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Ireland: Potato Farl

A very Northern Irish griddle bread, indispensable for the Ulster Fry.

This is best made with hot, freshly riced or mashed potatoes.

  • 2 lb/ 1 kg/ 2 cups mashed potatoes

  • 4 oz/ 125 g/ 1 cup plain flour
  • 2 tablespoons butter
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt

Melt the butter. Stir it into the potatoes along with the salt: then add the flour and mix well.

Ireland: Ulster Fry (March 10, 2008)

Cousin to the Irish breakfast or "full Irish", the Ulster Fry is possibly the single dish most closely associated with Northern Ireland.

There are, however, some vital differences between the Fry and the Full Irish. Officially, the Fry does not contain anything that can't be fried in bacon fat. This means that ingredients that have sneaked in from other regional Irish and British fry-ups (such as baked beans) don't belong in the Fry.

The Ulster Fry is available all over the North both for breakfast and (in cafes and casual restaurants) as a lunch and dinner dish. It's as close as this island comes to the "all-day breakfast" concept. The Fry is meant to be hearty and substantial, and any attempt to render it in low-calorie form is destined to fail, as the ingredients (except for the potato farl and soda farl) are already too high-cholesterol for grilling them to make much of a difference if you're going to be eating them all at once. The key to keeping an Ulster Fry from doing long-term harm to your cardiac health or your waistline is simply not to eat it every day, or maybe even every week. But if you're going to make it, make it the old-fashioned way.

The is a basic roster of ingredients without which an Ulster Fry isn't genuine. They are:

  • Streaky bacon / bacon rashers

  • Sausages (typically the kind referred to in these islands as the "chipolata")
  • Black pudding (an Irish sausage containing blood, a grain such as oats or barley, and various spices)
  • Eggs
  • Potato farl (a potato-based griddle bread, rolled out into a circle and cut into quarters, then baked)
  • Soda farl (soda bread baked on the griddle, also in quarters: "farl" is an old word for quarter)

Other ingredients that sometimes get involved, either as a garnish or as elements of other regional breakfasts that have slithered into the equation from the outside, are white pudding (a sausage like black pudding but without the blood), tomatoes, mushrooms, and fried bread.

Click "read more" for a how-to guide and a note on how to find the necessary raw materials.

Switzerland: Maluns / Slow-Fried or Scrambled Potatoes from the Graubunden

Maluns is nothing more or less than comfort food to many people who come from the part of Switzerland where it's most often now made (the Grisons or Graubunden). The dish has the Alps in its bones, speaking (as do so many of the local specialties) of a place where the lifestyle in past centuries was difficult: where you made the best of what you had when the snows set in hard, or spring was taking forever to arrive. Here you can just imagine some pensive cook in a tiny chalet staring at the last few potatoes and a little flour, and a firkin of the local butter or the lard from the last pig they killed, and thinking, "Hmmmm..."

This is not a dish for the calorie-conscious. The butter or lard involved (some versions call for both) will not be just a spoonful or so. So be warned. (The recipe below uses herb butter, which is readily available in Switzerland and makes the dish a little more interesting).

It should also be mentioned is that it takes forever to make maluns... or at least, it feels like forever while you're standing there stirring the stuff. It's like old-fashioned polenta: there is no way to hurry it up. (And unlike polenta, it doesn't seem likely that any enterprising Swiss convenience-food maker will come out with Quick Maluns any time soon. In fact, the concept just feels vaguely illegal somehow.)

Scotland: Stovies

If you spend enough time in Scotland, you're likely to run across stovies. This will not happen in any fancy restaurant, but more likely in a pub or similar place where they're serving good commonplace food -- stuff to fill you up, keep off the Hebridean damp, and keep the pints or the whiskey company. Sometimes the stovies will be accompanied by oatcakes, as in the picture to the right, taken at a Scottish ski resort.

Stovies are a leftover dish, and there are probably as many recipes for them as there are families in Scotland. But the basic concept is simple. Cube or chop up your leftover cooked meat (beef from the Sunday roast, sausages, what have you), saute it briefly with onions and part-cooked potatoes, and let the dish finish on the stovetop, developing an attractive and yummy crust.

There will be those who get all tangled up in word history and insist that the name of the dish comes from the French étouffée, "to steam". But despite Scotland's many ancient connections with France, that seems unlikely. The name more likely simply refers to what you cook the dish with, or on.

Click on "read more" for the recipe.

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