Dublin

"You take a lobster about three feet long..."

Once upon a time in Ireland, this was no big deal. These days the lobsters tend to be a lot smaller, as much due to overfishing as to climate change -- the Irish coastal waters aren't as cold as they used to be. But there are still plenty of lobsters around, and they form the basis for two dishes that have been popular for the last couple of centuries.

Though no one's absolutely sure where Dublin Lawyer got its name, wags will insist that it's probably because Dublin lawyers had a rep for being rich and having a lot of whiskey in them. The dish remains simple, quick and easy to make, but requires that the lobster be alive, and cooked immediately after killing it.

The other recipe is a little more complex, but still quick to make and also unquestionably tasty. The popular magazine columnist and novelist William Makepeace Thackeray came over to Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century to tour the country and meet up with some literary connections. In his novel The Irish Sketch-Book he tells about how, along the way, he has dinner with some friends at a scenic restaurant in Salthill, south of Dublin. The star dish of the dinner is a lobster dish with a surprisingly spicy sauce, and Thackeray describes everything from the ingredients, to the cooking method, to what to drink with the final result... and how to cope with the hangover the next morning.

This traditional supper dish of sausages, bacon, onions and potatoes dates back at least as far as the early eighteenth century. It seems to be more of a city dish than a rural one: it was a favorite of Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels and dean of Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin.

The name of the dish is probably descended from the older word caudle, derived from a French word meaning "to boil gently, parboil, or stew". The more recent version of the verb, "coddle," is still applied to gently cooked eggs; and in the case of Dublin coddle, it's become a noun, applied to a dish that is cooked very slowly at low temperatures.

In Dublin itself, coddle retains its reputation as a dish that can be prepared ahead of time and left in a very slow oven while the people who're going to eat it have to be out of the house for a while -- in particular, at a funeral: when everyone returns for the wake, the dish will be ready, and won't have suffered from being left in the oven a little longer than planned. While this is a simple dish, its quality depends entirely on the quality of the raw materials you use to make it -- so it's important to find the best ingredients you can.