So, if you could capture Ireland in a single mouthful, what would that mouthful be?

I think that Pádraic Óg Gallagher, he of the Boxty House, may have captured it perfectly when he drizzled Connemara Peated Single Malt Whiskey over smoked Irish salmon.

Connemara peated single malt whiskey and Irish smoked salmon

It’s like a modern interpretation of a John Hinde postcard. It tastes like you’re sitting close to, or possibly in, a turf fire, an experience that certainly used to go with the territory in rural Ireland.

Classic John Hinde Postcard: Collecting Turf from the Bog, Connemara, Co. Galway, Ireland
(image from www.johnhindecollection.com)

The marriage of whiskey and salmon was only the beginning, though.

It was the opening dish on the menu for the gala Saturday banquet presented as part of the recent Oxford Symposium On Food And Cookery by Pádraic Óg Gallagher, along with Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and a host of Irish artisan producers.

The theme for this year’s symposium was Cured, Fermented and Smoked Foods and banquet attendees were treated to the full Irish experience of same. Pádraic Óg is the first Irish chef to have been invited to present a meal at what is a highly prestigious event in the food calendar – I only wish I could have been there.

You can see below just what I missed.

The Oxford Symposium banquet menu

And finally, on the assumption that you may not have been invited to any Irish banquets lately, here’s how you can create a little taste of Ireland at home…

My new favourite potato thing: oven-dried crisps

Fond though I am of a proper bag of crisps, I don’t mind telling you that I am more than a little excited by these.

Paper-thin slices of potato, soaked in salt and vinegar, then dried to a crisp in the oven.

Yep, that’s dried, not fried.

I’ll grant you that these are not likely to usurp their fried-in-oil cousins anytime soon, but they do make a good case for themselves as a light and crispy snack in their own right. And they’re positively healthy to boot.

There’s a lot to like.

Alternatively…

If it’s real crisps you’re after, you could do worse that to seek out a new entrant to the Irish crisp market. I had the opportunity to sample some of Ed O’Donnell’s Tipperary Crisps during the week and, my, but they are worthy of your attention.

They are naturally appealing for the fact that they use fine, locally sourced ingredients, like Mount Callan cheddar and cider vinegar from Tipperary’s Apple Farm, but mostly they just taste good. The cider vinegar and sea salt flavour I thought an especially fine example of the genre. Here in Ireland, look for them in SuperValu or Centra.

]]> http://www.thedailyspud.com/2010/07/25/potato-crisps/feed/ 19 http://www.thedailyspud.com/2010/07/25/potato-crisps/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=potato-crisps http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheDailySpud/~3/3kw7SodqcXQ/ http://www.thedailyspud.com/2010/07/22/ketchup-recipe-rhubarb/#comments Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:01:29 +0000 Daily Spud http://www.thedailyspud.com/?p=20767

Exotic: (adjective)

1. From another part of the world; foreign;
2. Intriguingly unusual or different; excitingly strange;

There will, no doubt, be much that fits those descriptions at this weekend’s Festival of World Cultures in Dun Laoghaire. A gloriously bubbling stew of music, dance, crafts and food from the far flung reaches of the globe. Even if food were your only interest – and who would I be to judge you for that – the festival’s International Food Traders would surely warrant a visit, as would the Global Village and the South Asian Mela Market.

All told, not a bad way to spend a few days. However, as luck and my projected geographical location for the weekend would have it, I will miss the entire thing. Clearly I will have to compensate by cooking something with a suitably international pedigree. Like ketchup. And if you suppose that such a ubiquitous sauce is too familiar to be exotic, you might have to revise your thinking when you meet the variety made from rhubarb.

Rhubarb ketchup - yes, such a thing exists

See, the first thing you need to know is that, while tomato ketchup might hold a rather dominant position in the global condiment market, it isn’t even the original of the ketchup species.

What were called catsups originated in China and were discovered there by East India merchants sometime in the 17th century, who then introduced them to other parts of Asia and thence to Britain and beyond. Most early catsups were based on mushrooms and it was only when the tomato become more popular in the 19th century that tomato catsup start to emerge.

The chief virtue of early catsups was that they kept for a very long time and were thus popular on long sea voyages. In her book Curry, Lizzie Collingham reports on a recipe that Hannah Glasse provided in the 1748 edition of The Art of Cookery. The recipe, addressed to the “Captains of Ships”, called for stale beer, anchovies, mace, cloves, pepper, ginger and mushrooms in order to make a “Catchup to keep Twenty Years”.

Now, while I do expect this rhubarb ketchup to mature nicely over time, I can’t really guarantee that it will keep for 20 years. I, for one, could not restrain myself from eating such a tangy, fruity concoction for anything like that long.

For all you know, this potato could be quite large...

The fact is that my potatoes, so far, are really quite small.

There is no shame in small potatoes, of course, but, frankly, there’s just less of them to eat.

Undaunted by matters of size, I gathered together a dinners-worth of new season potatoes from my garden for my parents last week. Ma tells me that, when she was growing up, her family liked their potatoes big and piled high in the centre of the table – small potatoes, or póiríní, were strictly for feeding to the pigs. I was glad that my recent ancestors didn’t resurrect themselves for dinner in that case, as we had a rather low mound of spudlings on offer. Size clearly didn’t matter to my Da, though, who polished his spuds off in short order and was the first to ask, Oliver-Twist-like, for more.

After dinner, he retired to the sittingroom.

Moments later:

Da: “That was a grand dinner.”

Ma: “It was, sure.”

After another minute or two:

Da: “Are there any potatoes left?”

Ma: “No.”

Pause.

Da: “Do we have any for tomorrow?”

Da: “Oh.” The disappointment palpable.

Small or not, it’s good to know that my spuds will always be welcome at home.

Better get to work on my next delivery, so.

I hereby issue a warning to all passing lemons.

I am going through a zesting phase and any lemons within range are likely to be relieved of their outer garments sharpish. Zorro-like, I will unsheath my beloved microplane zester, draw razor-sharp blades across their citrusy skins and have my wicked culinary way with the finely shredded results.

Other citrus fruit, I might add, are also at risk.

No lemon is safe...

Ah, yes, it’s true that the zing of a little citrus zest has lifted many a meal lately. I think, however, that my zesting habit started with my first attempt at lemon shortbread bars.

There I was, ready for kitchen action, lured by the promise of the most lemony of lemon bars ever. Suffice to say that the author of the recipe should have their license to use superlatives revoked, because the lemon bars were nothing of the kind.

Fortunately, I realised that the situation could be retrieved by means of emergency zesting. A generous sprinkling of lemon shavings on top and at least I now had bars that spoke of lemon, rather than vaguely hinting at it.

Needless to remark, I have been zesting generously ever since.

Redcurrant shortbread bars with a little inner lemon zest

Many lemons later, the time finally came to return to the scene of the shortbread crime and make a properly tangy shortbread bar.

Rather than go the pure lemon route, however, I looked to my recent harvest of redcurrants, which boast their own particular brand of tartness. They made for a gloriously pink topping but, sharp and all as redcurrants are, they still lacked the oomph I was looking for in my shortbread bars.

One zested lemon later and they had all the oomph they needed.

]]> http://www.thedailyspud.com/2010/07/14/lemon-bars-shortbread-redcurrants/feed/ 20 http://www.thedailyspud.com/2010/07/14/lemon-bars-shortbread-redcurrants/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=lemon-bars-shortbread-redcurrants http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheDailySpud/~3/rvu6dEn_Wxg/ http://www.thedailyspud.com/2010/07/11/gallaghers-boxty-house/#comments Sun, 11 Jul 2010 22:26:49 +0000 Daily Spud http://www.thedailyspud.com/?p=21162 Sometimes it takes a foreigner to capture the truth about a nation:

Ireland … isn’t exactly the sexiest country in the world … constant gray skies, cool temperatures and an obsession with one of nature’s homeliest vegetables….

Clare, from An American in Ireland

Ouch. Harsh but true.

By tradition, we, like our food, are more hearty and plain than delicate and fancy. We are bacon and cabbage and boiled potatoes. We are soda bread, apple tart and the ubiquitous cup of tea. We are the food that you go to your Mammy’s house for. But when we eat out, we generally look to foreign cuisines for something a little outside of our Irish selves.

Perhaps, to my shame, that’s the reason why, in all my years of living in Dublin, I had managed, until now, to avoid darkening the door of Gallagher’s Boxty House. With its traditional Irish menu and diddly-eye music, it sat firmly in my “just for tourists” category.

Gallagher's Boxty House, Temple Bar

Yet a restaurant, of whatever type, that has been around for 22 years, has to be doing something right. And as for Pádraic Óg Gallagher, owner and originator of Gallagher’s Boxty House, I can but admire a man who builds an entire menu around boxty, Ireland’s own particular contribution to the pantheon of potato pancakes. The popularity of Gallagher’s boxty is borne out by the restaurant’s one-tonne-a-week potato habit.

The boxty family: boxty pancake, baked boxty loaf and boiled boxty

Whilst most of the boxty served up is in the form of thick, substantial pancakes, you can also sample boiled boxty, which is dense but lovely in a stodgy way, and the lighter textured baked boxty loaf. The boxty pancakes, meanwhile, you will find wrapped around all sorts of things including (yes) bacon and cabbage. All substantial and satisfying stuff.

Boxty pancake with bacon and cabbage

My visit to Gallagher’s Boxty House, though, was more than the sum of the boxties served.

It lived up to its promise of “bia, caint, ceol agus craic” / “food, chat, music and fun”, thanks, at least in part, to a generous helping of boxty and potato lore from Pádraic Óg himself. As we indulged our obsession with that homeliest of vegetables, I realised that sometimes it takes a local to celebrate the truth of what we are.

Sensational indeed.

The Temple Bar Summer Sensational, which started yesterday and runs until Sunday, is serving up a feast for the senses in and around Dublin’s Temple Bar. The festival menu, put together by the Temple Bar Cultural Trust, is bursting with drama, music, art, film, comedy, dance and, well, vegetables.

Wrap your laughing gear around Cirque de Légume

Yesterday evening, as part of the festival, Cirque de Légume dished up what was by far the most creative and entertaining vegetable medley I have ever seen. Here’s the recipe.

That’s the trouble with words. They mean different things to different people.

Time was when any self-respecting paddy would not have thought to call the items in the picture below anything other than biscuits or biccies.

Oatmeal, chocolate chip and redcurrant whatsits

But the fact is that we’re pretty comfortable with the term cookie these days, it being many years since “American-style Chocolate Chip Cookies” started to appear on Irish supermarket shelves.

Some Irish people might even use the terms biscuit and cookie interchangeably, though I think there is a perception that cookies are a bit fancier than your average biscuit. I mean to say, nobody that I know of ever elevated plain ol’ Marietta biscuits to cookie status, while I, personally, have great difficulty in separating the word cookie from the phrase chocolate chip. Where one goes, the other inevitably follows.

Plain old Marietta biscuits
(image from jacobfruitfield.com)

Still, while these words might be the little pegs on which we hang our cultural identity, what I call said baked goods, in the end, really matters less than the fact that they are just the thing to have with a nice cup of Irish tea.

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Dried Redcurrants

One of the joys of having a generous redcurrant harvest is that I could afford to experiment with slow-roasting as a means of drying some of my redcurrants out. They lose a lot of volume in the process, but there really is a nice concentrated tartness to the end result.

You’ll need:

• redcurrants

You’ll also need:

• One or more baking trays – enough to hold the redcurrants in a single layer

The Steps:

• Preheat your oven to 110C
• Wash the redcurrants and drain on kitchen paper
• Spread the redcurrants in a single layer on your baking tray(s) and roast for about about an hour and a half or up to 2 hours, until darkened, shriveled but still a little bit juicy.
• Scrape from the baking trays and use for baking or add some to your breakfast cereal.

The Results:

• 500g fresh redcurrants will yield around 75g dried redcurrants

It was one of those moments when you try something new and you know what the joy of good food is.

So said resident sis after we had practically inhaled a lunch of mildly sweet and delicate gravad lax from Kinvara Smoked Salmon (proving that you don’t have to be famous to get quoted on this blog, but it does help if you’re related).

She’s in good company as far as her opinion of Kinvara’s smoked salmon goes. Nigel Slater and Jeffrey Steingarten are among the noteworthy food writers who have had kind words to say on that particular subject. Having worked my way through the samples very kindly sent to me, I can’t say that I would object to finding any of them on my plate (though the gravad lax remains a particular favourite).

Pressies from Kinvara Smoked Salmon

And though it is fair to say that you should do very little to good smoked salmon except eat it, I think that there’s nothing wrong with using some classic potato salad to provide a soft, creamy filling around which to wrap a slice of perfectly smoked salmon. But there again, I would say that. You can quote me if you like.

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Smoked Salmon Stuffed with Potato Salad

This part hardly needs a formal recipe – just wrap your slices of salmon around a dollop of potato salad, serve with a wedge of lemon and some dill and you’re done. Apart from eating the end result, that is, but I was taking that part as read.

The amount of filling you can add to a slice of salmon will naturally depend on the size of the slices you have. The slices of Kinvara smoked salmon were around 15cm long and between 5cm and 8cm wide and I filled them with 2 heaped tablespoons of the salad. Adjust according to the size of slices you have.

You could serve a couple of these as a starter, say, or for a lunch serving, have two or three of these with an additional helping of the salad on the side, along with some brown soda bread.

You’ll need:

• Smoked salmon, sliced fairly thinly, with individual slices large enough to be formed into a small filled roll
• Potato and egg salad (see below)
• Lemon wedges to serve
• Chopped dill to garnish

The Steps:

• Scoop around 2 heaped tblsp of potato salad onto the centre of each slice of smoked salmon and form into a roll.
• Garnished with chopped dill and serve with a lemon wedge.

The Results:

• As many filled smoked salmon rolls as you have slices of salmon.

It was the simplest of ideas. To meet of a summer’s evening, drink tea and eat cake.

Gisela, from Life is a Festival, who organised yesterday’s Dublin Tea Up, asked only that you bring yourself, your favourite mug and a baked contribution if you were so inclined (and yes, as you’ll see later, I was).

The result was an Irish teatime gone into overdrive – currant scones and butter, rhubarb tart, swiss roll, iced buns, treacly flapjacks and more. There was even a lady who, in true Mrs. Doyle style, would (go on, go on) offer you one of her baked treats (you will, you will) until such time as you took it (which I did, I did).

Tea from Clement & Pekoe plus lots of scones, cake, tart and buns

And there was tea, of course. A summer berry iced tea and some lovely loose leafed varieties dispensed by Dairine of Clement and Pekoe.

But more than cake and more than tea, there was chat (and even a tune or two). This was a diverse group of people from the arts, who, by and large, had not met before, except in the internet sense of the word. But it turns out that we had plenty to talk about over a cuppa (or several). It was the kind of gathering that, despite involving neither pubs nor alcohol, could actually catch on.

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Lemon Cake With Redcurrants

This was one of my contributions to yesterday’s feast of tea and cake. It’s adapted from a recipe entitled Lemon Crusty Cake in Sue Lawrence’s lovely book, On Baking. I adore the original – tart, sweet and moist all at the same time – a zesty lemon cake drenched in a mixture of lemon juice and sugar as soon as it comes out of the oven.

For a different, but equally tart effect, I have replaced the lemon zest in the cake with redcurrants, which are enjoying their short but glorious season. Raspberries would be an equally good choice.

You’ll need:

• 175g plain flour
• 1.5 tsp baking powder
• pinch salt
• 150g unsalted butter
• 150g caster sugar
• 2 eggs
• 3 tblsp cream
• 150g redcurrants, washed and stalks removed (or substitute raspberries)
• juice of 2 large lemons (about 100ml)
• 100g demerara sugar

You’ll also need:

• A shallow-ish rectangular baking tin, mine was about 27cm x 18cm x 4cm deep

The Steps:

• Preheat your oven to 180C, grease your tin and line with greaseproof paper.
• Whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt and set aside.
• Cream the butter until very soft, then add the sugar and continue creaming until pale and smooth.
• Beat in the eggs, one at a time, folding in a spoonful of the flour after each addition.
• Fold in the rest of the flour and then gently stir in the cream and the redcurrants – the mixture will have a stiff dropping consistency.
• Bake for around 25 minutes or until golden and a toothpick inserted comes out fairly clean.
• While the cake is baking, combine the lemon juice and demerara sugar. Pour this mixture over the cake immediately it comes out of the oven. Allow to cool for about 30 minutes in the tin, then cut into squares and transfer to a wire rack to finish cooling. It’s very moist and lovely with a cup of tea or as a dessert served with yoghurt or sour cream.

The Variations:

• If you’re making this later in the year, it might be worth trying cranberries in place of the redcurrants or raspberries. You can also leave out the fruit if you like and just add the zest of a lemon to the cake mixture (which makes it very similar to the original recipe).

The Results:

• Make approx 24 x 5cm-ish squares