dessert

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.

In a part of the world best known for serious cakes like the Schwarzwalder kirschtorte and substantial desserts like the famous Dampfnudeln (sweet steamed dumplings), some people find the appearance on Munich menus of something called Bayerisch vanillecreme rather confusing... especially whey they taste it for the first time and find themselves unexpectedly in contact with a dessert that's suave and rich yet also airy and meltingly light; something most closely resembling a vanilla pudding which has wandered into the mortal realms after a brief sojourn in Heaven. (Which is what the Bavarians think their part of the world can be mistaken for, anyway.) How in the world, some people might say, did a sweet this subtle and sophisticated turn up in the robust mainstream of Bavarian home cooking?

It turns out there's probably a French connection. In 1385, Duke Stephan II of Bavaria married his daughter Isabel to the king of France, Charles the Sixth. Due to her husband's ill health, Queen Isabel (referred to by the French as Isabeau de Bavière or Isobel the Bavarian) wound up having to shoulder much of the serious business of ruling France, and was constantly engaged in diplomatic travel and power-brokering across central Europe. One thing she seems to have brought back to Bayern with her when business took her home was the recipe for the rich egg-based custard-cream desserts then popular at Charles's Parisian court. From the Bavarian court the vanilla creme made its way out into local food culture, and has never faded in popularity from that day to this. And in French food culture, Isabeau's affiliation with the dessert is remembered in its French name, bavarois, "the Bavarian dish". (Please note: this recipe is nothing to do with bavaroise, which is a drink involving tea and alcohol, sometimes specifically absinthe.)

You should be clear before embarking on this recipe that it's no easy-mix pudding, but a high-end product worthy of a royal court, and is therefore going to require moderate effort and all your attention for the hour or so that it takes to put it together. But the results will really be worth it. The final vanilla cream can be enjoyed on its own, or can have chocolate or fruit added: can be enriched with liqueurs or schnapps, stacked in parfait glasses, and used in all kinds of creative ways.

One note in passing: there are a lot of recipes for "Bayerische Vanillacreme" out on the Web that for some reason add vanilla ice cream and cornstarch to the mix. This is most likely somebody's attempt to get around the number of eggs needed in the original recipe to lend it richness and thicken it. These recipes are in no way authentic, as cornstarch wouldn't have been readily available in Bavaria in the 1400's any more than ice cream would have.)

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

Ingredients:

• 900 g flour

• 1/2 liter milk
• 40g or 1 1/2 envelopes dry active yeast
• 1 egg
• 50 g butter
• Pinch of salt
• 2 packages vanilla sugar
• Vanilla flavoring to season
• Sugar to season

Hefe in 1/8 Liter lauwarme, mit 2 Teelöffeln Zucker verrührte Milch lösen. Mehl in eine vorgewärmte Schüssel geben, in die Mitte eine Vertiefung drücken. Hefemilch hineingeben, mit dem Mehl verrühren und 20 Min. zugedeckt an einem warmen Ort ziehen lassen.

Prekmurska gibanica is an interesting combination of cake and pastry, and hails originally from the Prekmurje region of Slovenia. It restates a favorite theme in central European baking -- the layered sweet strudel, often with poppy seeds involved (as in this variation) and stuffed with sweet jams, fruit or fruit compotes, nuts, and/or dairy products (in this case cottage cheese).

Some descriptions of Prekmurska gibanica describe it as a pie. This is probably because of the bottom layer, which is sometimes made of shortcrust pastry -- possibly a remnant from the earliest versions of the dish, which were devised before refined sugar was available. Honey would have been the only sweetening in those versions, and a more solid bottom layer (more solid than strudel dough, anyway) might have made sense.

Those versions of Prekmurska gibanica also included dried grapes as one of the main constituents of the filling. The present version, however, uses cottage cheese, poppy seed, walnut and apples, and the dried grapes (in the form of raisins) turn up as part of the cottage cheese filling, having been first soaked in rum. This version of the recipe is well enough known and liked in Slovenia to have been declared one of the fifty national "birthday cakes" for the European Union's 50th birthday celebrations in 2007. It's so popular that it appears on one of the country's stamps!

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