Ireland

“It is easy to halve the potato where there is love.”

Menu: Beef Stew with Guinness, Champ with Spring Onions, Steamed Kale, Brown Bread, Apple Cake. Serve with water or black tea with milk and sugar.
Preparation Time: 3 hours
Cooking process: Start the stew first; while it is simmering, prepare the brown bread and the apple cake. 45 minutes before eating, prepare the champ and the kale. Serves six people.

THE RECIPES

Beef Stew with Guinness
2 lbs. beef for stewing
1/2 c. flour
2 T vegetable oil
2 medium yellow onions
1/2 c. tomato sauce
1 pint Guinness or other stout beer
3 carrots
salt
pepper
Cut 2 lbs. beef into bite-sized pieces. In a plastic bag, pour 1/2 c. flour, 2 t. salt, 1 t. black pepper. Place the meat inside the bag and shake until thoroughly coated; brush off excess flour. Heat 2 T oil in a Dutch oven or large, solidly-built pan. Quickly brown the meat, stirring and turning the pieces. Peel and chop 2 medium onions; add to the pot with 1/2 c. tomato sauce. Stir until the onions start to look translucent. Pour in 1 pint of Guinness and 3 chopped carrots. Cover and simmer slowly for a couple of hours until the meat is very tender. Season to taste.
If stew is too watery, add the remaining flour that you used to coat the meat.

Champ with Spring Onions
4 potatoes
1 bunch spring onions or scallions
1 c. milk
4 T butter
salt
pepper
Peel and cut 4 potatoes into large chunks. Boil them with just enough water to cover until they are soft (about 20 minutes). While the potatoes are boiling, chop 1 bunch of spring onions (including the white parts) and bring to a low simmer in 1 c. milk. Remove from heat. When potatoes appear done, drain the water and mash with 4 T butter, then add the milk/onion mix. Add 1 t. salt and 1/2 t. pepper. Serve with more butter.

Steamed or Boiled Kale
1 large bunch of dark green kale
2 T butter
Wash and stem 1 bunch of dark green kale. Gather all the leaves together and slice horizontally across all of them in 1/4” slices. Steam or boil for 5 minutes; toss with 2 T melted butter.

Brown Bread
2 c. whole oats
2 c. buttermilk
1 t. baking soda
2-1/2 c. wholemeal (or whole wheat) flour
salt
Soak 2 c. whole oats in 2 c. buttermilk overnight. The next morning, mix 1 t. salt and 1 t. baking soda with 2-1/2 c, wholemeal flour. Shape into a round loaf in the middle of a non-sticking baking sheet (coat lightly with butter if necessary) and cut a cross in the bread right through it, keeping the shape intact. Bake at 350° for 40 minutes. Cut into slices and slather with butter.

Apple Cake
2 large apples
1/4 c. sugar
2-1/2 c. flour
1/2 t. baking powder
1/4 lb. butter
1 egg
1/2 c. milk
1 c. whipping cream
Peel, core, and chop up 2 large apples. Mix them with 1/4 c. sugar and set aside. Whisk 2-1/2 c. flour with 1/2 t. baking powder. Cut in 1 stick butter. Add 1/2 c. sugar. In a separate bowl, beat together 1 egg and 1/2 c. milk. Pour into the center of the dry ingredients and mix gently. Divide into two halves; the first half goes into the bottom of a lightly greased cake or pie pan (dough will be quite sticky, so use your fingers to shape it into the pan). Place the chopped apples on top, then stretch out the second half of the dough with your fingers and cover the apples with it, sealing the sides if possible. Cut a couple of slashes across the top and brush with beaten egg. Bake for 35-40 minutes at 350° and serve with whipped cream if desired.

Tea With Singing and a Pint at the Session
Ireland, once known popularly as “The Land of Song,” has a long history of its inhabitants singing or playing away the darkness of rain and winter in the comfortable confines of a cottage kitchen, near a turf fire. Songs lasting up to 15 minutes were interspersed with equally lengthy stories, serving to entertain friends and families during the cold winter months. In the summers, dances might take place at crossroads and other outdoor locations. Ireland has a much more recent history of playing host to instrumental music sessions in pubs. This newer custom had its roots in the immigrant Irish of England, the United States, and Australia needing a place to go and socialize, because the urban tenements were not hospitable to song and music sessions.

Between the time that instrumental music became associated with pubs and the recent and emphatic entry of women into the public areas of the pubs (as opposed to quietly gathering with other women in the “snug” – a private room in back), a dichotomy developed between those who sang at home – usually women, usually in the presence of children and guests – and those who played instrumental music at pubs – usually men. The beverage of choice at home was tea, and the beverage of choice at the pub was a pint of beer (often a stout beer such as Guinness). Together with the abrupt economic upswing of the 1990s, the gender-based divisions between home and pub have diminished significantly. Pub life has been increasingly dominated by the presence of televisions, and home life has been dominated by competing work schedules, leaving significantly less leisure time. The combination of laws being changed to allow married women to enter the workforce with the sudden availability of jobs has resulted in less time for music making, storytelling, and dancing.

Ireland’s rapidly changing economic situation has not diminished the enjoyment of food, however. Indeed, Irish food has undergone a radical makeover since the 1990s. The economic boom spurred by Ireland’s entry into the European Union brought a renewed interest in fresh local foods, including smoked wild salmon, dark greens, artisan breads and cheeses, and, of course, the potato. The Great Hunger of the 1840s, the bleak result of the Irish people’s forced dependence on the potato, continues to have a powerful impact on the way people eat. A single meal at a restaurant today might include four separate potato preparations (boiled, mashed, fried, and baked) in addition to a meat dish and a green vegetable. Many people still shun foods like shellfish (once relied upon in desperation) as “Famine food.” Almost no one eats potato skins for the same reason: “the Famine is over.” Hand in hand with the new interest in food has come an explosive growth of restaurants catering not just to wealthy tourists, but to the newly-wealthy Irish themselves. While one would expect the growth of good-quality eateries to be limited primarily to the big cities of Dublin, Belfast to the north, and Galway to the west, small villages scattered throughout Ireland are increasingly home to restaurants specializing in fresh local food. One can now find organic goods in local shops.

Because tourism is one of the primary sources of Ireland’s wealth, hotels and some pubs, particularly in the popular tourist havens of Dublin and Killarney, have worked hard to accommodate the unceasing need for a “roots experience” by hosting traditional music sessions. Sometimes these sessions are held on stages with full sound systems (like an Irish cabaret), and the musicians intersperse their jigs and reels with popular Irish-American hits like “When Irish Eyes are Smiling” or “Danny Boy.” Other contexts for food and music outside the home include pubs that serve a limited number of dishes (bacon and cabbage, lamb stew or beef and Guinness stew, roast chicken, “chips” or fried potatoes, etc.). Locals and visitors alike might enjoy this food and pints of beer or cups of tea while three or four musicians play jigs and reels in the background. In this context, the musicians face each other, ignoring the “audience,” and the audience members chat quietly among themselves. At pub sessions, singers are expected to sing only when asked, and only to give the instrumentalists a break late in the evening. Otherwise, the place for song remains in the kitchen with the tea, brown bread with butter and marmalade, and occasional soda bread (usually served as a dessert rather than as the staple).

While beer was once the almost exclusive drink of the average Irishman (Irish whiskies and poitín – “moonshine” – more rarely), Australian wines are affordable and easily accessible today at all the major shops. Wine drinking has become popular in many middle-class homes, and an upwardly mobile interest in all things culinary has led to a spate of cooking classes and restaurants specializing in foreign cuisines. In addition, “hard lemonade,” fortified caffeine drinks and mixed drinks using vodka or rum are popular favorites in the urban dance scene. It is not too far of a stretch to see the ways that this experimentation with new cuisines has led some Irish people back to exploring traditional methods of cooking. People on the coasts used seaweeds, for example, as food, medicine, and fertilizer for centuries. It is no longer out of the question to see a sweetened seaweed-based dessert on the menu of a gourmet restaurant, or a soup that includes nettles.

The overwhelming sense of shame once associated with “traditional” ways of being (speaking the Irish language, singing in the old style, playing pipes and fiddles, eating wild plants and seaweed and shellfish) is no longer an automatic reaction among the Irish of the 21st century. Irish-language schools, for example, have grown dramatically in popularity, and more young people are enthusiastically exploring traditional music-making in ways that would have shocked their elders in the 1950s. Even today, however, certain foods and musical styles invoke in some Irish a deep disdain and resentment over the dark experiences of the past.

Aidan Carl Mathews wrote a poem titled “The Death of Irish,” speaking of language loss in the late 20th century:
The tide gone out for good
Thirty one words for seaweed
Whiten on the foreshore.

This concise but exceptionally revealing poem (from Mathews’ 1983 collection Minding Ruth) may no longer apply to the Ireland of the 21st century. Indeed, Mathews himself recommends that one take the poem “with a grain of salt”! One can now study Irish through online tutorials, program jigs into one’s cell phone ringer, and listen to live streaming broadcasts of old-style singing competitions from around the globe. And anyone halfway across the world can enjoy a hearty meal of beef and Guinness stew with champ, kale, brown bread and apple cake. Just don’t forget to sing afterwards in the kitchen.

Recommended listening:
Classic Irish groups from the 1970s include the Bothy Band, Planxty, The Chieftains, Clannad, and others, while contemporary groups Altan, Solas, Lúnasa, and Danu represent the modern face of traditional music. All these recordings feature carefully arranged pieces interspersed with songs. In some cases, the groups have experimented with rock, jazz, punk, and world music. Many individual singers and instrumentalists have made a splash on the scene, and so many brilliant CDs have appeared in the past ten years that it would be impossible to single out one or two without slighting all the others. Look for solo singers, fiddlers, pipers, harpers, “box” (button accordion) players, flutists, and pennywhistle players. Most importantly, support live music by attending a concert or session, or just sing in your car, your kitchen, and your child’s bedroom at night.

–from “Ireland” (Sean Williams) in The Ethnomusicologists’ Cookbook: Complete Meals from Around the World, ed. by Sean Williams. 2005. New York: Routledge.