Taste: Spuds are special

CHEF Darina Allen is determined that traditional Irish food continues to take its place on the table.

Darina Allen

IRISH stew may be the headliner, but for the truly Irish it’s not that dish nor green beer that would be their choice on this St Patrick’s Day.

In her book Irish Traditional Cooking (Simon & Schuster Australia), Darina Allen says in some parts of Ireland mussels still are shunned as ‘famine food”. No such rejection seems to be cast at the potato, however, the failure of which caused the Great Famine.

Before the Great Famine began in 1845 an Irish labourer would eat 3kg to 6kg of potatoes a day.

By 1851, there were three million fewer people in Ireland – one million had died and two million had emigrated to many different parts of the world, putting St Patrick’s Day in the diary in countries other than Ireland.

Champ, once a potato peasant food, is now featured in fashionable restaurants, Allen says.

Spring onions are cooked in milk, boiled potatoes are mashed and added to the onion-infused milk. The mash is served with a knob of butter in a depression in the centre.

Ireland’s best-known potato dish is colcannon – there is a version for every region. Potatoes and cabbage or kale are boiled separately, then combined with hot milk and mashed, and the obligatory knob of butter added.

The potatoes the Irish love are not waxy (like our pink eyes). Such potatoes are scorned as being ‘wet” or ‘soapy”, Allen says.

The Irish prefer dry potatoes, referred to as ‘balls of flour”. Darina sits in the middle of three generations of famous Irish cooks called Allen, and none is mother and daughter.

In 1964, Myrtle Allen opened a farm restaurant where the menu changed daily. Darina came to work for her in the late 1960s, married her son Tim and started Ballymaloe Cookery School.

And in 1990, along came Rachel to work at the school.

She married Darina’s son Isaac and went on to become a television chef. The school built up a collection of traditional Irish recipes, but Allen says about 18 years ago, she realised she had to step up her research.

She said, ‘a whole food tradition [had been] jeopardised in an alarmingly short space of time” as ‘shop bought” bread replaced soda bread and the contents of tins and packets replaced the dishes sourced from the house cow, chickens and vegetable garden.

Allen says corned beef with cabbage was the traditional Easter Sunday dinner but is no longer eaten in Ireland as often as it used to be.

However, for Irish expatriates ‘it conjures up powerful nostalgic images of a rural Irish past”.

Less widely known abroad, but ‘without question Ireland’s national dish” she says, is bacon and cabbage. It’s boiled (of course) and served with boiled potatoes and parsley sauce.

My favourite Irish dish could be served with champ.

It is good enough for the French to have adopted. They call it ragout a l’Irlandaise.

Beef braised with onions, carrots and Guinness

900g chopped stewing steak

2 tbsp oil

3 bay leaves

1 large onion, chopped

2 tbsp flour

300ml each of Guinness and water

225g carrots cut into rings

1 tbsp chopped parsley

12 soaked unpitted prunes (optional)

Preheat the oven to 180C.

Heat the oil and add the bay leaves and let them crackle.

Add the beef and fry. When half done, add the sliced onion and let is gently colour. Sprinkle over the flour and let it brown, then add the Guinness and water. The meat should be just covered – add more water if necessary.

Add the carrots and parsley. Seasons to taste and braise for two hours. Half an hour before cooking finishes add the prunes. And to be really fancy, stuff the prunes with a hazelnut.