablespoon of butter to the same skillet and melt the butter over medium heat. As soon as it sizzles, pour in the eggs and cook, turning them with a wooden spoon or, for fluffier eggs, a heatproof silicone spatula, until just set and not too dry, 2 to 3 minutes. Season with salt and pepper and spoon onto the plate with the mushrooms and tomatoes. Serve at once.
When hens are laying constantly in the summer, it’s hard to believe you could ever be without eggs. But winter will come and with it, a dearth of eggs. Frugal Irish farm families in times past knew what to do when the eggs were flowing and the cows were giving milk freely, too: butter the eggs. It’s best practiced on eggs that are literally still warm from being laid. A very thin layer of butter is rubbed around the egg, sealing it airtight and preserving it for several months. Eggshells are so porous the buttery flavor permeates the egg, which is why eggs are still buttered today rather than merely refrigerated.
To prepare your own buttered eggs, it is essential to have freshly laid eggs from directly underneath a hen. The eggs must still be warm or the preservation process won't work. A warm new-laid egg still has a slightly porous shell, so the softened butter is able to permeate the shell and completely seal it from oxygen. Use salted butter for best results.
To butter eggs, have butter at room temperature and rub it gently but completely into each warm egg using your hands. Be sure to really massage it into each egg for best results, using your hands to gently smooth off the excess butter and transfer it to the next egg. Store the eggs in regular egg cartons in a very cool place (the cellar of your Irish cottage is ideal). Buttered eggs keep for up to six months.
You can use a buttered egg for any recipe that calls for eggs. If you simply cook the egg for breakfast, you may be pleased to find that it has a pronounced buttery taste. For some cooks, however, the term "buttered eggs" refers to a method of scrambling eggs that makes them custard-like. Don't add water or milk, just butter. These are pure luxury.
To make 3 to 4 servings
6 buttered eggs (or regular eggs)
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
Salt and pepper
1. Break the eggs into a bowl and beat well with a fork or whisk. Heat a nonstick or cast-iron pan over low heat and melt the butter in it.
2. Pour in the eggs and cook, turning over gently with a heatproof spatula and keeping the heat very low, until just barely set. The eggs should still be slightly wet. Sprinkle lightly with salt and pepper. Eat at once.
Some of the best fish I ever ate for breakfast came after the first night I ever ate at the renowned Ballymaloe House in County Cork. We were staying at a very casual bed and breakfast in nearby Ballycotton—so casual that, when we came back after dinner with some friends who’d driven to meet us for dinner and decided to stay over instead of driving on, we booked them in ourselves, found a key to an unoccupied bedroom hanging on a shelf in the entry, and showed them to their room ourselves.
In the morning, the lady of the house calmly welcomed her unexpected new guests in the breakfast room and said to us all, “I’ve not much in the place to give you this morning for breakfast. You can have porridge or I’ll do you a fry, or, if you don’t mind waiting a moment, I’ll cook up a bit of that fish that himself is after unloading down on the dock this minute. He was out all night.” She nodded toward the window as she spoke, and we turned to see her husband unloading big wooden crates of fish from a fishing boat alongside the small dock below the house.
After the night’s feast at Ballymaloe, we’d all sworn we’d never eat again. But when she reappeared with a platter of big thick chunks of haddock, the edges golden brown and crisp, we fell on it like starving people. It was moist, meaty, and tender, some of the freshest fish I’d ever had the pleasure of eating. And while my average hunk of fried fish isn’t as good most days, it still evokes that memorable meal.
Makes 4 servings
1½ pounds fresh whitefish fillets, such as haddock or cod, each fillet about ½-inch thick
1 teaspoon salt
¼ cup flour
3 tablespoons butter
Lemon wedges
1 Sprinkle the fish on both sides with salt and flour. Heat the butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat until it sizzles.
2 Lay the floured fish into the butter and fry for 2 to 3 minutes on each side, until the edges are crisp and golden brown and the fish is cooked through. Eat at once, with lemon wedges on the side for each diner to squeeze over the fish.
