An Enquiry into "Irish Food"

[gothwalk]

If you live in Ireland, or know a bit about the place, what do you think of as "Irish Food"?

If you had to provide a recipe for "something Irish", what would it be?

Comments

[gmh.livejournal.com]

Stodge. With potatoes.

As for a recipe: Colcannon.

[hkim.livejournal.com]

I actually got sent on a course for this! Mad.

Depends on the context of the question. When I'm asked what "Irish food" is like, I usually explain that a typical Irish family might have, say, spaghetti bolognese one night, vegetable curry another, chicken stir fry another night, a roast dinner at the weekend and so on.

If we have to serve food that's supposed to promote Irish products/exports abroad, it will invariably, invariably include Irish smoked salmon on brown bread. Mains would usually be some kind of Irish meat (e.g. rack of lamb), and probably Irish chocolates and Irish cheeses after.

If someone asked me to come up with a traditional Irish dinner, I would probably make Irish stew or if I had the ingredients, a coddle (which I would consider cheating a little, as it would be rare for irish people to nowadays eat coddle on a regular basis, c.f. bacon & cabbage).

[teapot-farm.livejournal.com]

Food was fuel, and paying more attention to it than was absolutely necessary was probably a sin.

Now that explains a LOT about my Dad's attitude to food (his parents were Irish though he was born here in England). He's clearly got the same thing, just filtered through some academic-style wittering; apparently he tried to persuade my Mum that we could all eat the same thing every day and it would be easier and more practical - this with two children under 5...

[hobbitblue.livejournal.com]

When my Irish flatmate came back from trips home to see her parents, she'd bring soda bread, oat bread and lots of sausages, the latter because her dad was a butcher mind.

[gmh.livejournal.com]

clanwilliam makes good soda bread.

(And in necessity, it can be used as an offensive weapon, effective at a range of up to 30 yards.)

[hobbitblue.livejournal.com]

Maybe it was wheaten bread then.. utterly delicious though, but then of course I *like* stodgy bread, and fluffy bread, and bland bread, and I don't much care for dark breads or rye, assuming Finnish bread is of similar nature to German rye breads. I also like potato cakes and similar heavy baked goods which I think Irish bakers make quite well. Isn't oaten bread quite heavy and stodgy though? The kinds I've had in various places have been - yum!

[ulaire-daidoji.livejournal.com]

In my "typical Irish working class household" growing up, dinner was:

Monday: Leftovers from Sunday dinner
Tuesday: mixed grill and chips
Wednesday: Curry/Spag bol/ or something exotic like that (it was the 70's)
Thursady: Steak (payday for dad), mashed spuds, carrots or peas
Friday: Fish and chips (or egg and chips) Absolutley NO meat
Saturday: Chicken and chips
Sunday: Roast beef/ham, Roast spuds, three types of veg

And that was repeated every week.

If there was ever a desert it was HB icecream and jelly.


The only concession my mum ever made to "Irish" food was occasionaly making bacon and cabbage or Colcannon mash.


Breakfast was always tea and toast and fruit.

Supper was always tea, toast and a biscuit.

[ailbhe]

I'd whip out A&A Farmar's "Traditional Irish Foods" book and do something exotic with pigs' knuckles.

Or Irish Stew, bacon and cabbage, colcannon, Full Irish Breakfast, soda bread.

The thing I miss most is proper brown soda bread.

[ailbhe]

I own one.

[trjh.livejournal.com]

I'd just abandon all pretense of being 'truly irish' and go with what we had on St. Patrick's day at home in America -- corned beef, cabbage, and irish soda bread. I still occasionally make the last on paddy's day now that I live here.

Potatoes are quintessentially Irish. Witness the carvery meals where you can have two veg, both of them potatoes cooked slightly differently.

I too am very fond of soda bread and smoked slamon. Gravid Lax is lovely -- oh, but google tells me it's scandinavian.

When I lived in the US, my Irish housemates would bring home Butler's or Barry's tea, butter, Cadbury chocolate (esp. creme eggs), and occasionally crisps.

[celemon.livejournal.com]

Gravad lax is about as scandinavian as it gets...we spread it to the rest of the world. And avoid the spelling 'gravid' - in Swedish that means 'pregnant' which is an interesting idea...pregnant salmon?

[cissa.livejournal.com]

In a cookbook I got recently, there is a totally gorgeous recipe for a gravlax variant that uses fennel instead of dill. YUM.

A corned beef boiled dinner is an Irish diaspora meal, as I understand ti- but I like to make it for St. Patrick's day. I usually corn the beef myself these days. I cook it with potatoes, carrots, turnips, and cabbage.

I also make colcannon for Halloween.

[wyvernfriend.livejournal.com]

When I think of Irish Food I think of proper Brown Bread, made by one of my parents (dad is marginally better than mum and it's made daily!) Real lamb, roasted. Chicken, Duck (pref Muscovy), pheasant, fresh, fresh salmon (dad once got one over 20lb cause he did a favour for someone in the fisheries board), fresh lemon sole on a friday. Gravy on everything. Seasonal veg.

Messy mince on a saturday (something roughly resembling bolognese with spuds and whatever veg was seasonal)

It did help that my dad has the greenest thumbs ever and my mum is a domestic science teacher.

Mostly though I think about going through the market in Galway on a saturday. I know that most of the traders are non-national but they take Irish produce and do wonderful things with them. Like the sausages from the german guy, the goat cheeses from the dutch. They've been there since I was quite young.

[wyvernfriend.livejournal.com]

Oh for the recipe I'd provide the brown bread (I love mum's line "enough buttermilk so that it's too dry to pour and too wet to handle"

I do have a few books of Irish food, some of which look at it from earlier eras and I think pure survival made some Irish people very conservative.

IIRC one of the items on the stocktake of the Co-Op my grandad was involved with had bananas in Moycullen before World War II, I think De Valera, the inward looking policies of his governments and the wars did incalculable damage to 20th Century Irish Cuisine.

[nonhae.livejournal.com]

Blaas! Oh but I need an excuse to go to Waterford again. Pig's trotters. (I'm not even going to attempt to spell it as Gaeilge - our water's gone and I've no coffee)
Stew. Honest to God stew with unidentifiable bits of meat and overcooked carrots.
Brown bread, oh how I love you. With lashings of real butter made from something that came from a cow, not a plant. Made half oats half flour for extra omminess.
Potato farls with crispy rashers. *drools*
Cabbage, bacon and spuds. Bacon ribs. None of this fancy pants pork ribs.
Coddle.
Porridge. With a handful of blackberries at this time of the year.
Gur cake.
Smithwicks?

[(Anonymous)]

Favourite food growing up:
Potato bread
Sultana soda
Soda bread
Barnbrack

But I was from a family of bakers.

[qidane.livejournal.com]

Oops - forgot to log in!

[vesper2000.livejournal.com]

Full Irish breakfast, sharp cheese, soda bread, smoked salmon, stew. Although, when I lived there, all I ate was lentils and rice from the Asian market because I couldn't afford anything better.

[aidian.livejournal.com]

an authority on the subject once said to me, regarding irish potatos and other such:

'Boil 'em, chuck 'em in a bowl, mash half heartedly
while giving out about being tormented with all the
work, add salt, and some buttermilk, and slam on the
table alongside the bacon and cabbage.'

+100 internet points if you remember who said that to me :)

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

Good god, man. Where do you keep these logs?

Vocabulary, comma style, and the distinctive abbreviation of "them" says it's my writing, but I've no memory of it.

Cut?

[aidian.livejournal.com]

i don't have many - just a few fragments i saved here and there - but yeah, that's exactly right. ;) From cut, ages ago; almost another lifetime, eh?

[goncalves.livejournal.com]

For me,
Irish stew, colcanon, proper black & white pudding, red lemonade :P, boiled bacon & cabbage with mushy peas, soda bread, barm brac, apple pie & cream, pint of smithwicks, oh and a bag of taytos :P

[dorianegray.livejournal.com]

Potatoes are obvious but I think I'll say pig products. We seem to be pretty good on pig products, especially the ones that use up the less obviously edible bits of the animal - and Irish sausages are so much more flavourful than English ones!

As for a recipe, I'd go dig in my grandmother's cookbooks for barm brack.

[mollydot.livejournal.com]

Boiled bacon and cabbage, Irish stew, soda bread.

Recipe for either soda bread or bacon & cabbage.

My sister misses the sausages & rashers, esp the sausages. A French ex-colleague misses scones.

[belgatherial.livejournal.com]

sikander7 makes Soda bread a lot. That's Irish, right?

[http://users.livejournal.com/sanderella_/]

Not that you don't have enough answers, but my favorite is still a proper Irish fry for breakfast, complete with fried potato bread and black and white pudding. Two things that are so damned hard to find here in Canada.

Of course, the rest of the world tell a hundred different jokes involving "3 Irishmen eating steak and potato stew...", though I rarely ate that when I lived there.

[eng-monkey.livejournal.com]

Sod the potato!
Brought in by foreigners.

My two cents:
Get yourself one boar/pig - hunted and killed within the last day if possible.
Gut it (you can use the giblets or whatnot to make sausages or stuffing later), in the mean time wrap the animal in straw.
As this is going on, have some friends dig a hole. Also have them heat up some good size rocks till they are white hot.
Fill hole with water and place white hot rocks into water... wait until water is boiling.
Rub honey into waiting pig and place in boiling water, cover, and replace rocks as needed.
10 minutes per lb (give or take)
Remove and serve (remember the correct portions allocated to your guests according to their station)
Serve with roasted game fowl.
Eat accompanied by some ale fermented from malt or hops that you have grown out your back garden.

For afters: oat cakes smothered in honey, and more ale. (Or wine, if you can afford to trade with Iberian sailors)

But that would be my opinion.