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CH, DE, OE: Spaetzle Dough for Potato Ricers

This terrific recipe comes courtesy of Principia Gastronomica.

Ireland: Porter Cake (March 13, 2008)

Porter was (and is) a style of dark beer which began to be brewed in England and Ireland in the mid-1700's. The stout style now exemplified by Guinness was closely linked to it: indeed, Guinness was originally marketed as a porter before having its name changed to "Extra Stout". The only porter being brewed in Ireland now, however, is the "Plain" porter (as in the famous line from Flann O' Brien's "The Workman's Friend", A pint of plain is your only man) that comes from the Porterhouse group of brewpubs in Dublin. (For more information about the intertwined history of porter and stout, see the Porter pages at Wikipedia and the BeerAdvocate website.)

Somewhere along the line in the 1800's, it occurred to somebody in Ireland that porter would make a good addition to the robust dark flavor of the standard fruitcake: and so porter cake was born. It usually contains, at the very least, raisins or sultanas (golden raisins): often dried candied peel (orange peel, lemon peel, candied pineapple, etc.), and sometimes even glacé cherries, come into the recipe as well. All the alcohol in the porter is of course driven off during the long baking period, resulting in a darkly rich-tasting cake which is another great standby for those who like to wheel out a well-loaded tea trolley.

This cake keeps very well if stored in a cake tin.

Click "read more" for the recipe.

Ireland: Dingle Pies (March 11, 2008)

The word fairings starts to turn up in English around the mid-1600's. It means something you buy at a fair -- sometimes as a present for someone else -- and specifically, food bought at a fair. In Ireland, these regional fairs -- which started out as periodic horse and cattle markets and expanded into general excuses for meeting and celebration -- were normally tied to the great holidays of the old Irish calendar, or to the major feasts of the Christian religious calendar that supplanted it.

One such holiday was Lammas Day, August 1st. ("Lammas" is a worn-down version of the Old English word hlaefmaesse, "loaf-feast": this festival, celebrating the grain harvest, is closely tied to the ancient Celtic summer / harvest festival of Lughnasagh.) Among many Irish Lammas fairs, one of the most famous was the one held in or near Dingle during the first week or ten days in August. People would flock to the Kingdom of Kerry from miles around to buy and sell their cows, horses and other goods, and to eat and drink and have a good time. The Dingle fair was particularly famous, and is still remembered in folksongs like the one about Red-Haired Mary. Other Lammas fairs in the area had such curious traditions as making a goat King of the Fair (this tradition is still carried on yearly at the Puck Fair in Killorglin, Co. Kerry, just south of the Dingle peninsula -- click here for the Google map), and they also still carry on the Dingle Fair's old tradition of serving fairings like the Dingle pie.

Once made with mutton, Dingle pies are now usually made with lamb. They're small individual pies that could easily be bought from a stall and carried around the fair while you had a look at the cattle or thought about where you might stop for your next pint.

Click on "read more" for the recipe.

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.

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