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Irish

Ireland: Chocolate Potato Cake

Potato is famous for making breads and cakes tender (and for improving their keeping qualities, too). This recipe adds potato to an excellent basic chocolate cake.

This recipe also uses grated chocolate rather than cocoa... so if you're into designer chocolates and you want to exploit the flavor of one of them in a cake, give this a try.

The ingredients:

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: Gaelic Steak (March 16, 2008)

This dish is a fairly modern one -- dating back not much further than the last century -- and the name "Gaelic" may be doubly appropriate, since the basic concept may possibly have been adapted into Irish cooking from that other great nation of the Gaels, Scotland.

Naturally this works best with Irish beef. But those who have no access to that should seek out a butcher who at least ages his or her beef for ten to fourteen days before sale. Prime ingredients are important for this dish.

EuroCuisineGuy, our local expert at the whiskey end of things, suggests that the cook should select a stronger-flavored Irish whiskey like Jameson's, which is robust enough to stand up to the deglazing process that produces the sauce without losing its unique character when the alcohol cooks off. Additionally, there are versions of this recipe that call for flambéeing the steak in the whiskey. EuroCuisineGuy suggests that this is just showing off, and feels strongly that simply reducing the whiskey and then further reducing the sauce after adding the cream produces a better flavored final result.

Click on "read more" for the recipe.

Ireland: Spiced Beef (March 15, 2008)

At holiday times -- especially the Christmas and New Year's period, but at other times of year as well -- spiced beef can be found in almost every butcher's window in Ireland, often with a red ribbon around it to point up its special status. A cousin of corned beef and second cousin of pastrami, spiced beef is such a mainstay of any butcher's business, and so popular with the customers, that annual competitions are held by such organizations as the Associated Craft Butchers of Ireland to determine who makes the best spiced beef, regionally and at the national level. (See the results of the 2007 competition here.)

Most Irish people have been willing to let the butcher do most of the work on this dish, as it's rather labor-intensive. The beef first has to be cut, rolled, and brined. Then after the brining comes a spicing period that can run from several days to a week or more, depending on each butcher's unique recipe.

However, newer and more casual forms of the recipe have started making the rounds. These homebrew versions eliminate the initial brining by simply starting with corned beef, which has already been brined: so they take considerably less time to make. The recipe we've adapted here takes about three days, though you can leave the beef to spice for an additional day or two if you prefer.

Once the spicing period is finished, the beef is cooked by slow simmering, and then allowed to cool. It's served thinly sliced, accompanied by brown bread and butter, and (if you like the black stuff) a pint of Guinness.

Click "read more" for the recipe.

(PS: if you're reading this on Saturday, March 15th, and you're interested in making this dish, you've got just time enough -- if you start early -- to have it ready for dinner on Monday night.)

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