Take the red kidney bean (the white will not keep) lay a layer of beans and a layer of salt in a crock till full put suet a top to keep out the air, small pots are best for that reason, when you dress your beans cut them longways like chips and lay them in warm water to take out the salt change the water two or three times it will make them green and fresh boil them as usual.
—from an 18th century Irish cookbook manuscript
Here’s a brief tale that will illustrate better than anything else how the Irish feel about potatoes: To understand it, you must first know the French pride themselves, as with so many other of their food, on the quality of their potatoes, and they are exquisite. I can buy expensive French fingerling potatoes, such as rattes, at gourmet stores and greenmarkets at a huge markup in New York. And yet, when my parents used to own a house in France where they stayed for long months every summer, they took along enough potatoes to last them all summer. As much as they loved France, and the food, and the wine, there was simply no negotiating when it came to potatoes. Proper Irish potatoes or nothing.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the key characteristic is flouriness, no matter what you’re doing to them. In America, the best bet is probably a russet. When we want a waxier potato, we call it a new potato, and we eat it with butter and mint as a rite to herald the arrival of spring.
In the same way Eskimos are supposed to have countless words for snow, we have countless things you can do to a potato, and I’ll give you the major recipes and a few of the quirkier ones. But what other vegetables do we eat? Cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, leeks and onions, kale and Brussels sprouts, celery and parsnips, turnips and rutabagas, lined up roughly in order of popularity. If you told most Irish people they could never have any other vegetable again besides these—and potatoes, obviously—most of them would look at you blankly: What other vegetables are there?
Halloween is actually an Irish holiday. Called Samhain (SOW-ann) in ancient Celtic tradition, it’s the traditional autumn festival when the spirits of the dead walk the earth. Translated to the Christian era from the pagan, it became All Hallow’s Eve, the night before All Saint’s Day. Thus the spirits and the jack-o'-lanterns carried from one tradition to the next. Turnips used to be carved out and lit to frighten away unwanted interaction between the living and dead on the long dark roads. The Irish still have unlit roads throughout the country, but people don’t walk them with carved turnips. They do, however, still eat the traditional foods of Halloween—barmbrack and colcannon. In the Catholic tradition, All Hallow’s Eve was a fast day, meaning no meat, but this supper of potatoes mashed with butter and cream, scallions, and chopped kale, was warming and satisfying. It’s traditionally served in a huge mound, a festive meal eaten communally, with a pool of melted butter in the center for dipping. For Halloween, a coin, a button, a ring, and a thimble were hidden in the colcannon. Whoever found one received, respectively, wealth, bachelorhood, marriage, or spinsterhood in the coming year.
Makes 4 servings
8 large russet potatoes
1 pound curly kale
Salt
1 cup half and half (or whole milk)
1 bunch scallions, green parts only, chopped
2 tablespoons butter (and more for serving)
Freshly ground white pepper
1 Peel and quarter the potatoes and place in a saucepan. Fill with cold water to cover and add a teaspoon of salt. Simmer until potatoes are tender, about 20 minutes.
2 While the potatoes are cooking, bring a second pot of salted water to a boil. Strip the kale from the tough center ribs and discard the ribs. Chop the kale coarsely and cook in the boiling water until tender, about 15 minutes. Drain, and when it’s cool enough to handle, chop it very finely.
3 In a small saucepan, heat the half-and-half or milk until hot, not boiling. Stir in the chopped scallions and the butter.
4 Mash the potatoes, stirring in the half-and-half.
GREEN STUFF
Although the name colcannon originally comes from the Irish cal ciann fhionn, meaning white-headed cabbage, it has been made all over Ireland for generations using dark green curly kale, never cabbage. In Ireland, curly kale shows up in stores in the autumn, right around Halloween.
How can new potatoes herald the arrival of spring? Our winters are generally quite temperate: the first daffodils push up in mid-February, and the first tiny potatoes are ready to be harvested about a month after that. They’re always eaten boiled, sometimes with butter and salt, but usually like this:
Boil new potatoes in cold, salted water until tender, about 10 minutes. Drain the potatoes, leaving just a tablespoon or so of the cooking water in the pot. Drop in a big lump of butter and a handful of thinly sliced fresh mint leaves. Cover with the pot’s lid, and holding the lid down firmly with a dish towel or potholder, shake the pot firmly up and down and side to side. The butter, mint, and cooking water will emulsify into a sort of sauce on the slightly bruised and bumped up potatoes, whose skins will crack during the shaking to absorb the sauce. Eat at once.
If you’ve ever eaten at an Irish hotel, you probably had some potatoes on the plate with a sort of leathery, brown skin. Those were meant to be roasted potatoes, parboiled and baked with fat until they’re crisped and browned. But roast potatoes famously do not hold up well, so hotel versions, even at good restaurants, are usually a disappointment. This is a treat best made at home.
We call them “roasties,” and they’re either a special-occasion treat or an everyday occurrence, depending on the patience of who does the cooking at your house. People take their roasties very seriously, and there’s a trick to getting them just right. One of those tricks is goose fat, which some families stockpile from the holiday bird and save all year. (It will stay fresh in the refrigerator for months.) The other is parboiling to just the right point. We have a name for roasties that are boiled too long: Mashed Potatoes.
To make good roasties, peel as many medium-sized, floury potatoes as you want. Larger potatoes should be halved. The ideal size is a sort of medium, oval potato: not too big, not too small or round like a new potato. The oven is presumably already blazing away, roasting your joint or bird, but if not, preheat it to about 400 degrees F. Place potatoes in cold, salted water and boil for about 15 minutes, until the potato is not quite cooked. A knife can’t push to the center with total ease. You sort of have to try it a few times and develop a feel for it.
Drain the parboiled potatoes and let them dry out for a couple minutes.
Some people preheat a baking dish with oil in it. I heat oil in a very large cast-iron skillet on the stovetop. But whatever method you prefer, don’t put potatoes in cold oil for roasties.
Here’s how I do it: Heat a large, heavy, ovenproof skillet on the stovetop for several minutes. Ladle about 1/4 inch of fat (goose, duck, beef ), peanut oil, or olive oil in the bottom. Let the fat or oil heat in the skillet for a couple minutes. Add the potatoes and gently ladle the hot fat over each one. Don’t toss them vigorously, or you’ll break up the potatoes.
Sprinkle lightly with salt. Place in the oven and bake for 45 to 60 minutes, shaking the pan now and then. Roasties can be forgiving enough to stay in the oven another 20 to 30 minutes if your roast isn’t done yet, but no longer. They should be very crispy and dark brown all over. Keeping them warm for more than an hour will result in that leathery hotel skin.
Combining cooked and raw potato with flour to make a thick cake is a decidedly northern recipe. It’s very common throughout Ulster, and we’re aware of it and occasionally run across it in other parts of Ireland, the same way, you might say, that parts of America know other parts of America eat a lot of barbecue, even though you might not eat it every day. There is in Dublin a restaurant of many years standing called The Boxty House, where large, flat boxty cakes are rolled around a variety of fillings such as creamed bacon and cabbage.
1 large potato
2 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for kneading
1 cup leftover mashed potatoes
½ cup (1 stick) butter
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 to 3 tablespoons whole milk
1 Grate the raw potato directly into a bowl. Lift the pieces and squeeze them into the bowl with your hands, setting the squeezed shreds aside on a small plate. You’re trying to get as much liquid out as possible. Let the liquid in the bowl settle, then pour the thin juice off the dense starch that will settle to the bottom. Discard the juice and return the shreds to the bowl.
2 Stir in the flour, mashed potato, and butter right away to prevent the grated potato from discoloring. Add the baking powder and salt, and turn the mixture out onto a lightly floured work surface. Knead gently, just to combine. If the dough is very stiff and dry, knead in a couple tablespoons milk.
3 Divide the dough into quarters. Pat each piece into a large circle about ½-inch thick. If you’re filling them, leave them whole, but if you’re eating them the traditional way, use a knife to score each circle with a cross, cutting not quite through the dough.
4 Heat a cast-iron skillet over medium heat. With a large spatula, lift each boxty into the pan. Cook on each side until golden brown, 5 to 6 minutes per side. Eat hot, with butter.
Mashed potatoes with hot milk, butter, and scallions, or green onions, as we call them in Ireland, is what Dubliners call Champ. But my mother is from the west of Ireland, and she always refers to this dish as Cally. When we make plain mashed potatoes, with a little butter, milk, and salt and pepper, we like them quite stiff and dry. But when we make Champ, they should be softer and looser. It’s typically served with a good dollop of butter on top of each person’s mound of potatoes, and in country families, a filling plate of cally might serve as your entire evening meal.
Makes 4 to 6 servings
8 large russet potatoes, peeled
¾ cup whole milk
¼ cup (½ stick) butter, plus more for serving
1 bunch scallions
Salt and pepper
1 Halve or quarter the potatoes if they’re very large. Put them in a large saucepan and cover with cold, salted water. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, reduce the heat slightly, and simmer the potatoes until tender, 12 to 15 minutes. Drain well and shake the drained potatoes in the pan over the heat for a moment to dry them out.
2 Before the potatoes finish cooking, heat the milk and butter together in a small saucepan. Slice the scallions, green and white parts, thinly. Turn this mixture into the milk and heat through, just to soften the scallions slightly.
3 Mash the potatoes with a masher and slowly blend in the milk mixture. You may not need quite all the milk. Beat the potatoes with a fork or a large wooden spoon to make them fluffy. The potatoes should be soft but not too loose; they should still be able to form a peak so they can be mounded on serving plates. Season well with salt and pepper.
4 To serve, heap up a portion of champ on a plate, make a dent in the top of the mound and drop in a dollop of butter to melt into the indentation.
Praties in the Kettle
Growing up in Dublin, I often spent summers on Inisheer, the smallest of the three Aran Islands off the coast of Galway. This counted as summer camp for Irish kids. We were distributed, several teens to a house, among the island residents, and we spent our days roaming the island, practicing our Irish vocabulary, and listening to local musicians at night. But one of the things I remember most vividly is how the bean an tí (bahn ahn tee— literally “woman of the house” and the sole name we all used to address our hostesses) cooked.
In the cottage where I stayed, the bean an tí had two cast-iron kettles in her kitchen, and not much more. The small cast-iron kettle was known as a bastible. It had legs to stand in the fire and a close-fitting lid. She’d put it in the fireplace and heap coals on the lid to bake the soda bread. The larger one served to boil the mountains of potatoes that, along with fish, made up our diet.
She always fed us before the fear an tí (far ahn tee, “the man of the house”) came home from fishing, and she boiled our potatoes on the stovetop. The man of the house, however, preferred the taste of potatoes cooked in cast iron over a peat fire, so when he came home after his day’s labors on the waves, the woman of the house lugged that heavy kettle over to the fire to provide that smokey turf fire flavor for him.
This potato salad looks extremely simple (okay, I’ll just say it: plain) compared to American potato salads full of mustard, vinegar, dill pickles, eggs, and so on. But it has a surprisingly robust character that highlights the flavor of the potato, so this is a great recipe to show off distinctive heirloom potatoes or pricey fingerlings. Don’t skimp on the chives. An entire bunch is necessary to bring out their gentle savor.
Though the Irish love floury potatoes, fluffy, floury spuds tend to break apart when boiling and can fall into mush when stirred up as a potato salad. Be sure to use a waxier boiling potato for this salad, such as Red Bliss or a multi-purpose potato such as Yukon Gold.
Makes 4 servings
1½ pounds boiling potatoes, scrubbed, skins on, halved
½ cup mayonnaise
1 bunch fresh chives, chopped in pieces about ½-inch long (about ¾ cup chopped)
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Juice of 1 lemon
1 Cook the potatoes until tender. Drain and cool in large glass bowl. When the potatoes are cool enough to handle, cut them into bitesize pieces. Remove any large pieces of skin that slip off as you work, but pieces of skin that cling to the potato should remain.
2 In a small bowl, stir together the mayonnaise, chives, salt, pepper, and lemon juice. Pour over the potatoes and stir gently to combine. Chill until ready to serve.
As I have mentioned elsewhere, in Ireland the cabbage we eat so much of is not the greeny-white heads of tightly packed cabbage found in America. Instead, our typical cabbage is early-season spring cabbage: big, long, loose bunches of heavy, dark-green leaves. York cabbage is a popular variety of spring cabbage, and while you will see cabbage in Irish markets throughout the year, the best, freshest, sweetest bunches appear in the early spring. I’ve never come across Irish spring cabbage in America, but I get good results by substituting milder savoy cabbage, which is somewhat similar to spring cabbage in shape and size, and adding a little kale for color and flavor.
Makes 6 servings
3 tablespoons butter
1 pound savoy cabbage, cored and chopped
½ pound kale (1 small bunch), stems discarded, roughly chopped
Salt and pepper
1 In a large pot over medium heat, melt the butter. When it foams, add the chopped kale and toss to coat. Pour in a cup of water and clap on the lid. Bring to a boil and cook, 5 to 7 minutes, until the leaves are softened.
2 Add the savoy cabbage and stir it in well. Put the lid back on and cook another 6 to 7 minutes, just until the leaves are tender but still toothsome, not mushy. Season liberally with salt and plenty of black pepper. Eat hot.
Coarsely mashing boiled carrots and parsnips together with a little butter highlights the sweetness of both. The two vegetables will not fully incorporate completely into a pale orange mash, but instead the orange and white parts stay just separate enough to make a beautiful mosaic. Alongside a heap of dark-green spring cabbage, it’s an Irish flag on a plate.
Makes 6 serving
1 pound carrots (3 to 4 large)
1 pound parsnips (about 4 to 6 medium)
Salt and pepper
2 to 3 tablespoons butter
1 Peel and dice the carrots and parsnips. Put in a saucepan with cold, salted water just to cover. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer gently until the vegetables are completely tender, 15 to 20 minutes. (Test them once or twice with a fork.)
2 Drain and add the butter to the pot. Mash with a potato masher to a coarse purèe, and season with plenty of salt and black pepper.
The sort of sugar or maple-glazed cooked carrots you sometimes see in America are uncommon in Ireland. If Americans can be said to have a sweet tooth, I think it’s only fair to say the Irish have a butter-and-cream tooth! Root vegetables tend to be pretty sweet on their own, so we just glaze them with liberal amounts of butter, or sometimes a cream sauce. For glazed carrots, cut peeled carrots into thin slices on the diagonal, and simmer in salted water until tender. Drain and add enough butter to give them a sheen. Remember large carrots tend to be sweeter than their smaller, skinnier counterparts.
I wonder if it’s because our weather is so raw already that we don’t eat much in the way of raw vegetables. The way the American kids eat raw celery and carrot sticks, Irish kids will eat cooked celery and carrot slices, often floating in a slightly thickened butter sauce. The celery should be cut in slightly bigger pieces than the carrots, so they cook evenly. It’s common to make this dish with something very simple, such as boiled potatoes and roast chicken, so the sauce on the vegetables serves as a sort of overall gravy for the plate. I simmer the vegetables entirely in chicken stock, to infuse them with more flavor, but you can also simmer them in salted water until tender, then drain them and make the sauce as below but using 1 ½ cups chicken stock.
Makes 6 servings
1 pound carrots (3 to 4 large)
1 pound celery (4 to 5 stalks)
3 cups chicken stock
3 tablespoons butter, softened
3 tablespoons flour
Salt and pepper
1 Peel the carrots and cut into ¼-inch slices on the diagonal. Cut the celery into ½-inch pieces. Place in a saucepan and cover with the chicken stock. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, cover loosely, and simmer gently for 15 to 20 minutes, until the vegetables are completely tender when pierced with a knife.
2 While the vegetables are cooking, in a small plate or bowl, cream the softened butter with the flour using a fork or the back of a spoon.
3 When the vegetables are tender, some of the stock will have evaporated. Drop nuggets of the butter-flour mixture into the bubbling liquid and stir to combine. Watch as you stir; if the sauce starts to thicken to your liking, you may not need the entire amount of butter and flour. You want a thick sauce with a buttery sheen, but still liquid enough to flow like gravy, not a dense paste. Season with salt, if needed, and lots of black pepper.
In Ireland, when we make mashed turnips, it’s nearly always mashed rutabaga. Actual turnips are the little, watery-fleshed, sweet, white and pink root vegetables we roast or boil and eat in spring. But the meatier, starchier veg we call “turnip” is the big, starchy, yellow-fleshed vegetable Americans mostly think of as rutabagas. They usually come thickly waxed, and there’s a band of dark purple around the stem end. They are tough to peel with a vegetable peeler. It’s easier to cut the stem end off level, then turn the rutabaga upside down on a cutting board, and carefully sawing downward as you work your way around, cut the waxed skin off in big peels with a sharp chef ’s knife.
Makes 4 servings
1 large rutabaga
2 to 3 tablespoons butter
Salt and pepper
1 Peel the rutabaga and cut into 1-inch cubes. Put in a saucepan and cover with salted water. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, reduce heat, and simmer until tender. This may take as little as 15 minutes, or as long as 25 minutes, depending on the age of your rutabaga. Check it occasionally with the tip of a paring knife to see if it’s tender.
2 Drain well and add as much butter as you can bear—even 4 tablespoons, if you like. Mash with a potato masher and then whip with a fork to make them fluffy. Season with a little salt, if needed, and a lot of black pepper. The pepper’s bite is delicious against the sweet, buttery flesh.
When I was a child, the words “Cauliflower Cheese” struck horror into me at dinnertime, mainly because my mother’s occasionally over-frugal ways meant it was simply a boiled cauliflower covered in a lumpy white sauce of far more flour than cheese. I have since gone on to a much more successful career in cauliflower and cheese, so that my older son greets this dish at supper with cries of joy. White pepper is common, because it adds a sharper flavor to the sauce, but black pepper is fine, too.
Makes 6 servings
1 large head cauliflower
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons flour
1½ cups whole milk
8 ounces sharp cheddar cheese (preferably white cheddar)
¼ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
Salt and black or white pepper
1 Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F and butter a 1-quart shallow casserole dish. Break the cauliflower into florets and boil or steam until tender, 10 to 15 minutes. (I like to steam it because then the cauliflower is not waterlogged and tastes cheesier.)
2 In a medium saucepan over medium heat, melt the butter and stir in the flour. Pour the milk slowly in, whisking constantly, to avoid lumps. Bring the milk just to a simmer, stirring frequently, and cook 2 to 3 minutes, until the sauce thickens.
3 Add the cheese by handfuls, reserving one last handful. Stir until melted. Season with nutmeg, salt, and plenty of pepper.
4 Spread the cooked cauliflower florets evenly in the prepared casserole dish and pour the cheese sauce over all. Sprinkle the reserved handful of cheese over the top. Bake for 10 minutes, until the casserole is bubbling and lightly browned in spots.
When my wife and I were dating—she was an American student in Dublin at the time—we used to often cook elaborate meals together, drinking a glass of wine or two as we worked. Now, dinner preparation begins with one of us saying frantically, “Who’s making dinner?! Quick! The kids are starving!” But back in the day, during one of our leisurely courtship rituals, I was involved in something complicated—I don’t recall, wrapping a beef tenderloin in pastry or something else I’d never do now—while she looked on and sipped from her glass. Distracted, I said to her rather sharply, “Haven’t you prepped that fennel yet? This is going to be done soon!” and she said to me, helplessly looking around the kitchen, “But…I don’t know what fennel is!” We’ve come a long way.
Makes 4 servings
2 large fennel bulbs
2 tablespoons butter
1½ cups chicken stock
Salt and pepper
1 Prepare the fennel by trimming off the protruding fronds and stems, leaving only the solid bulb, which is sort of ribbed like celery. Trim off the root end, leaving a flat base, and then, cutting downward, quarter each bulb.
2 Slice each quarter into thin pieces lengthwise. The fennel bulb will naturally fall into segments, so trim it just to make sure the pieces are all a similar size.
3 In a large skillet, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the fennel and toss to coat. Stir and cook for 3 to 4 minutes to let the fennel pieces brown a little. Pour on the chicken stock, cover, and simmer gently for 15 minutes, until the fennel is tender.
4 Remove the lid, raise the heat slightly if necessary, and simmer to reduce the stock to a light syrupy glaze. Taste and season with salt, if needed, and plenty of black pepper.
Meatless meals on Friday were once extremely important in Ireland, as the Catholic Church considered Friday a fasting day, requiring some sort of penance, such as abstaining from meat. (Although Ireland remains a mostly Catholic country, the practice has largely died out.) This leek and cheese pie, bolstered with potatoes, is in the style of filling vegetarian dishes that might constitute dinner on a meatless Friday. Skipping the crust makes it an elegant and elaborate side dish for a festive meal and helps highlight the leeks’ delicate flavor. Americans tend to use leeks mainly for soup, but in Ireland they’re a more multi-purpose vegetable, whether braised, baked, boiled, roasted as a vegetable to accompany roast meats, or incorporated into other dishes.
Makes 4 servings
For the pastry:
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
8 tablespoons (1 stick) cold butter
1 large egg, divided into white and yolk
1 tablespoon cold water
For the filling:
2 medium baking potatoes
6 large leeks, green parts removed, sliced into 
-inch rounds and washed well in cold water
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons flour
1½ cups milk
2 cups grated sharp cheddar
¼ teaspoon grated nutmeg
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 Make the pastry combining the flour and salt in a food processor. Cut the butter into 8 pieces and pulse until mixture resembles fine cornmeal. Add the egg yolk (reserving the white) and 1 tablespoon cold water and process until the mixture forms a ball. If you need more water, add it 1 teaspoon at a time. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and place in the freezer for ½ hour, or in the refrigerator for up to 2 days.
2 To make the filling, peel the potatoes and cut them into bite-size pieces. Cook in salted water until tender, then drain, reserving ½ cup of the cooking water.
3 Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Sauté the leeks in butter until softened, then sprinkle on the flour and stir well. Stir in the milk slowly and cook until sauce thickens. Add the cheese and stir over medium heat until melted. Season with nutmeg, salt, and pepper to taste.
4 Stir in the cooked, drained potatoes and a couple tablespoons of the potato cooking water so the mixture isn’t too thick. (Add more if it looks very thick. The leeks and potatoes should be saucy.)
5 Roll out half the pastry and fit it into a deep-dish, 8-inch pie pan. Spoon in the leek mixture. Roll out the remaining pastry and cover the top of the pastry, crimping the edges with a fork.
6 Cut several long slits in the top, crust, and brush all over with the reserved egg white. Bake for 50-60 minutes, until the crust is golden brown and the sauce is bubbling through the slits. (If the edges brown before the sauce is bubbling, cover the edges with aluminum foil.)
RUB IT IN
Food processors make pastry incredibly simple. It’s much easier to cut shortening into flour with a high-speed blade rather than the labor-intensive work of cutting it with two knives or a fork. Irish recipes for pastry never say to “cut” in the butter, however; they usually say to “rub” in the butter. My wife asked me about that early in our marriage and I was surprised. “You know—like this,” I said, rubbing my thumbs and fingers together. It was her turn to look surprised. “With your hands?” “Yeah,” I said. “It’s much easier that way.”
And so it is. Take off any rings or jewelry and put your hands in the bowl and rub the butter and flour between your fingers. It’s faster than a pastry cutter or two knives, and nearly as fast—and effective—as using a food processor. And despite all the dire warnings against warming the butter with your hands, I’ve never had a problem with the texture of my pastry crust.
