When
asked about Irish food, almost every response will include two things – Irish Stew and Corned Beef with Cabbage. And almost every visitor to Ireland is
surprised to find that neither is featured all that commonly on restaurant menus!
In fact, corned beef is not
traditionally Irish at all – but Bacon and Cabbage is. This is also true for
Irish stew, which has
been recognized as the national dish for at least two centuries. A poem from
the early 1800s praised Irish stew for satisfying the hunger of anyone who ate
it:
Then hurrah for an Irish Stew
That will stick to your belly like glue.
That
isn’t to say that such dishes are no longer eaten, they are, but they are
homely dishes, served to family, rather than ones which would be chosen on an
evening out. And so their appearance on a restaurant menu is a rarity.
Most traditional Irish foods use simple, basic and fresh ingredients. Many have been
given a modern twist by a new generation of chefs or incorporated into dishes
that better suit the tastes of a more widely travelled population.
Irish
traditional cuisine is a peasant cuisine and food in a poor household is never
wasted. There is nothing that illustrates this so well as the pig. Few ordinary
Irish households in the past would have eaten beef – this was a food for the
rich – but many kept a pig and it is said that they ate every part of it except
for the grunt. Crubeens or pig trotters, tripe (pigs stomach) and drisheen (a blood sausage)
were all popular dishes and are still eaten in parts of the country, notably
Cork.
Irish
people are still extremely fond of their fried breakfast, which always includes
pork sausages, bacon rashers and black pudding (another type of blood
sausage). In addition to that, breakfast is rather elaborate and typically includes
orange juice, porridge, cereals, eggs, the traditional soda brown bread, toast,
as well as tea.
When talking
about Irish food, it is impossible to go without mentioning the potato. They
are eaten boiled, mashed, fried, chipped and baked, mixed with cabbage or
scallions to make colcannon or champ, made into potato cakes and used to top
pies and thicken soups or stews. It’s common to find potatoes cooked two ways
on the same dinner plate. It’s not all about dinner either. The food that Irish
people miss most when they are overseas is Tayto, an Irish brand of potato
crisps. Irish people are very fussy about their potatoes. Typically a
supermarket will stock at least 5 or 6 different varieties, often many
more, with the varieties changing depending on the season and each suited to a
particular method of cooking.
Of all
foods, the humble spud is certainly the most traditional. The Irish may
not be dependent on them in the way they were in the past but there
are a lot of Irish people for whom a dinner without potatoes is not a dinner at
all.
Because it is slightly off the beaten path, only few come across the
Famine Memorial, a touching sculpture by the renowned Dublin sculptor Rowan Gillespie. The memorial is easy to find as it is just a few blocks seaward from
the O’Connell Bridge along the quays on the northern side of the Liffey river.
The Canadian connection with the site is marked by a large plaque
recognizing a donation on behalf of the people of Canada, which was a haven for
thousands of those who emigrated because of the Famine. There is a counterpart
of the sculpture in the Ireland Park at Toronto’s Eirann Quay. Five figures collectively
entitled “The Arrival” honor the 38,000 Irish immigrants who fled during the
Famine of 1847 and arrived in Toronto that summer. “The Arrival” is the work of
the same sculptor as the Famine Memorial.
