Dairy Products
Bachelor’s fare; bread
and cheese, and kisses.
Jonathan Swift
Ireland has always been famous for its rich and creamy butter, as the lush pastures support large herds of productive dairy cattle. The Gaelic word for the greenest grass, watered by a stream, is glasghaibhlinn and this pasture produces the best milk, of which the last and richest part is sniugadh. In the past, farmers used to make their own produce, but now there are numerous large butteries spread across the country, and some are now diversifying into different dairy products, such as butters flavoured with garlic and herbs or other ingredients. Ireland is now the fourteenth largest producer of butter in the world and much of its produce is exported to other countries. Butter, cream and other dairy products have always been used extensively in Irish cooking.
There are two main types of butter. Sweet cream butter is made from fresh cream, while lactic butter is made from ripened cream to which bacterial agents have been added to improve the flavour. This is salted butter. The cream from around ten litres/18 pints of milk goes into making just 450 g/1 lb of butter. With a high energy content, butter contains calcium and vitamins A and D. In medieval times, butter was packed into wooden churns and stored in peat bogs. This bog butter, as it was known, has been found in bogs after hundreds of years. It was sadly inedible, but still smelled like and resembled very cold, hard butter.
Buttermilk, locally known as ‘bonny clobber’, is used extensively in Irish cooking. Although it is now manufactured using a culture, it was traditionally the liquid left over after churning the butter, and it has a distinctive sour flavour. Once quite difficult to buy in the supermarkets, it is again much more readily available, but you can substitute milk mixed with a teaspoon of lemon juice if necessary. The container generally used to carry buttermilk is known in Gaelic as a piggin.
The cream is the part of the milk that contains most of the fat, and the different types of cream have different culinary qualities because of that. Single cream contains 18 per cent butterfat and is used to give a smooth texture and flavour to many dishes, while double cream contains 48 per cent butterfat and is used in richer dishes and for thickening. Another type of cream more usually associated with the West Country of England but also well used in Ireland is clotted cream, and its use probably came over to
Ireland from Cornwall. It is made by leaving milk to stand for 12 hours, then heating it gently and skimming off the crusty layer from the top. In Connaught and Ulster, there are still stories of butter fairies who steal the cream from the top of any milk left standing, and leprechauns who turn the milk sour.
Cheese, or cais in Gaelic, is one of our oldest foods and was probably eaten as long as 11,000 years ago. In Ireland, the art of cheese-making dates back at least to the travelling monks of the ninth and tenth centuries, and cheese has been an important ingredient in the Irish diet since early Christian times. Towards the end of the 1600s, however, the art of making cheese went into something of a decline and by the mid-nineteenth century, around the time of the Great Famine, cheese-making in Ireland had almost died out. Over the past few decades, however, the revival in local cheese-making has produced a wonderful selection of cheeses.
Originally a method of preserving milk, cheese is made by curdling milk with rennet, creating a solid, the curds, and a liquid, the whey. The country way of making an Irish cream cheese was by putting thick curds into a cloth and hanging the cloth bag from the roof of the cottage, letting the thin, watery liquid drain out. The remaining cheese was then placed in a hooped, wooden sieve, pressed down and left to mature. Hard cheeses were made by drawing off the curds, which were then pressed, or moulded, salted, drained, dried, cured and aged, then ripened by various methods to produce the different varieties of cheese, all rich in protein, fat, minerals and vitamin A. The flavour of the final product depends both on exactly how the cheese is made and also on the source of the milk – cows, sheep or goats – and on the pasture on which they have grazed.
About 30 farmhouse cheese-makers currently make over 40 different varieties of traditional Irish cheeses but there are around 170 different Irish cheeses altogether, and they vary considerably in texture and strength from the semi-soft derrynaflan cheese to the hard, unpasteurized gigginstown cheese. Dunlop was originally an Irish cheese which was introduced into Scotland by a refugee from religious persecution in the seventeenth century. It is similar to cheddar but with a moist, fine texture. Also similar to cheddar is Ireland’s only raw-milk cheese, made by Baylough in Clogheen, Tipperary. Likened to gouda, coolea cheese is a cows’ milk cheese with orange rind which is made in County Cork and is ideal for recipes where grated hard Irish cheese is called for. Another cheese likened to Dutch cheese is ardrahan, also from Cork. The dry and crumbly gabriel cheese is ideal for any recipe that calls for parmesan. Carrigaline Farmhouse produces mild, semi-hard cheeses either natural, or flavoured with garlic and herbs. Friesian cows’ milk is used to prepare Riverville Farmhouse cheese in Galway, and three flavours are produced, as well as original: garlic, peppered and spiced.
One of the first Irish blue cheeses to be made in country farmhouses was cashel blue, a cows’ milk cheese from Tipperary, which has been compared to gorgonzola.
Mileens, a product of West Cork, is a soft, spicy, creamy cheese with the texture of camembert. The rind of this cheese is washed in salt water as it matures. A similar cheese, made in Thurles in County Tipperary, is Cooleeny Farmhouse cheese, with its white mould rind and gooey inside. The cheeses made at the Carrigbyrne Farmhouse are likened to a cross between camembert and brie. One, musky-flavoured Irish cheese is gubbeen, which is made in Skull in County Cork with vegetarian rennet and unpasteurized cows’ milk. These ingredients are also used in durrus cheese, a soft variety with a dark pink rind. Produced in Cork, this is a mellow, wholesome cheese.
Knockanore Farmhouse also makes a variety of cheeses, including oak-smoked, red, garlic, herb, black pepper and chive-flavoured. These cheeses are hand-turned and individually waxed. Oak smoking is also used by Ardrahan Farmhouse, which also produces a semi-soft, rind-washed traditional cheese. Cahills Farm in Limerick flavours its cheeses with red wine, porter, whiskey and fine herbs. Carbery, in County Cork, produces a dubliner cheese, and Compsey, of Tipperary, make a cream cheese. Instantly recognized by their surface designs of the shamrock and Celtic motifs, Dunbarr’s soft, cows’ milk cheese is produced in Dublin.
The many varieties of Irish cheese also include those made with sheep’s or goats’ milk. One well known goats’ milk cheese is inagh, from Shannon, and Corleggy also makes a mature goats’ cheese as well as cows’ milk cheeses flavoured with garlic, cumin or green peppercorn, or smoked.