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Ireland: Apple and Potato Cake (Farmhouse-Style Apple Tart with Potato Crust): March 17, 2008

This dish probably started being baked by Irish firesides in its present form about three hundred years ago. It's now baked on halogen and gas and convection cooktops all over the country whenever a home chef wants to make a quick and easy dessert that can with equal aplomb appear cool and demurely sliced on the tea trolley, or as the crown of a country-style supper, piping hot and drizzled with thick Irish cream.

The potato would have been a relatively late addition to the equation. "Filled bannocks" of this kind were being made with merely flour-based doughs in the time of the ancient Celts, who valued the apple not only as a gift and symbol of the Gods, but as one of the relatively few fruits that grows reliably in the Irish climate.

Please note: because of the delicacy of the potato crust, this tart sometimes resists coming out of the pan in one piece (like the example in the background of our picture, which tastefully tore itself in three during removal). The recipe suggests some ways around this problem.

Click on "read more" for the recipe.

Ireland: Carrageen Moss Blancmange

Carrageen moss is one of Ireland's more unusual natural resources. First of all, it's not a moss: it's a seaweed. And to add to the confusion, there are any number of ways to spell its common name: carrageen, carrageenan, carragheen and carragheenan, take your pick. They're all derived from the Irish word carraigín, which means "moss of the rocks" (though some think that the -ín ending is actually an Irish diminutive, which changes the word's meaning to "little rock" and connects it to a relatively common Irish place name).

At any rate, the scientific name of the Irish version of the seaweed is Chondrus crispus. This reddish-brown plant grows on or near just about every Irish coastline. It has been used for centuries as a food additive. Local people would gather and dry it -- usually in the sun: this treatment bleaches it. When someone wanted to use it in a dessert (which might be a long time later, as dried carrageen lasts just about forever), all that had to be done was to soak the dried seaweed in warm milk or water, depending on the recipe. The seaweed then releases a delicate natural gel that acts as a setting agent when the dessert mixture cools.

These days, carrageenan's main worldwide use is as a thickening agent in all kinds of commercial food preparations (shakes, ready made desserts, and so forth). But it's still used in various Irish traditional dessert dishes, especially when the cook wants a more authentic effect than gelatine would produce. Probably its commonest use is in that ancient and traditional dessert, the blancmange -- a light, molded sweet pudding. In blancmange, which must have a light and subtle taste to work correctly, the carrageenan adds a hint of the sea -- a delicate flavor hard to identify but very habit-forming once you've experienced it.

Carrageenan can usually be found in health food stores, and can often also turn up in gourmet specialty stores. Click "read more" for the blancmange recipe.

(Looking for still more traditional Irish desserts? Click here!)

Ireland: Stampy (An Oven-Baked Potato Bread)

Stampy is a traditional name for one of the many Irish potato breads. While the recipe below calls for this one to be baked in the oven, this is a recent development: Irish kitchens didn't usually have ovens until the late nineteenth century, so stampy in its most authentic form would have been either a griddle bread, or would have been baked inside a covered pot either hung over the coals of the kitchen fire, or resting in them.

Making stampy is a little labor-intensive -- grating the potatoes and letting their starch settle out takes a while -- but the result is worthwhile. Stampy cakes hot out of the oven and slathered with butter are are a rich and flavorsome experience. (Some have said that the only really good accompaniment for them is Irish whiskey. Your mileage may vary, but it's worth trying...)

Click on "read more" for the recipe.

Ireland: Apple Upside-Down Cake

The Irish countryside is full of surprises for the creative baker, especially this time of year. Early apples are ripe on the trees: and the best of these are the heirloom apples, their trees often surviving half-forgotten in old suburban gardens or weedy vacant lots.

EuroCuisineLady is lucky enough to have one of these trees in the overgrown paddock next door. The branches may be bent with age and covered with moss, but the apples hanging on them are not only Granny Smiths, but (because of extra branches grafted on more than fifty years ago) one of the very first dessert apples, the increasingly rare heirloom apple variety Beauty of Bath, with its characteristic pink circles and markings in the creamy flesh. Like many early apples, Beauty of Bath has a very short "perfect" time for eating out of hand -- no more than a week. After that, you'd better pick as many of them as you can for cooking or pies...a favorite option, as their beautiful pink color intensifies when cooked.

The upside-down cake is a favorite autumn treatment for all those piled-up apples, heirloom or not -- a tart cooking apple will work as well in this recipe as an eating apple. Click on "read more" for the recipe...

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