Ireland

Some of the best Irish dishes are the simplest ones, based on solid, good quality ingredients, not treated in any fancy way but simply with a respect for their basic flavors and the way the ingredients interact with other foods. This recipe is one of those.

It harks back to a time when cooks were intent on making the best of what they had on hand, and didn't have recourse to glossy supermarkets full of ingredients that were in season somewhere else but not at home. Most farmers in Ireland would have been within easy reach of someone growing barley, if they weren't growing it themselves. Besides being good for brewing with, the grain made its way into endless soups and stews, not just for the sake of its own nutritional value, but because of its thickening abilities. Apples, too, grow all over the island of Ireland quite happily. But their season doesn't last forever. The farmers and householders of the days before modern storage technologies were available got very clever about ways to keep a season's apples well into the next spring, even the next summertime. A given year's harvest -- what wasn't eaten fresh or preserved by being made into alcoholic / "hard" cider -- was mostly put down in straw in the coolest place a farmer could find. The apples would wrinkle, and their internal texture would go a little mealy over time, but their flavor would be well preserved.

This recipe for apple barley pudding was clearly developed to deal with those out-of-season apples and a little of the spare barley that would always be hiding somewhere in the kitchen. Cooking the apples down to a puree both removes the problem with their texture and infuses the barley with the apples' pectin, another effective gelling and thickening agent. Then the final result is sweetened a little, sharpened further with lemon juice, and chilled. The finished product is surprisingly light and delicate, with a tart kick: the cream mellows it all down and adds amazing richness.

The original recipe (which we've adapted from one in Ethel Minogue's Modern and Traditional Irish Cooking) calls for cool cream to be stirred into the apple and barley pudding when it's finished and ready to be eaten. However, another approach that works (we think) much better is to layer it in parfait glasses with freshly whipped, slightly sweetened cream. It's your call.

This is, by the way, yet another of a small but select group of Irish dessert recipes that are nonalcoholic. Doubtless there are people who'll want to put Irish whiskey in it anyway. Go right ahead, but we'll disavow any knowledge of your actions. (If you're going to do this, consider flavoring the cream, rather than the basic dessert, as you may run into problems with the pudding mixture thickening up.) The recipe will serve about four people.

Click on "read more" for the recipe and method.

You could make a case that of all the desserts a modern cook might think of off hand, the cheesecake is the most traditionally Irish. Desserts based on sweetened curds (called milseán) were mentioned in the epic poetry of Ireland as far back as 800 AD, as were numerous cream cheeses. (The milseán must have had a lot of honey in it: the word has since passed into modern Irish as the adjective for sweet and the noun for candy.) A little later on, in the early 1600's, descriptions of pastry-based curd cheese pies baked with milk and sweetenings start to turn up in Irish cookery writings, and then in the earliest cookbooks published in the late 1600's.

Tastes do shift over time, and the older version of the cheesecake, the curd tart or pie, has now become somewhat hard to find in Ireland. Most Irish home bakers and professional bakers alike prefer to work with ready-made commercial cream cheese instead of the curds that are the cream cheese's early stage. (However, recent immigrants to Ireland from central Europe have brought their own curd-cheesecake recipes here with them, and many Irish supermarkets and local stores in places with significant Polish, Slovakian or Czech populations are now routinely carrying such central European curd cheeses as tvarog.) 

To reflect present preferences, here's an Irish cheesecake recipe that includes the ubiquitous Baileys Irish Cream*. And it's a marbled cheesecake as well -- the marbling being where the Baileys is. To reinforce the Baileys flavor, a little bit of both cocoa and coffee (which Baileys contains) are added to the dark part of the mix.

The recipe for the "base" cheesecake is derived from the famous cheesecake native to the venerable New York restaurant Lindy's. Though the original Lindy's went out of business in 1969 without ever formally releasing the recipe for their famous dessert into the wild, a recipe for the cheesecake turned up in Sunset Magazine in 1951. Bearing in mind Sunset's strong reputation as a reliable recipe source in the 50's, it seems likely enough that the basic recipe is very close to the real thing. (Please bear in mind that while there are a fair number of "Lindy's" recipes floating around on the Web, many of them are not accurate transcriptions of the Sunset recipe: one or another ingredient often falls out -- the vanilla beans, for example, or the cream. Our version of the recipe goes back to the original.)

This cheesecake is incredibly rich: a slender slice of it is normally as much as anyone will want after having had dinner first. It's a good thing that this cheesecake keeps well refrigerated for days and days, freezes brilliantly, and will keep in the freezer for up to six months. One warning in passing: this cheesecake needs 18-24 hours to set after baking, so you'll need to make it at least a day ahead. (But who wants to be baking anything but soda bread on St. Paddy's Day anyway?)

Click on "read more" for the ingredients and method.

Scones are one of those traditional products of the Irish kitchen that are fortunately not falling by the wayside because they're too time-consuming to make. In fact it's hard to think of any item of home "baked goods" that's quicker or easier to make, and even in the busy Ireland of today, lots of people find time to make scones at home. (Though the supermarkets naturally always have them too.)

This dish is one of the great favorites of Irish people at home, to judge by its presence in almost every deli, convenience store and supermarket you walk into (in the latter case, in both fresh and frozen-food case versions). It also turns up on practically every pub menu in the country, usually with a green salad on the side, and sometimes with chips / fries as well.

Once upon a time this near-universal presence might have made sense in terms of a pie being a great way to use up leftovers from when "chicken and bacon in the pot" had been made on the premises within the last few days. But nowadays, when such traditional and somewhat labor-intensive dishes are made a lot less frequently than they used to be, these pies look as if they're being made from scratch most of the time.

The ingredients involved in the basic recipe are simple, but the pie takes a certain amount of work, so this isn't something to embark upon on the spur of the moment.

Readers should note in advance that the "ham" of the recipe title is not ham in the North American sense of the word. It is slow-simmered brine-cured pork -- almost all cuts of which are called "bacon" in Ireland. (What a North American would think of as bacon is called "rashers" in Ireland.) It's fairly simple to duplicate this meat by finding a cut of fresh pork such as collar or butt and then brining it for a couple of days. The recipe below will give more details on how to proceed if you're brining your own pork.

Click "read more" for the recipe.

Odds are strong that on the morning of February 16th, all over Britain and Ireland many cooks are likely to wake up with the bizarre thought, "Oh no, I forgot to buy lemons!" This is because that day is Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday -- a day also known in Britain and Ireland as Pancake Tuesday.

This holiday is yet another holdover from the days when the fast imposed on European Christians during the penitential season of Lent was a "hard fast". This fast's rules required its observers not only to eat much less than they usually did, but to eat a much sparser diet -- one that completely omitted meat and other rich foods such as oil, eggs and butter. The householder therefore had to use up those foods before midnight on Ash Wednesday, the official beginning of the Lenten season.

All the great pre-Lenten festivals (of which the North and South American celebrations of Mardi Gras, "Fat Tuesday", are descendants), contain aspects of celebration that deal with this basic problem: what's the careful householder to do with all the eggs and oil and butter and so forth in the cupboard? You can't just throw them out. Therefore you have to eat them, and in a hurry.

There are several ways to do this, and different regional cultures across Europe handle the problem in different ways. Some countries like to concentrate on the oil, going in heavily for deep-fried pastries like grosti and chruscik that now routinely turn up as part of the pre-Lenten Carnival tradition. (For more info on this, see also the wonderful Fried Doughs Worldwide web page.) Others get serious about the butter: in Russia they celebrate Maslenitsa -- not just a single high-fat day, but a Butter Week, during which the traditional Russian blini pancakes get seriously soaked with melted butter, along with (it seems) just about everything else. (Don't be surprised that the Maslenitsa web site has translated the word as "Blini Week": they're worried that the butter will freak out the cholesterol-shy Westerners.) In Ireland and Great Britain, though, the emphasis seems to be more on getting rid of the milk and eggs, in the form of pancakes.

However, the pancake in question isn't anything like the traditional North American pancake that appears in breakfast stacks all over the US and Canada. The Shrove Tuesday pancake is thin and nearly as wide as the average frying pan, more like the French crêpe than anything else. (And there may be connections to the crêpe, for the French also celebrate a pre-Lenten pancake day on February 2nd, which is the old Church holiday of Candlemas, the former Feast of the Presentation, commemorating the first time the Christ Child was brought to Temple six weeks after his birth.)

The Pancake Tuesday pancake is traditionally quickly cooked and sometimes tossed -- and there are famous connections between the day and the art of pancake-tossing, especially the famous Pancake Race which has been held yearly on Shrove Tuesday in Olney, Buckinghamshire since 1445: check out its video.

Anyway, after the cooking and tossing (and optional racing...), each pancake is rolled, laid side by side with its fellows on a plate, sprinkled with lemon juice, and dusted with confectioners' sugar / icing sugar (or granulated sugar, in older versions of the recipe).

The lemon juice, incidentally, lies at the core of just about the only attempt so far to commercialize this holiday. One particular firm (now owned by a conglomerate) has for some years attempted to rebrand Pancake Day as "X Lemon Juice Day", this being about the only time of year that there's any kind of rush on their brand of pre-squeezed lemon juice in its traditional plastic squeezy lemon. (See also Ian's trenchant comments on the subject.) Fresh lemon juice works much better.

Click on "read more" for a basic Pancake Tuesday pancake recipe and method.