pie

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.

Finding pumpkin for that vital pumpkin pie can be tough when you live in Europe.

It's not that pumpkin doesn't grow here (some of the best breeds are grown in France and make their way all over the continent). But there doesn't seem to be much of an urge to can it: and by the time the expat North American's thoughts turn to pumpkin pie, the pumpkin season in Europe is pretty much over and the vegetable itself has disappeared from the markets. The only place to find pumpkin after that is in imported cans on the shelves of too-expensive import shops that charge the hapless would-be pie maker a whole lot more than the same cans would cost at home.

Fortunately there are alternatives. It can be surprising, when it comes right down to comparisons, how very much the flavor of a pumpkin pie depends on its seasoning... and the existence in North America of a specific blend of "pumpkin pie spice" should serve as a suggestion that it's very easy, when coming up with alternative "pumpkin" pie recipes, to cheat.

When you get down to it, a pumpkin pie is pretty simple. It involves a pureed, relatively mildly flavored vegetable, a baked custard (eggs and milk or cream) and a very few spices -- normally cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, and ginger. The obvious substitution if the pumpkin can't be found would be an orange-ish vegetable without too pronounced a flavor. One possible alternative is butternut squash (and a pie recipe featuring that squash is here). Another is the humble yam or sweet potato, which works very well in this context, and is famous in its own regard as sweet potato pie.

This recipe is a little less sweet than many sweet potato pie recipes, and emphasizes traditional pumpkin pie spicing. The flavor of the finished product is surprisingly close to that of pumpkin pie from commercial canned pumpkin.

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

Those of us who routinely spend Thanksgiving off the North American continent but still try to lay out a traditional Thanksgiving dinner probably all have our own stories about failing to find some vital missing ingredient, and then being forced to make do with something less than optimal. One item that sometimes turns out to be very hard to lay hands on is pumpkin.

The difficulty usually surrounds canned pumpkin rather than the fresh kind... but even that can be a problem when it's out of season. Markets in France and Germany for example, routinely feature some of the best fresh pumpkin to be found anywhere on the planet -- firm, meaty, relatively seedless, and (most important) flavorful. But then these are varieties that have been bred for the table for centuries -- not the North American varieties that are mostly bred for size so that they'll make good jack-o-lanterns at Halloween. Problem is, once they're out of season, you won't see them again until the next year... and when you go looking for canned pumpkin, the response is usually bemusement. You won't find it in most parts of Europe. If you can track it down, it's usually in some overpriced store that caters to foreigners and is going to make you pay five or ten times more for it than you would have in a supermarket in the States or Canada.

At such times -- if you're not willing to buckle under -- you learn to improvise. This recipe is one of EuroCuisineLady's takes on the theme. It's an adaptation of the basic pumpkin pie recipe in The Joy of Cooking. This pie -- using butternut squash and yams to replace the pumpkin -- produces a rich, dark pie that compares very favorably with the traditional pumpkin version. It's not going to taste exactly like it... but for the moment it'll do. (One note: the darkness of the pie in the picture is due to EuroCuisineLady using molasses in it instead of brown sugar. The brown sugar variant produces a lighter, more pumpkiny-colored pie.)

Click "read more" for the recipe and method. (Also: for a variant on this theme using only sweet potatoes, check out our Virtually Pumpkin Pie.)

Ingredients:

• 1 kg round steak
• 1 tablespoon flour
• 1 tablespoon brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon raisins (optional)
• 5 onions
• 300 ml Guinness
• 8 slices bacon
• 3 ounces lard
• Enough short-crust pastry for a two-crust pie in a deep dish

Cut the steak into bite sized cubes, roll in seasoned flour, and brown in the lard with the bacon, chopped small.

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.   

This dessert looks like another invention of a cook in one of Ireland's southern counties who found him- or herself with a few leftover cooked potatoes on a day when the farmyard chicken flock was laying well. Half a dozen extra eggs on the counter, maybe a forgotten half-glass of whiskey from yesterday evening's hospitality... then a moment of inspiration, and a dessert is born.

The Carrigaline whiskey pie starts out its life as a dessert soufflé in the usual way -- beaten eggs, whipped egg whites, sugar to sweeten it all -- but there goes its own way, adding mashed potatoes and a little pounded almond to bind the mixture. Orange juice or extract is added for an extra spike of flavor and aroma, and then the whiskey. After baking the soufflé falls, but in this case it's meant to, and even when you make it in a springform pan, it winds up looking like a pie. The final result is a solid, fragrant, and surprisingly rich dessert that speaks of the Irish countryside and a rural lifestyle that's still (just barely) with us.

The name of the recipe probably has to do with Carrigaline's closeness to the great whiskey distilleries of Cork. In particular, Carrigaline is only thirty kilometers or so from Midleton, now famous all over the world for the premium whiskeys of the same name.

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