mousse

Many people come to our site each day (especially as we get closer to St. Patrick's Day) looking for traditional Irish dessert recipes, especially ones that contain Baileys Irish Cream.*

As far as "traditional" goes, this is always going to be a sticky subject... especially in Ireland, where the label is usually applied to recipes that have been around for hundreds of years. Can you have traditional recipes for anything that's only been around for thirty-five years? Locally, at least, the jury is still out (Though there's no problem with Baileys as such. Lots and lots of native Irish people love it.)

But there's no question that there's a tendency in North America to put Baileys in all kinds of desserts. The problem is that some of the desserts are distinctly dodgy. And this tendency manifests itself most fully in a whole lot of the recipes for "Baileys Mousse Pie" that are out there on the Web at the moment.

The worst thing about them -- the most un-Irish thing, anyway -- is probably their tendency to contain non-dairy toppings, either instant or frozen, as a major ingredient. One of our County Wicklow neighbors stopped EuroCuisineLady in the pub one evening a couple of months ago, knowing that she was an American, and asked her, "What exactly is Cool Whip?" ECL explained that it was a whipped topping that didn't contain any dairy products except the very processed milk chemical casein, and that its main attraction was probably that you could keep it in the freezer for a long time and just get it out when you needed it.

The neighbor then showed ECL a typical Baileys Mousse Pie recipe he'd found that contained nothing much but a graham cracker crust filled with Baileys, sugar, and Cool Whip. "What's this stuff doing in an Irish pie?" ECL's neighbor said: possibly with some reason, since Cool Whip does not exist in Ireland. In fact, no non-dairy topping has ever taken off successfully here, as native Irish people seem to think that there's no point in wasting your money on some weird overprocessed fake-cream product when there's perfectly good real cream all over the place. And the neighbor was very confused as to why -- if these recipes were being pushed as something Irish -- why the people inventing these recipes didn't make them the way Irish people would, with ingredients that you could normally find in Ireland. "They don't mind the cream in the Baileys," the neighbor said. "So why do they have to put this bogus chemical junk in?"

EuroCuisineLady had no quick answer to this. The conversation then wandered off into other territory, especially the question of non-bake versions of such a pie that might actually keep the Irish whiskey in the Baileys inside the pie instead of letting it be driven off by an oven's heat. ECL then went home and started to experiment, to the point where EuroCuisineGuy started wondering why the milkman was leaving so much cream every other day. (The EuroCats, however, did not complain at all.)

After some experiments, EuroCuisineLady finally constructed a Baileys Mousse Pie recipe that fulfills these requirements: (1) It contains no ingredients that are not available in Ireland. (2) The alcohol stays in it. (3) Native Irish people, after tasting it, have agreed that they don't mind it being called "Irish", and have declared it to be Not Bogus.

Please be clear: though the amounts of alcohol in the pie as a whole are not huge, you probably should not eat this pie and then drive. Other than that, all you need to know is that it's rich, it's yummy, and it freezes nicely if you have any extra left over. (Not very likely.)

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

The apple, as one of the few fruits that grows really well in the Irish climate, has been held in high regard everywhere in this island for thousands of years. Before the new religion came in from the East, apples and apple trees were considered important enough to be looked after by the mighty Celtic virgin goddess Brigit herself. And in the Brehon law-code of a millennium ago, apple trees were protected to an extraordinary extent. Whoever damaged an apple tree belonging to someone else was liable to pay a fine of several head of cattle, and a landlord whose tenant was moving on was required to compensate the tenant on departure for any apple trees the tenant had planted during his stay.

As a food and as a basis for drink, the apple remains heavily cultivated here, though naturally Ireland imports apples from many other regions when the local varieties are out of season. And it would be a rare farmyard that didn't feature a few apple trees for cooking and cider-making purposes.

Apple Amber is one of those Irish recipes that plainly involves the cook strolling out to the tree on a whim, pulling a few green cooking apples off it, and taking them back inside to quickly turn them into something unusually nice to end the meal. But the fact that the apples are cooked before baking suggests that this method was meant to work well with storage apples as well, the fruit that had been put away in straw in the cold cellar to last until the first new fruit of the next summer and fall started coming in.

Originally, apple amber was usually constructed as a crustless pie: the grated apple was briefly cooked, seasoned and sweetened (cider vinegar was probably used when lemons were hard to get) and then baked by itself in a pie dish: then meringue was piled on top and the dish returned to the oven just long enough to brown it. More recent versions of the recipe call for the addition of a pie crust. We've used a crust on this version, as it does a nice job of soaking up the juices produced by the fluffy apple mousse as it bakes.

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