Almost forgotten Great Irish dishes

Proper Irish Stew.

And by proper, I mean:

Lamb or, preferably mutton.
It should be almost clear and unthickened.
It should have onions, carrots and potatoes.
Flavoured with thyme, salt and pepper.

I deviate from this by:
I often add celery, leek, turnip, pearl barley.
A little lovage is really good in it to.
I recently did one with a light golden ale - twas fantastic, if not proper!:eek:
I sometimes very slightly brown the meat giving a golden broth rather than clear.
I like to serve it with flat leaf parsley.

Let the debate begin.

Soda bread e.g. the round loaf with the cross cut in the top:

280g white flour
280g wholemeal flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
A handful of porridge oats
One egg
About 400mls buttermilk

Mix all of the dry ingredients (flours, oats, salt and bicarb) and make a well in the centre. Whisk the egg into about 300mls of buttermilk and start to add slowly to the mixture, stirring to incorporate. Continue to add buttermilk until you have a dough that you can pick up and shape without it being too dry or too sticky. Don't overwork it too much. You'll almost certainly need more moisture than 300mls plus the egg, hence 400mls in the recipe, but you may find you need more again, or a little less. It will depend on your flour.

Shape into a round and cut a deep cross in the top.

Pre-heat your oven as high as it will go, and slide the bread onto a baking tray, then cook for 15 minutes on the highest temperature, followed by about 30-40 minutes on 180 degrees centigrade. I actually do mine on a pizza stone in a non-fan oven, comes out very well.

You'll get variations in the result depending on your flour and how much moisture you need to use; the egg adds a richness but it can be left out and simply use buttermilk. The buttermilk reacts with the soda to create a raising agent.

Or the strange things we used to call some things.

For instance we always called brown soda bread 'brown cake'.

And we always, and still do, call what is essentially an apple pie 'apple tart'.
(a tart should have no top crust but these 'apple tarts' do have a top crust).

Kimia wrote: »

Bacon and cabbage!

Corned beef & cabbage - My Dad's from Cork originally and it's his specialty any time he has to cook dinner.

Black Dog - Sounds like you ate the same as me as a kid.

My school pals used to think that my family were crazy eating boiling fowl, coddle, stuffed ox heart, oxtail stew, fried kidneys, ox tongue, ox cheeks, trotters and liver, bacon & stuffing casserole. Thanks to coming from generations of cattlemen & butchers I have a great appreciation & love of the flesh from all parts of the beast.

Another favourite dish of mine is a variation on Irish Stew, but made with mutton knuckles. I find that the bones & cartilage give a 'bigger' flavour than in traditional Irish Stew.

The Shnack Box - 3 pieces of Southern Fried Chicken & Chips

The Pink Shack

The Yella Shack

Black Dog wrote: »

Boiled chicken - now, there's one for you. An old hen, gone beyond her laying days, was consigned to the pot. Because of her old age she would be too tough to roast so a slow boil or used in a stew was the only way.

That's why I hate traditional Irish cooking. Same ingredients here as in France, but here we boil the chicken until you've got a soup (at best - far more likely to be flavourless wet chicken meat); there you get coq au vin. And it's endemic to traditional Irish cooking - even the phrase reflects it, it's never "traditional Irish cuisine" - at best it's "cooking". And the reason you don't hear much about Irish cuisine is probably that we don't have one.

What do we have?

Bacon and cabbage (must be boiled to within spitting distance of soup, and if the house doesn't stink to high heaven as you serve, you didn't cook it right).

Irish stew (fantastic if you cook it differently to the standard recipe and add things that aren't in the standard recipe, and well, basically cook a different dish entirely).

Boxty (actually not bad if you ignore the traditional version and ... again, cook a different dish entirely).

Bacon. Well, we do cut the rashers from the right part of the pig at least (crazy americans), but it's hardly cuisine.

And about pork - if it's anything other than rashers, it must be cooked until it's as white as paper, and tougher than shoe leather, "just in case". No-one's quite sure of what we're worried about, exactly, but we're overcooking pork until it's a building material to avoid it.

Colcannon. Well, actually, that's not Irish so much as Northern Irish and Scottish, and ironically, it's pretty much okay no matter where you eat it. Same for leek and potato soup and quite a few other dishes.

And that's basically it. Everything else is borrowed or stolen from abroad and badly cooked. The stuff I was raised on was appalling. I won't let it be cooked in my kitchen anymore in fact. Spag bol - or more accurately, the Irish version of spag bol (which is the bol surrounded by mashed potatoes in a ring); chicken breasts + sauce from a jar + mashed potatoes; lasagne (very italian because it had a whole pinch of oregano in it for about six pounds of mince); apple pie (which put me off apples until I learnt to make the dish properly in my 20s); the "hang sanwich and cupatae" (and the tea! Always over-sweetened tea made from the sweepings from the floor of the factory after a run of packing proper tea for people who actually know what infusion is); and chips. I think we eat more chips than the scottish, but they're only behind because they eat fish with their chips and Ireland, an island nation, basically eats no fish at all. Or shellfish. Or indeed any meat other than steak or chicken. So we eat more chips to make up the volume.

We *do* have nice soda bread though, that's very true. And *modern* Irish chefs are making nice things. But that's not cuisine, that's a few modern Irish chefs doing nice things they've learnt abroad.

kylith wrote: »

Reminds me of a Denis Leary sketch where he said that he saw a cookbook called Irish Cuisine and he laughed his balls off ("We take everything and boil the s**t out of it for four and a half hours until you can drink it through a straw. It's not cuisine, it's penance").

+1

I wonder sometimes is our lack of cuisine a hangover for not having any fecking food for years. It's hard to come up with interesting things to do with chicken or beef when all you can afford to eat is potatoes.

Pfft. What about rabbit? All over the place here for the last few hundred years, and up until the end of the first world war, it was eaten by everyone else in the US and Europe in the same quantities that we eat chicken breast meat today.

And there's a lot of fish and shellfish out there that we just don't bother to eat, except in one or two places - there's just no tradition of eating it in Ireland for some reason. Which is damn odd for an island nation.

And given that the bulk of what we eat today at home is made up from the four "mainstream meats" (chicken, beef, lamb, pork), you'd think we'd learn to at least cook them right. Why the hell do most Irish home cooks think that "well done" means "you cooked that correctly"? I was at college before I learnt that pork is actually still softer than styrofoam when cooked, that beef was tastier when pink ("what's medium rare?" is not a question you should leave your kids to ask in a restaurant ffs), that chicken isn't unsafe if it's still juicy; not to mention that there are other things you can eat like duck and goose and tuna and sea bass and sole and halibut and prawns (okay, I don't like them, but at least I know they exist now) and lobster and ....

Well, you get the idea. Truth is, as a nation, we suck at cooking food once you get outside the few who do it professionally or as a hobby. How the hell that's possible when we had an entire generation where home economics was a de facto mandatory subject for half the population, I don't know.

mathepac wrote: »

You were obviously badly traumatised early in life by your Mammy's / Grannies' lousy cooking as detailed above

True, but it's not as easy as "your mammy can't cook, so your point is worthless". Alas.

I'm not sure why anyone would want to use a French word to decribe our traditional cooking.

Because everyone uses French words to describe all cooking, because the French basicly own cooking, having invented about a third to a half of modern cooking.

there is rarely any need to use French words when there are Irish or heavens above, even English words to describe the same thing

Wait. Seriously. Just a little bit. I just need you to wait long enough for me to get the camcorder before you say that to a professional chef of any calibre (and I don't just mean Michelin star level, I mean everything above Little Chef).

WOW I had never heard of coddle before I saw this thread but fecking hell it sounds yum! Sausage and rasher stew sort of from what I can gather unless the bacon bits are supposed to be from bacon and cabbage type bacon, also sounds yum! Might have to give it a go. Can someone tell me which type of bacon to use so I can get to the good coddle on the first go?

Thanks Thaedydal but still is it rasher bits or boiling bacon bits or some sort of other bacon entirely??

Cool. I'm going to try it the day after tomorrow. Will post whether or not it lived up to my expectations! Actually, I'm just thinking maybe I should invite my parents over. It should be right up their street!

Thanks for that, Thaedydal.

Just one thing... what sort of colour is it? It sounds like it would be quite pale, no?

Little Alex wrote: »

Sounds interesting. Oddly enough I'm from Dublin but have never had coddle. Any chance of sharing the recipe?

I'd hazard a guess that even though you are from dublin, your parents or family might not be. I ate coddle all the time, but few of my friends did (whose parents were all from outside dublin originally)

mathepac wrote: »

there is rarely any need to use French words when there are Irish or heavens above, even English words to describe the same thing. (cuisine = cooking, food preparation, kitchen, culinary practice, culinary art, etc. - it's all the same thing really, unless you want to move into the realms of haute or grande cuisine, which is not the preserve of mere mortals such as me).

I'm sorry but this is nonsense.
food and cooking aside, english developed from other languages, including french and a number of english words are either based on french words or directly taken over.

Just because its a cooking term its suddenly a bad thing because the french think they are better at it. FFS
I suppose we should only say cul-de-sac if we are driving a peugeot or renault. :rolleyes:

mathepac wrote: »

I know a number of Italian, Chinese, and Indian people, cooks and consumers alike, who have no need to resort to words outside their own languages to descibe the dishes they prepare, the ingredients or the methods they use. Their food does not seem to have suffered any adverse consequences from this lack of 'Frenchification'. I'm also fairly sure the French did not create the likes of the tandoor or the wok or the dishes that come from them, for example[/B]

Maybe because cuisine is an english word, not an italian, chinese word etc etc

If you use a wok at home, is it suddenly a roundy frying pan?



On the other hand, i agree with you on Sparks' childhood trauma with food. Most of what he describes is alien to me and my house (i am a bit younger so that might have an effect)


Are you originally from dublin Sparks? I find the way you describe food typical of central ireland, when I was in collage, all my friends were bacon and cabbage men and they all over cooked everything.
Same for the fish, you said we (the irish) don't eat much fish. I'd disagree, seafood was always a big part of irish "cuisine" ( ) for may years, but obviously it was only in certain areas that had access to ports and the sea, Galway and Dublin would be perfect examples of this.
Galway Bay Oysters
Dublin Bay Prawns.
It makes perfect sense, that people living in central ireland wouldn't eat a lot of fish out of availability. So when these people or thier families moved to dublin, it also makes sense that they stick with the bacon and cabbage diet.