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Mention of Irish food used to conjure up images of basic fodder like potatoes and Irish stew. Or coddle – braised meat and onions cooked in an earthenware pot.
Sometimes this sort of fare was washed down by pints of stout or porter beer – or even whiskey, if there was any around. As the Irish poet and diarist William Allingham observed in the 19th century:
Poor Paddy of all Christian men I think
On basest food pours down the vilest drink.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, when periodic famines racked Ireland, even basic corned beef and cabbage was considered a luxury. People were too concerned with getting enough to eat to worry about fancy recipes.
The bad old days have passed and the “bland and basic food” stereotype is hopelessly out of date in modern Ireland. Cuisine has become one of the country’s delights, as anyone who has visited lately will attest.
Ireland’s chefs excel themselves. The raw materials have always been there – Galway oysters bursting with flavour, delicious mussels and other seafood, poultry, salmon, veal, lamb and farm produce worthy of a country with a long agricultural tradition. Chefs have learned to blend these ingredients in wonderful ways. You can dine on fine cuisine throughout Ireland, if you stay at the right places.
In the kitchens of Ireland’s celebrated castle hotels, master chefs and fine traditional cooks combine traditional ingredients such as venison, leeks, sage, seaweed, nettles goose, oysters and light-as-a-feather pastry. A restaurant called Monks near Galway Bay serves renowned chowder. People drive long distances for it but the establishment is crowded with locals – always a good sign.
Restaurants like Gallagher's Boxty House in Dublin’s Temple Bar stress the Irishness of their menus. (Boxty, by the way, is a filled potato pancake.)
Here’s a quick glossary to help you understand a few traditional culinary terms:
Barn barck: Also called bram brack, barm brack, barn bark or brick brack (you can almost make up your own term for it!) Whatever you call it, it’s dark bread made with honey and glazed cherries, flavored with tea.
Blood pudding: Also called black pudding. A large sausage made with minced pork fat, pig’s blood, meal and spices.
Boxty: Filed potato pancake.
Brawn: Jellied loaf of beef brains cooked in rich stock, or compounded from the head or feet or a pig of calf, served chilled like pate.
Clootie: Fruit dumpling with custard sauce.
Coddle: Braised meat or sausages and onions cooked in a pot.
Dabs: Small fish sauteed and eaten whole.
Fry or fry up: A breakfast featuring an egg, bacon rashers, sausage, blood pudding, possibly fried bread.
Irish stew: A stew of mutton, potatoes and onions, flavored with thyme
and parsley; slowly simmered.
Mash: Mashed potatoes, often served with sausages.
Nob meat: Venison.
Queen of puddings: Bread pudding filled with jam and topped with baked meringue.
Skause: Beef stew with new potatoes.
Not all food in Ireland is “Irish”. Dublin is full of ethnic
restaurants. Food from France and China vies with that from America, India,
Thailand, Russia, Japan, Lebanon, Indonesia, Italy – you name it.
Near Dublin’s Temple Bar district, an establishment called The Alamo
offers a “Mexican and Irish breakfast”.
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