Ireland: A general note about our Irish recipes

Readers of our recipes will notice that there seems to be a tendency in Irish cooking toward one-pot dishes, and to simple cooking methods like grilling. This has to do with the main factor which influenced the way the Irish kitchen looked for many years: the availability of fuel.

Depending on where one lived in the country, there was always plenty of turf, coal, or wood to make a fire with. But fuel was scarcer or more tightly controlled in many other parts of Europe, and this scarcity led people in those areas to develop fuel-conserving tools like the baking oven (a whole village would usually share one, the way, in earlier days of scarce and expensive metal, a whole village would chip in to buy and use a plow). The Irish kitchen was essentially the house’s fireplace -- both the interior, where the fire itself burned, and the stone or brick hearth over which hot coals could be raked to heat the hearth, and then pushed back again. Since there was plenty of fuel, people could easily bake at their own hearthsides, or right in the fire, in covered containers -- pottery at first, in the most ancient days, and then later, iron.

One of these containers, called the Bastable oven, can still be found in antique shops. It was what a North American cook might call a "Dutch oven" -- a three- or four-legged pot with an unusual concave cover. You would sit your pot right in the middle of the coals of the fire, rake them up around it, put the cover on, and pile more coals on top. This produced a beautiful even heat that baked or roasted from all sides at once, and was excellent for baking bread or cooking a stew or roasting a chicken -- almost anything. Probably ninety percent of Irish cooking, for some hundreds of years, was done in pots like these, and Irish cooks became incredibly versatile with them.

Other things might be cooked directly on the hearth, once it had been heated by coals raked over it and then brushed back. The "farl" kind of soda bread, for example, would bake well there. So would oatcakes. Also, fresh fish, filleted, would be laid on the stones to sizzle.

A somewhat later development was the "bakestone", a flat round iron plate that hung over the fire by a semicircular handle from a hook called a "crane": the bakestone could be raised or lowered to control the heat.

Just about all dishes with mixed sauces, or any sort of elaborate spicing, came from the kitchens of the well-to-do -- people who actually had kitchens, rather than firesides at which they cooked: people who could afford spices and cookstoves and extra pots. These people were in the minority.

Until the beginning of the 20th century, the vast majority of Irish people had the very minimum of cooking space and equipment. Despite this, the one thing on which all contemporary sources agree is the incredible hospitality, and often lavishness, with which the guest in Ireland was fed, whether in a cottage in the middle of nowhere, or a great country house of the Ascendancy. Food was considered one of the main signs of courtesy to one’s guest: you gave the best you had, whatever you had -- whether it was a great feast from a full larder and kitchen, or a few boiled potatoes and some buttermilk to wash them down with. Any stew could be stretched, any bread cut a little thinner, to make the "stranger in the gate" welcome. That tradition, in particular, is possibly the greatest heritage of Irish cooking, and is worth spreading around./p>