Ireland is a stunningly beautiful country. First-time visitors are always surprised to see the grass really is emerald green, and that it stays that way through the year. In the spring, bluebells sprout so profusely the gardens are a dense blue haze. Summer is a riot of foliage and morning birdsong. Autumn is full of soft mists and glowing light, and winter brings on picturesque hoarfrost that covers the hedges like icing. Everywhere you look, there’s an MGM movie set of land and water and sky.
But when I think of Ireland, I think of food.
Brown soda bread so moist it barely needs the yolk-yellow butter; sweet, briny oysters so fresh they quiver on the shells; fragrant apple tarts under tender, golden crusts; rich, heartwarming stews redolent of meaty gravy and nut-sweet carrots; crisp-edged potato cakes flipped hot from a cast-iron skillet directly onto your plate.
Forget meatloaf and macaroni and cheese—this stuff is the original comfort food.
Real Irish food is more in the style of traditional French country food—not the formalized cooking of chefs, but the classic dishes with regional variations passed down from generations of home cooks. Each bonne femme’s variation on boeuf en daube finds its counterpart in Irish stew, the countless versions of tartes au citron and mousses au chocolat are echoed by very distinct apple tarts and fruitcakes, and that extra fillip that gives life to a regional saucisson can be seen in each artisanal black pudding. Real Irish food is full of flavor and subtlety, based on prime ingredients treated with care and respect. Real Irish food is astonishing in its depth and range and mastery.
In the same way Italian food is about more than spaghetti and meatballs, real Irish food is a far more complex and exciting thing than the corned-beef-and-cabbage caricature we tend to think of in North America.
I know because I grew up eating the glories of Irish food, and I’ve missed it nearly every day of the last 20 years I have lived in the United States.
Based on my experience of St. Patrick’s Day dinners in the US, I can forgive any American for expecting real Irish cooking to be boring and bland. All that watery cabbage? Ugh, no thanks.
Happily, those once-a-year cooks are wrong about nearly everything (and one of them, whom I had to re-educate, was my own American wife!). Over the last 20 years, we have continued to divide our time between Ireland and the US, spending a good deal of time in Ireland, both living there and traveling around, and always eating, eating, eating. Indeed, one of the great pleasures of our culinary life was watching the face of our oldest son when, as a toddler, he gnawed on his first Irish sausage with a look of wonder while he joyfully repeated the Irish Gaelic word for sausage I’d just taught him: “Ispini! Ispini! Ispini!”
My parents have been the source of endless education about real Irish food from both coasts. My mother is from County Mayo, on the west coast of Ireland, one of the few places where the Irish language is still spoken and almost a land unto itself in its regional isolation. My father, in his day, was a home cook so proficient I can only describe him as smokin’. He was born and bred in Dublin, the heart of the country (from anywhere else in Ireland, one goes “up to Dublin”—to all other places, one goes “down the country”). Together, my parents raised a family of four sons who are serious eaters and cooks—half of us professionals.
Between my mom and dad alone, I sampled an enormous range of dishes and regional styles at a young age. From them, I also learned surprising culinary trivia, such as the fact that black pepper was unknown in the Ireland of their youth. White pepper was the usual seasoning, and black pepper didn’t appear regularly in stores and markets until the 1960's, when it was considered a daring and Italianate seasoning.
From them and my grandparents, I learned about the bastible, the cast-iron pot that served as a stove in traditional Irish cottages, and the moist and flavorful soda bread that emerges from it after half an hour over a turf fire. Growing up in Ireland, I learned to appreciate the beauty of Irish fruits and berries, which grow beautifully in a cold, damp climate—from wild strawberries and blueberries dotting the hillsides to the first crop of enormous golden raspberries, bursting with flavor, and cooking apples that practically beg to be made into cakes and tarts. And I have a terrific North Dublin recipe for Irish stew that includes fluffy, raisin-flecked dumplings. I learned about seafood, that at home we call “leppin’ fresh,” from the pale pink tones of true wild salmon (the dark red color of farmed salmon comes from their feed) to enormous scallops with the roe still attached. Even today, every trip back home to an Irish kitchen leaves me amazed at the incredible variety of foods, the caliber of ingredients, and the ingenuity of Irish cooks.
Most Irish people are horrified by what Americans think of as “Irish food.” That’s because the real thing is much subtler, more infinite in variety, and more tantalizing and seductive than any parsley-sprinkled platter of overcooked meat and mushy vegetables could ever hope to be. A prominent Irish chef told me recently, “When I was studying at Johnson and Wales in America, my roommate’s family invited me for dinner, and they said, ‘We’re making your favorite meal!’ It was corned beef and cabbage, and I had literally never heard of it before.”
Real Irish food is influenced by traditions dating back to the Middle Ages, when monks made the rigors of silence and celibacy more palatable with moist, honey-sweetened oatcakes and fortified themselves against pillaging invaders by brewing up heartwarming soups, dense with barley and vegetables. And centuries before that, the Brehon laws enshrined the cow as the most valuable piece of property a Hibernian could own, marking butter and milk and certainly beef as foodstuffs to be treasured and celebrated. (It’s a sentiment anyone would endorse today when tasting Ireland’s bright-yellow, low-moisture butter, the result of grass-fed cows. What’s more, in Ireland this isn’t a premium product—it’s just butter.)
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, landowners and “strong farmers” ate a diet that would be sophisticated even today, from elaborate meat and vegetable preparations to a glittering array of desserts, sweets, and imported wines. There were almonds and lemons and oranges, even artichokes, as well as fresh herb omelets (called “amblets” in some old cookbook manuscripts), rich cakes full of butter and sugar, rice and pasta, often called simply “paste” but also known as macaroni, no matter what shape, dressed with plenty of butter, cream, and “toasted cheese.”
Until recent years, Irish cooking always meant home cooking. There wasn’t a restaurant scene because Ireland was not only a poor country for most of the last century, but also a country with a strong socialist streak, and for a long time, restaurants were considered extravagant. In the last decade, Ireland’s restaurants have undergone an astonishing culinary renaissance. More and more chefs have returned from far-flung work and travel, bringing home novel ideas for transforming Irish ingredients while mining the depths of their own native cuisine to produce food that is both home-cooked and surprisingly sophisticated.
Firm and succulent Dublin Bay prawns and sweet-fleshed west-coast lobsters once took the first plane to Paris for top prices. Now they stay at home on the tables of appreciative gourmets. A country-wide movement toward organic produce, local meats, and artisan-produced items such as cheeses, breads, and chocolate—spurred in part by a concern about genetically modified food—has led to ever wider availability and quality of staples. What about potatoes? They’re everywhere, it’s true, but they’re prepared in countless different manners unknown to Americans.
Like the spectacle-wearing, shy girl in some 1950’s movie, Irish food has flung off the dowdy trappings and emerged an elegant beauty. Ireland is now a place of destination restaurants and cooking schools, a place where foreign cooks find inspiration. From hearty stews of slow-cooked meats to innovative vegetable dishes, from trays of fresh-baked, buttery scones to dense, eggy cakes and jams bursting with tart fruit, I can think of no food so warm and welcoming, so homey and family-oriented, so truly mouthwateringly satisfying as real Irish food.
So where did Americans get the idea Irish food is dull? Consider that many, many Irish-Americans trace their heritage back to the povertystricken people who fled Ireland during a horrific famine in the 1840’s. It’s no wonder the dishes that survived in America were rough-and-ready peasant food, created to offer as much bulk and sustenance as possible at the least expense. It’s the same with pasta, which Italian-Americans serve as an entire, filling meal, but which in Italy, is treated as a delicate, lightly sauced first course.
As in any culture, however, subsistence food is only part of the culinary story and has regrettably left Irish food not exactly shining. It has consistently been unsung, underappreciated, and dismissed. Irish stew, which much-missed British chef Keith Floyd once wrote would be heralded around the world had the French invented it, is mocked, unmanned, and dishonored by the watery, unmeaty versions of it purveyed in the name of Ireland by people who have never set foot on the island.
In fact, I would go so far as to place the blame squarely on corned beef for the less-than-stellar reputation that Irish food has in America. Every March 17, millions of people eat soggy cabbage and salty beef in the mistaken belief they’re paying some sort of painful culinary homage to Ireland. They’d be closer to the mark (and doubtless happier) with a pint of Guinness, a dozen fresh oysters, a sliced lemon, and some buttered brown bread. And Ireland hasn’t helped matters. They have allowed certain food myths to take hold by feeding busloads of tourists the worst sort of steam-tray potatoes and overcooked roast beef and breakfasted them on bland, lumpy porridge, brown bread, and “the truly criminal,” as Irish novelist Mary Lavin wrote, “cheap jam.”
I believe there are some souls in the west of Ireland, around County Clare, who actually do corn beef and eat it with cabbage. At best, it’s a highly specific regional dish. What the Irish do eat more generally across the country is bacon and cabbage, which looks sort of like corned beef but is so much tastier. It’s made from the “collar,” which is, to American pork butchers, the butt end of the picnic. The collar is lightly cured, then simmered with vegetables until tender and delicate, and served with what the Irish call “spring cabbage,” the very dark green first shoots of what will later be large cabbage heads. Because spring cabbage is tender, lightly cooked as it should be, and dressed with a little butter, it is miles away from a tough head of white cabbage boiled into submission.
So how can Americans possibly reproduce bacon and cabbage, or any other Irish dish that’s based on local ingredients, in their own kitchens? It can be done, with a little ingenuity and care. For instance, lightly brined Boston butt tastes almost identical to Irish bacon, and a mixture of very lightly sautéed and steamed curly kale or savoy cabbage offers a much more Irish flavor.
Fortunately, reproducing most classic Irish food doesn’t involve much sleight of hand, but it’s good to know it can be done when necessary. And the extra effort is well worth it. Tasting Irish food the way it’s meant to be tasted is nothing less than an eye-opening experience.
In this book, you’ll find a sweeping review of Irish cuisine, from food the Irish have been eating for centuries—such as porridge with cream, heart-warming beef stews, and cakes laden with dried fruit and warm spices, as well as delectable sweets made with almonds and oranges—to foods we’ve eaten merely for decades, such as holiday roast turkey with a distinctive sausage stuffing and the classic Irish breakfast of rashers, sausages, and fried eggs with grilled tomatoes and mushrooms (the black and white puddings, also integral, date back to much longer ago). Other dishes are even more recent but still hallowed in the Irish kitchen—Irish coffee, for example, was dreamed up by a bartender at Shannon Airport but is now served in any pub, consumed with great gusto by tourists and locals alike, and often caps the end of an Irish dinner party.
No matter how old or new, what’s here is real Irish food, the real stuff that people all across Ireland eat all the time (or at every holiday). And real Irish country food, like the real country foods of France and Italy, is about careful and frugal preparations to bring out the best of locally available ingredients, with time-honored and traditional recipes.
I’ve designed the recipes in this book so you can get good results in an American kitchen and an authentic feel of classic Irish dishes, even without Irish ingredients. Many tourists come home excited about the wonderful meals they’ve eaten in Ireland. They want to reproduce the wonderfully moist and nutty brown soda bread the landlady in their B&B whipped up for breakfast every morning before her eyes were even open, or they’re looking for butter that’s as flavorful and golden as what they got in their travels. But by following the recipe exactly in their American kitchens, even measuring out the whole-wheat flour by weight instead of measuring by cup, they merely get a pale brown bread, not particularly nutty or moist, topped with butter that seems white and flavorless by comparison, and they’re sadly disappointed. With the recipes here, you can reproduce the flavor, the texture, and, more importantly, the nutty moistness of typical Irish brown bread, and even, with surprisingly little difficulty, churn your own cultured butter!
Same with Irish stew. If the version served in American pubs on St. Patrick’s Day hasn’t impressed you much, try the real thing, made with lamb chops layered with thinly sliced potatoes and onions (no carrots), seasoned well, and slow-cooked in a covered pot with very little liquid. The delicate flavor, the perfectly cooked vegetables, and the tender meat will show better than any description why the Irish get so excited about stew.
You’ll find all the classics here, from barmbrack and brown scones to the old-fashioned Dublin favorite, gur cake, a sweet, sticky filling of cake crumbs, fruit, and syrup encased in tender pastry, beloved of generations of schoolchildren. There are recipes for every type of soda bread around the country, from the austere cakes of flour, buttermilk, soda and salt, to the egg, butter, and fruit-enriched versions designed for flush times, and the caraway-seeded cakes from the south, not to mention the “yellow-meal” (cornmeal) soda breads that date back to famine times when cornmeal was imported in an attempt to feed the starving.
You’ll also find recipes for everything the Irish do to a potato, from the simplest boiling (still peeled at the table, dipped in salt, and occasionally even dipped in buttermilk, the real peasant tradition) to the most elaborate champs, colcannon, poundies, boxty, and cakes, as well as a favorite fall dish, Potato-Apple Cake, a sort of dense tart. If you’re wondering what that “cally” was your Irish granny used to talk about, here’s the book to find out how to make it yourself (potatoes mashed with butter, cream, and the first of the tender summer scallions, of course). Can’t find anything to reproduce the flavor of those juicy and mild-flavored little sausages that appear on every Irish breakfast table? Make your own in the food processor or with the meat-grinder attachment on your fancy mixer. (You’ll also learn how to make traditional Irish black and white pudding, should you be so inclined, or simply where to buy either in the United States in Sources.)
Throw away your Boston grandmother’s recipe for mushy veggies and discover a method of cooking that’s fresh and simple, homey and comforting, from warm, soothing honest breads and cakes, to original and inviting vegetables, with grace notes of exquisite seafood and delectable roast meats. You will also discover fascinating bits of Irish culinary history, from country remedies for coughs and colds to festive dishes and special feasts. The old saying goes that everyone is a little bit Irish on St. Patrick’s Day, and with any recipe here, you’ll be glad to claim that heritage.
Cool, wet climates aren’t usually considered good for growing. In Ireland, however, the weather creates unparalleled strawberries, red and golden raspberries, tangy blackberries free for the taking along every country roadside, and fragrant wild blueberries, known as fraughans (FROCK-ens). Not to mention there are apples galore, from the delicately perfumed Cox’s orange pippins, typically served with nothing more than a fruit knife, to the lumpy, misshapen Bramleys, a cooking apple whose tart, meaty flesh, the true essence of apple, makes a Golden Delicious taste like papery mush.
Classic Irish food showcases this harvest of cool weather better than any other culture: carrots, onions, parsnips, and other root vegetables of an unsurpassed sweetness, all types of potatoes bursting their skins with floury, flavorful goodness, fruits I dare any other country to match, and meat that still tastes of meat. Irish dairy products include a rich and bright yellow butter with the highest fat content, more flavorful than anything to be found in Normandy. Like the French, the Irish culture the cream slightly before churning, and the resulting golden block of butter is a condiment, a spread, and a sauce in its own right. Irish eggs have the dark orange yolk of the real organic, free-range egg, and Irish beef is truly grass-fed, with the chewy, beefy flavor so lacking in corn-fed meat.
The best American chefs insist on knowing the source of their ingredients, and they spend time and effort hunting out local suppliers, but the average Irish village inhabitant can walk into the local butcher shop and buy a piece of beef, pork, or lamb that likely came from the butcher’s own flock or that of one of his family members.
Fishmongers at any town near the coast (and since it’s a pretty small island, many towns are near the coast) can supply seafood and shellfish straight off a boat that same day, and sometimes they smoke their own salmon into the bargain. Eggs and dairy products are antibiotic and hormone-free, and usually organic, even at the largest supermarkets.
It is, truly, a gourmet’s paradise.
But what do home cooks do back in the kitchen with all this fresh, seasonal, organic bounty? They transform it into a huge and fascinating range of foods. Give any type of artist absolute freedom, an unlimited budget and endless approval, and most of them will end up paralyzed with indecision.
But impose strict limitations—and creativity flows. (Look at Michelangelo: He never did better work than when some patron was breathing down his neck, or his block of marble was flawed.) Thus the traditional Irish cook found endless and infinitely delicious variety within basic vegetables and fruits, a simple range of meats and poultry, an abbreviated list of herbs and spices, good eggs and dairy, and excellent grains.
From these building blocks of the classic Irish kitchen, what riches have flowed! Ireland is a small place (about the size of Maine). It doesn’t have the range in produce of a country the size of France, where you’ll find goose fat and winey richness in Quercy and the Périgord; zesty, herband-olive-oil Mediterranean flavors in Provence; and butterfat, apple cider, and tender tarts in Normandy. Instead, Ireland’s regions came up with dramatically different regional styles for similar ingredients, from the boxty (a sort of crepe) of Ulster in the north, to the caraway-studded buttery potato cakes of Munster in the South, to the meaty stews of Leinster, and the moist hearth-baked breads of Connaught (this is where, occasionally, you may find corned beef ).
The bountiful Irish table includes roast meats accompanied by sauces of bread or onions, thin gravies that taste wholly of meat, and stuffings of sausage, apple, and sage; whole salmon are brought “leppin’ fresh” from the dockside to the table, troubled by little more than steam and homemade mayonnaise; lobsters, oysters, and Dublin Bay prawns, which grow succulently sweet in our cold seawater, are served with drawn butter or a light sauce made of cream, not flour.
Turkeys with a delightfully gamy savor are accompanied by lardons of smoky bacon, chickens that actually taste like chicken, and flocks of game birds, from squab, quail, and pheasant, to woodcock, grouse, and snipe, are roasted with a huntsman’s skill and served alongside their roasted organs spread on a bit of buttery toast, with floury potatoes cooked multiple ways. Like most Western cultures, the Irish are not vegetarians, but they indulge their passion for meat with a distinct respect for its origins. Poultry at the butcher comes with head and feet still attached, and often even plastic-wrapped supermarket chickens are not entirely denuded of their feathers.
Irish stews include far more variations than the simple classic of mutton, potatoes, carrots, and onions. My father produced an excellent and unusual version of Irish stew from his mother’s recipe that included small fluffy dumplings made of suet, flour, raisins, and parsley, that not only lightened the stew, but also stretched it, perhaps invented for large hungry families on Dublin’s north side. My County Mayo grandmother, however, on the opposite side of the country, had the bounty of a rural area at her fingertips, and her stew was thickened with nothing more than potatoes and onions cooked until they almost fell apart.
Irish vegetable dishes are legendary, especially colcannon, the traditional autumn dish of mashed potatoes and chopped kale (not cabbage, as occasionally seen when colcannon is made in the United States), served in a high mound filled with a pool of melted butter so each forkful can be dipped into the butter. It wouldn’t be Halloween night (Samhain, in the Irish language) without a heaping plateful of colcannon, to keep the chill and the ghostly spirits away, followed by a thick slice of barmbrack, or simply brack, a sweetened yeast bread filled with dried fruits. Each glistening dark-brown loaf contains a toy ring or a coin, carefully wrapped in paper, to bring luck to the recipient for the coming year.
But brack (from the Irish word “breac,” meaning cake, or loaf) barely scratches the surface of Irish baking. Every region makes brown bread in a different style, but the classics usually contain little more than whole-meal flour, baking soda (or “bread soda,” as we call it), salt, and buttermilk. The skill is in the mixing, with the hands of the experienced cook feeling exactly how much liquid and how much kneading are required for the moistest, most delicately flavored loaf. Traditionally, brown bread was cooked in a pot-oven or a “bastible,” a cast-iron, three-legged pot set into the fire, covered, and heaped with glowing coals. The resulting bread was moist with a faint, almost indefinable hint of turf smoke. (One of my elderly great-uncles in County Meath, who lived in an old thatched cottage, baked in a bastible until the end of his life, in the 1960’s, sucking gently on a pipe while he waited the requisite hour for his bread to finish baking.)
