Today is St Patrick’s Day, which means that anyone with the merest drop of Irish blood in their veins (or just a fondness for Guinness) will be partying and celebrating.
Traditional Irish cooking is based on simple peasant-style food using good wholesome ingredients
Bars will be full of silly green hats and paper shamrocks, drinkers awash with Bushmills and beer, and no doubt there will be plenty of sore heads in the morning. I wonder what would happen if I stood up and shouted: “St Pat wasn’t Irish – he was English!” I’d probably get knocked out with a shillelagh!
Traditional Irish cooking is based on simple peasant-style food using good wholesome ingredients, with the verdant countryside giving good grazing for cattle providing milk, butter and buttermilk.
Authentic Irish soda bread is made with flour and salt, bicarb and buttermilk and nothing else, but there are some recipes out there called Irish soda bread – mostly American, and lots of them – that add dried fruit, eggs, butter, sugar and spices to the dough, but they are not soda bread.
Having said that, I do find the authentic version a bit leaden, so I make it with self-raising flour and rub in a little butter, which makes it lighter. Some supermarkets in Malta occasionally have buttermilk, but you can make your own very good substitute by adding lemon juice to milk and letting it stand for five minutes.
Ireland is renowned for its seafood – cockles, mussels, scallops, oysters and, of course, the famous Dublin Bay prawns, which aren’t really prawns at all. They are langoustines, tiny lobsters also known as Norway lobsters or scampi, and there is some debate as to whether they are actually caught in Dublin Bay or just landed there by fishermen.
They are tasty but very expensive, as only the tail end is eaten. Dublin lawyer (I don’t know where they get these names from) is a dish of fresh, boiled lobster, sautéed in butter then flamed in Irish whisky. I love lobster, but there is no way that I could cook a live one, so I used big tiger prawns instead to make a delicious starter.
It’s impossible to talk about Irish food without mentioning potatoes, as they are such an integral part of Ireland. For centuries, the Irish diet consisted mainly of potatoes and buttermilk, which is why the potato famine in the 19th century was so devastating.
With an estimated million people dying and another million emigrating, Ireland lost about a fifth of its population. I read somewhere that the Irish eat more potatoes per head than any other country in the EU, and they certainly have quite a repertoire of potato dishes.
Apart from the usual baked, boiled, fried or mashed, there is colcannon, boxty, pan haggerty and potato cakes. Potato scones, or farls, often served with a cooked breakfast, also make a good topping for stews.
Which brings me back to where I started – with alcohol. I can’t bear to drink Guinness as I find it mouth-puckeringly bitter, but there’s no doubt that adding it to a stew does make for a wonderfully rich gravy. Apart from that, it’s an essential ingredient in my mother’s Christmas pudding recipe.
Bailey’s Irish Cream, well, that’s altogether different. Smooth, creamy, mellow and delicious – and lovely in a sauce poured over apple pancakes.