If you live in a major metropolitan area in the Northeast—Boston, say, or New York City—finding authentic Irish food is pretty easy. You may have to make a few phone calls, but within easy reach you can find numerous shops and importers selling all manner of Irish teas, biscuits, and sausages, even household supplies. In traditionally Irish neighborhoods such as Woodside, Queens, in New York, you’ll even find butchers making fresh Irish sausages and curing their own rashers and boiling bacon, as well as bakeries producing Irish baked goods.
Some authentic Irish products are now easily found in supermarkets all across the United States, so you can get Kerrygold butter, salted (in the gold wrapper) and unsalted (in the silver wrapper), which is the brand I always eat at home. Wherever you find Kerrygold, you’ll usually also get Dubliner, a sharp cheese with the classic crumbly, fudgy texture of the best cheddars.
Failing that, you can order a lot of Irish food online.
This is one of the best all-around sites for basic ingredients, not just processed foods. Here’s where you will find Irish flours, such as Odlum’s cream flour, a popular brand of soft wheat flour for baking, as well as Odlum’s Extra Coarse Whole-meal, the flour that gives brown soda bread its distinctly nutty flavor. You can also order meats, beverages, sweets and jams, and even fresh baked goods.
An Irish-based website, Good Food Ireland exists to promote excellent Irish food and producers, and it’s packed with information on the top purveyors of different types of food. If you click on the link “Buy Online,” it will take you to pages and pages of sites where you can buy foods directly from individual producers, many of whom have the capability to ship outside of Ireland. One such producer is the Burren Smokehouse (www.burrensmokehouse.ie), a wonderful artisan smoker of salmon and other fish.
It will take a little surfing, but there are lots of treasures to be discovered at Good Food Ireland’s main site: www.goodfoodireland.ie.
The food section on this site has lots of non-perishable packaged items, such as Irish teas, jams and preserves, chocolates, biscuits and crackers, and mustards and other condiments.
This site sells primarily British food, but they have a good section of commercial Irish foods, including the elusive red lemonade, a fizzy drink that’s exclusive to Ireland, where it’s a popular bar mixer. They also have frozen items such as sausages, rashers, black and white pudding, and soda bread.
Irish Grub is a California-based company that makes Irish style meats out of American pork, including rashers and sausages and black and white pudding. This is the place to get real boiling bacon.
So it’s a German butcher. It’s also the source of excellent pork products, including cured Irish boiling bacon. At their site, search “Irish” and you’ll find it.