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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.

Ireland: Gammon Steak with Sauteed Apples and Whiskey Sauce (March 7, 2008)

The word gammon goes back a long way, at least to the fourteenth century. It may have come into English from French, as the word jambon starts being used for ham in the middle-French dialects around the same time. Once gammon meant any rear haunch of a pig, or specifically the ham: later it came to mean some of the side cuts as well, though only as long as they were still attached to the pig's haunch while the meat was being cured. Today it simply means ham, and "gammon steak" is ham steak.

Generally speaking, gammon steak isn't a dish you would often see offered at breakfast in Ireland (though some hotels might do it). It's more usually a lunch or dinner entree. At a pub it would most likely turn up with chips / fries on the side, as so many things do here. (The illustration shows champ and braised cabbage, which are a good idea too. There should be some kind of mashed potato preparation involved, so that the sauce that comes iwth this recipe has something to soak it up.)

This treatment is particularly nice because of the synergy of the apples and the whiskey in the sauce. Try to use a tart apple like a Granny Smith or Bramley for this: the sweeter eating apples won't work so well.

Click on "read more" for the recipe.

Ireland: Chicken and Ham Pie (March 5, 2008)

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.

Tyrol: Panicia cun cern sfumieda y bales (Barley Soup with Smoked Pork and Dumplings)

MMMMM----- Recipe via Meal-Master (tm) v8.04
 
      Title: Panicia cun cern sfumieda y bales / Barley soup with...
 Categories: Soups, Val gardena, Smoked, Tyrolian
      Yield: 4 servings
 
MMMMM----------------------------SOUP---------------------------------
           Smoked bacon or pork
           Water
           Barley
      1    Finely chopped onion
      1    Clove garlic, finely chopped
      1    Carrot, cut into rounds
      1    Potato, peeled and cubed

MMMMM-------------------------DUMPLINGS------------------------------
      1    Finely chopped onion
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