Irish Cuisine

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Overview of Irish Cuisine History
Much of Irish food is typical of northern Europe, and particularly reflects both native Irish food traditions, and influence from England and Scotland.

Throughout the early half of the 20th century, Irish cuisine was considered somewhat limited in variety. Due to the Great Famine (1845-1849), a good plain meal consisting of a trio of meat, vegetables and potatoes became the symbol of comfort in Ireland.

This held until about the 1960s, when Ireland began to slowly develop economically. People began to gain experience of eating a wider variety of foods as overseas travel became accessible. Today, one can find plenty of multicultural food and drink on offer on a visit to any Irish supermarket, although smaller rural stores do not reflect these changes to the same degree.

Today, the cuisine of Ireland features two cooking styles: the traditional one, characterised by the preparation of simple foods and a more recent international style that is used mainly in restaurants. Some simpler restaurants may also feature one or two traditional dishes alongside a international offering.

Ingredients
The staple food of Ireland has traditionally been the potato. Most commonly steamed, there are other methods of preparation as well, such as boiling and mashing. Mash potato (with butter, salt, and sometimes milk) can been enhanced with other vegetables (also boiled), as in the dishes colcannon and champ. The potato has been used in Ireland since the late 17th century. At first, it was grown in gardens, but later began to be grown on larger areas. Small-holding tenants were unable to grow enough food to sustain their families without using the potato as essentially their sole source of nutrition. Poorer families in early modern Ireland would have eaten boiled potatoes with some milk or buttermilk twice or three times a day, in the absence of anything else. When the potato crop failed (most notably in 1845), the reduced production led to famine.

The other main ingredients were pork, beef and mutton. In general, only one pig would be kept by a family per year, and until late in the 20th century, the ordinary farmer referred to this animal as "the gentleman who paid the rent" - indicating that it was just as common for families to sell their pig for money as it was to slaughter and consume it themselves. People also made use of poultry and game meat, such as rabbit. Although Ireland is an island, the seafood does not have a very important role in the national cuisine. Fish was eaten only quite close to the coast and on the western islands. The popularity of seafood dishes only increased recently. Dublin Bay Prawns and Galway Oysters, have become famous across the country. The most frequently fish cooked at home are salmon and cod, and hake.

Food started to become more varied in the 19th century, when people started to buy and sell ingredients domestically. It became more popular to rear chickens. Ireland also became a major exporter of butter and wheat during this time.

Artisan domestic produce such as honey has become more widely available to consumers during the past century. Local varieties of honey become available in the spring and summer, and hold for a very long time. Honey was also used to make mead, but this is not as widely drunk as it was in the medieval period.

The south-east of Ireland has a suitable climate for fruit-growing, and strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries are grown and harvested there, mostly famously in County Wexford. Ireland has many orchards, in which apples and pears are the most common fruit-trees. Cherry-trees, plum-trees, bilberry-trees and Arbutus trees (sometimes known as 'strawberry trees') also grow wild, as well as fruiting bushes such as blackberry, black currant, red currant, and occasionally gooseberry. Rhubarb, which is suited to Ireland's damp climate,, is grown in orchards and - although a vegetable - treated as a fruit in desert dishes or turned into compote for yogurts.

Native nuts include hazelnuts, chestnuts, cobnuts and filberts, while walnuts can flourish in some sheltered areas. All are eaten except chestnuts, although these too are edible when roasted.

Traditional Irish breads like sodabread or buttermilk loaves, are made without yeast. Local varieties of bread in Ireland do have yeast, especially in the eastern and southern provinces. For example, Waterford blaa is a soft bread usually presented in the form of small circular roll.

Dairy is a hugely important industry to Ireland's culture and economy, with many local cheeses being produced, from the milk of cattle, sheep, and goats.

Fast food in Ireland has traditionally centred around fish and chips, often from restaurants owned by Italian families: famous chippers in Ireland include Burdock's, Macari's and Sorrento (Dublin), Luigi's and Enzo's (Limerick), and Dino's (Cork). These originate in the emigration of Italians to the UK and Ireland in the 1940s. American-style fast food is also available in major towns and cities. The most popular take-away cuisines are Chinese, and increasingly, Thai and Indian. There has been a certain amount of fusion between older and more recent styles of fast food, with the invention of curry chips and spice bags.

Nowadays, Irish cuisine is becoming more diverse and healthier. There is increased influence from continental European modes of life and increased availability of foreign produce: the improvement in the choice of fresh vegetables in the last 15 years is especially notable. Traditional Irish vegetables were: potatoes, cabbage, carrots, parsnips, turnip, leeks, and occasionally onions, beetroot, or nettles. Products such as chickpeas, bell peppers, aubergine, celery, cucumbers, onions, garlic, and new varieties of previously available ingredients like tomatoes and mushrooms have now become available.

The most popular hot drink is still black tea with milk, although other kinds, such as green tea, have become much more widely available. The Irish drink more tea per capita than any other country. Traditionally, coffee drinking was a feature of only urban or middle class rural families, but coffee has become more popular in the past thirty or forty years.

Traditional Irish drinks include stout (dark heavy beer), ale and lager as in England and the Low Countries, and cider, usualy made from apples but sometimes from pears. Local brews include stronger pale ales and red ales. Most famously, Ireland and Scotland are the original whiskey-producing nations. Other traditional spirits, such as poitín, though widely known, have become much less popular owing to the illicit nature of their production.

Cuisines of Ireland


Due to the relatively small size of the island, the cuisine of Ireland is broadly speaking homogeneous. Some difference can be noted north and south of the Border, due to different degrees of Scottish and English cultural proximity and influence. As Ireland was historically rather isolated from the continental mainland, its cuisine is more linked with English, Welsh, and Scottish cooking than its other neighbours to the south and east, such as France and the Netherlands. Ireland has much local produce, and a certain amount of distinct dishes depending upon the region and its agricultural specialities.

Traditional Irish Cuisine
Examples of Irish cuisine include:

Popular condiments include apple and onion chutney, brown sauce (made from tomatoes, onions, figs, and spices), mustard (English or Dijon), and ketchup.
 * Irish stew, made with beef, carrots, and onions, and a simple herb and spice mix, often thyme and black pepper.
 * Bacon and cabbage / turnip / nettles, in which the chosen vegetable is boiled with salted bacon in water until cooked: Bacon and cabbage or turnip is popular, while bacon and nettles is traditionally eaten only once a year, during the spring, and was believed to be good for children's health.
 * The traditional Irish breakfast, composed of fried sausages, rashers (back bacon), fried black pudding (pork blood sausage with suet and breadcrumbs), fried tomatoes, fried eggs, fried mushrooms, and hash browns (thick potato cakes made of mashed potato combined with onions and flour and fried in butter), and served with buttered toast and black tea.
 * Boxty, a type of potato pancake, is another traditional food; made from a much 'stiffer' dough than a hash brown, and more like a flatbread than an ordinary pancake, it is commonly eaten alongside an Irish breakfast in the midlands, especially in Leitrim.
 * A dish mostly particular to Dublin is coddle, which is composed of pork sausages (other other bacon product), potatoes, and onions, boiled in chicken broth and a stout such as Guinness.
 * Colcannon is a side dish made of mashed potato and either cabbage, or kale, and sometimes garlic. Champ consists of mashed potato into which chopped scallions (spring onions) are mixed.

Examples of Irish desserts, which show strong English influence, are:


 * Apple tart and rhubarb tart
 * Bread and butter pudding
 * Carrot cake
 * Gingerbread cake, a sticky deep-pan cake make with ginger and golden syrup.
 * Rice pudding (often made with added raisins)
 * Coffee cake with chicory icing (often made with added walnuts)
 * Stewed apples served with light custard
 * Chocolate biscuit cake (tiffin)
 * Caramel slices, i.e. shortbread with a layer of thick caramel, topped with chocolate.
 * European pastries, such as croissants, cinnamon swirls, and 'Danish' custard pastries.
 * British and English cakes such as Battenberg and sponge cake.

Other 'treats' which fill the same niche as pastries but which are less sweet, include:


 * Scones, either plain or with fruit (raisins), eaten with butter and jam, and sometimes cotted cream
 * Duck Loaf, a soft yeast-bread enriched with butter and raisins, topped with sugar icing, and eaten plain or with butter.
 * Seasonal sweet breads such as Oxford Lunch, porter-cake, and fruit loaves.
 * Biscuits such as shortbread and ginger biscuits, often made at home. Shop-bought British biscuits and teacakes are also popular, although other English treats like crumpets are not common.
 * Treacle cake with raisins, eaten with butter, similar to the English cake 'spotted dick'.

Some types of meat consumed in Ireland, but not in other parts of western Europe include goat, whereas rabbit and horse, both popular across the Channel in France, were not widely eaten, unless (in the case of the former), by poachers.

Some dishes marketed as "traditional Irish cuisine" abroad, such as corned beef, have never been popular in Ireland, except perhaps among the more Anglicised portion of the population during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Modern Irish Cuisine
In the 21st century, Ireland has gained access to a lot of typical European food which had previously been absent, as well as experiencing some Americanising trends.

Europe's dishes have influenced the country, along with other world dishes introduced in a similar fashion to the rest of the continent. Common meals include pizza, curry, Chinese food, and lately, some West African dishes and East European (especially Polish) dishes have been making an appearance. Supermarket shelves now contain ingredients for traditional, European, American (Mexican/Tex-Mex), Indian, Chinese and other dishes. Speciality foodstores selling Eastern European, West Asian, or Chinese food have opened across the country. Irish people might refer to Eastern European stores by the generalising term "Polish shops", and indeed many of them focus solely on Polish food. There are also those which offer Polish, German, Baltic, and Italian food, however, as well as "Moldovan" shops which generally sell Romanian, Moldovan, and perhaps Bulgarian food. Halal food is available in bigger towns, and Dublin has a few Jewish restaurants and food shops serving kosher food.

In tandem with these developments, the last quarter of the 20th century saw the emergence of a new Irish cuisine based on traditional ingredients handled in new ways. This cuisine is based on fresh vegetables, fish (especially salmon and trout), oysters, mussels and other shellfish, traditional soda bread, the wide range of hand-made cheeses that are now being made across the country, and, of course, the potato. Traditional dishes, such as Irish stew, coddle, and potato bread have enjoyed a resurgence in popularity. The "full Irish" breakfast is still widely available in restaurants and cooked at home, but generally is seen as an occasional indulgence, whereas during the 20th century it would not have been uncommon for comfortable families to eat it several times a week. Nowadays, a 'Germanic' breakfast of cereal and toast, or a 'Continental' breakfast of coffee and a pastry, is becoming more popular.

Some traditional dishes which had fallen out of common use, such as Dublin coddle, are now regaining their popularity. Others, such as tripe and crúibín (pig's trotter), have disappeared almost completely. New variations on traditional dishes can be found, e.g. steamed mussels with lemon butter, or Guinness being added to steak and kidney pie.

As Ireland has grown in prosperity, foods that once would have available only to the gentry, such as lamb, venison, duck, pheasant, and partridge, are becoming more accesible, though still expensive.

Schools like the Ballymaloe Cookery School have emerged to cater for the associated increased interest in cooking.

Preparation Methods for Irish Cooking
In the very early ages of the Irish cuisine, people used to sometimes prepare game meat (especially venison), by placing it in a hole full with water, in which hot stones were put, known as a fulacht fia.

During the middle ages and early modern period, ordinary people cooked in a pot or frying pan over an open fire, and roasting was reserved for public occasions or wealthier families. Later, woodstoves and gas cookers became more popular, and these are both still in use, especially in old houses in rural areas, today.

Salting was by far the most common method of preservation, rather than smoking or drying out: the amount of firewood available to ordinary Irish people was historically quite small, and the climate is not suitable for drying fruit or nuts in the open air, as it is in warmer climates.

Nowadays, of course, Irish cuisine uses modern preparation methods, such as boiling, frying, stewing, smoking, salting and broiling.

Equipment and Serving
The equipment that can be found in a typical Irish kitchen is common to most of the world. The utensils that are used in Ireland do not differ significantly from the cooking tools used in continental Europe - knives, forks, soup spoons, dessert spoons, for eating at table, and teaspoons, graters, scoops, pans, trays and pots of various sizes for preparation.

Each food is served on a certain plate: soups are served in deep bowls, while the desserts are served on small plates or shallow bowls, and eaten with a fork, or in less formal circumstances, with a desert spoon. Flat dinner plates are used unless a dish like stew or casserole calls for a deeper dish. At a formal restaurant, as elsewhere in the world, two sets of cutlery will be provided for the starter and main course respectively. Forks can be used tines-down or tines-up depending on personal preference, the formality of the situation, or the meal provided. Most Irish people eat with the fork in their left hand and the knife in their right. Because of how strict table-manners were in the past, you can still see older generations eat even chips, pizza or wraps with a knife and fork.

When eating at home, most Irish families will plate the food in the kitchen before bringing it to the table, but sometimes potatoes are served in a communual style in the middle of the table.

At teatime, tea is normally presented ready for pouring in a small pot, porcelain or stainless steel, and drunk from a cup; in a café or restaurant, tea or coffee with invariably come with a saucer, teaspoon, and sugar, while fresh milk (not crema) is available in a small jug on the table. Ginger biscuits or small chocolate squares might also be tucked onto the saucer, but generally speaking a tray will not be brought to the table, as it might be in other European countries.

Irish Food Traditions and Festivals
Ireland has many seasonal foods, especially related to Christmas, Easter, and Hallowe'en.

Christmas

Christmas dinner in Britain and Ireland has traditionally been roast goose, with bread and potato stuffing, a sauce such as cranberry sauce. In recent decades, turkey has become the most popular Christmas dinner, served with roast potatoes and roast vegetables, carrots with gravy, and other trimmings. Goose is now retained for New Year's Day or Easter Sunday.

Christmastide deserts include:


 * Christmas cake (a rich fruitcake decorated in marzipan and royal icing)
 * Christmas pudding (boiled fruit pudding soaked in an alcohol such as brandy), made about 5 weeks before Christmas.
 * Yule log (a chocolate version of a Swiss roll, decorated to look like a snow-dusted branch of wood.
 * Orange cake, a madeira cake made with orange peel and orange-flavoured butter icing.
 * Mince pies, small pies filled with a traditional spiced fruit mixture.
 * Certain German treats such a gingerbread, lebkuchen, and stollen cake.

Spring

Saint Patrick's Day normally falls before or during Lent, when some people fast for religious reasons; normally people who have made a Lenten promise make an exception for Saint Patrick's Day. There is no particular food associated with Saint Patrick, though members of the Irish diaspora abroad might eat something Irish as part of their celebrations.

Easter

Roast lamb or occasionally goose is eaten for Easter, with lamb being more traditional. Around Easter, people bake Simnel cakes, a light fruit cake decorated with marzipan, and hot cross buns, spiced sweet buns with orange peel and raisins, usually sliced open and buttered. Both poultry and chocolate eggs are popular around this time as well.

Summer

Simple fruit deserts such as strawberries with cream or pear tart tartin are eaten during the summer.

Hallowe'en

Traditional Irish baking associated with Hallowe'en includes the báirín breac (speckled loaf), often Anglicised as "barm brack". This is a fruit cake, often containing a hidden ring - the person who gets the ring is supposed to be more likely to get married in the coming year. As Hallowe'en falls during autumn, many apple and berry dishes will be found on Irish tables around this season.

Weekdays

Many families still eat fish on Fridays, as part of another tradition from Ireland's monastic Christian heritage. School, university and workplace canteens generally offer fish in addition to meat and vegetarian options each Friday. Sunday tends to be the day of more relaxed family dinners, or perhaps eating out.

Food Festivals
In recent years, food festivals have been set up to promote local produce. Examples include


 * Me Auld Flower - a fruit, vegetable and flower show in St. Michan's, Dublin (March)
 * West Waterford Festival of Food, in Dungarvan, Waterford (April)
 * Tralee Food Festival, in Tralee, Kerry (in Ireland's 'Golden Vale', a dairy-producing region)
 * The Food Fleadh in Ballina, located in Mayo (May)
 * The Burren Slow Food Festival, in Lisdoonvarna, north Co. Clare (May)
 * Taste of Dublin at the Iveagh Gardens, Dublin (June)
 * Galway International Food & Craft Festival in Galway town (July)
 * Clare Food & Drink Fleadh in Ennis (July)
 * Wexford Harvest Festival in Wexford town (August)
 * Oyster Festivals in Galway town and Clarenbridge (September)
 * Abbeyleix Apple Fest in Abbeyleix, Co. Laois (September)

Additionally, most towns and cities will have a Christmas market in December, selling Irish and international food and drink.

More about Irish Culture
Other Regional Links:
 * More about this country on WikiPedia.com
 * Ireland Travel Guide - Travelguidewiki.com
 * Irish Fashion - Wikichic.com