True Irish Food Traditions

As the world turns with its tragedies, I found this quote from a Wisconsin good food advocate helpful in considering continuing on in light of emotional, social, and political turmoil... "Our job as advocates for a sustainable food system is to stay the course, even in the face of the tremendous political upheaval that is facing our beloved state."--REAP Founder, Jack Kloppenberg    So on with it.

As folks around the country prepare to celebrate St Patrick’s Day with corned beef, cabbage, and green beer, I can’t help thinking that this is a rather impoverished version of Irish Food Heritage.  It would be much like limiting our American food traditions to meat and potatoes...or French fries and soda....

Until recently though, this too was my perception of Irish food: I looked to my Sicilian heritage for  any culinary cultural inspiration.  When I was growing up, my non-Irish mother would honor my father’s full-Irish heritage by making corned beef and cabbage with potatoes and soda bread each year for St Patrick’s Day.  I did enjoy it at the time certainly, but as I got older,and my thoughts about food evolved (i.e.; I became a snobby vegetarian cook for many years,) I began to suffer from a misconception that many suffer from: that Irish cuisine is dull, heavy, starchy, fatty, salty, unhealthy, unimaginative…basically, something to be avoided.   

What it took me a while to realize is that this misconception was a result of many social, historic, and economic happenings colliding to thin out the rich culinary history of the Green Isle.  This history is far too complex to review in this blogpost, but I’d like to take special note here of the Great Famine (Potato Famines) because this exemplifies the importance of food biodiversity so well.  The potato (a food of South American origins) was introduced to Ireland in the 16th century and only became important when English and Anglo aristocracy reduced land allotments so drastically that the native Gaelic Irish peasantry could only survive by dedicating their small growing spaces to the nutrient dense potato.  When potato blight swept through several years in a row, people were left with little else to eat, but the by-then all too scare wild foods. Over 1 million died. And many, many more emigrated.

But. Irish cuisine has been experiencing a renaissance (much like we are here in the US) of its own beautiful and varied food traditions.  People like Darina Allen of the Ballymaloe Cookery School, and Slow Food Ireland, are stalwarts of good traditional Irish Food Heritage and Farm to Table Cookery. The foods of the Ireland have evolved over thousands of years and incorporate a rich blend of agricultural and hunter-gatherer traditions.  Wild foods dominated the Celtic diet for eons, but agriculture took root over 5,000 years.  The result: a wide variety of healthy and sustainable food ways co-existed until political winds changed and then industrial food systems superceded

A mini list of Traditional Irish ingredients includes: seafood & fish like cockles, smoked haddock, salmon, periwinkles, trout, oysters; fruit and nuts like hazelnuts, blackberries, rowanberries, apples; honey; cultivated vegetables like turnips, parsnips, leeks, potatoes, rutabaga, cabbage, kale, artichokes; wild foods like mushrooms, nettles, asparagus, sorrel, samphire, dulse, carrageen moss; grains and legumes like split peas, oats, barley, rye, wheat; game such as venison, pheasant, goose, wild pig; livestock like lamb, pork (bacon, sausage, pudding) and beef; Raw Milk Cheeses like Cheddars, Mileens, Cashel Blue, Gubbeen; whiskeys and good beer...and on.... This list puts me in mind of Wisconsin and its mix of wild and cultivated foods from woodland, water, and pasture. 

To celebrate St Patrick’s holiday at my weekly cooking class, we made a smoked fish soup (recipe below) of mostly local ingredients, but alongside homemade Brown (Whole Wheat) Soda Bread, it reminded us of a land that gave us such lovely food and art and poetry...  "The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper." — W.B. Yeats

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

Green Isle Soup                                                  

    * 2 onions, diced

    * 2 carrots, diced

    * 1 large potato, diced

    * 1 turnip, diced

    * 1 small head cabbage, diced

    * 1 tablespoons butter

    * ~ 1 lb smoked fish (such as haddock or trout)

    * 1 bay leaf

    * 2 cloves garlic

    * 6 cups of water or fish stock

    * 1 tablespoon fresh thyme or 1 teaspoon dried

    * 1 bunch parsley, chopped

    * ½ cup half n half

    * ¼ teaspoon grated nutmeg

Melt the vegetables in butter. Add fish and other ingredients except the last three.

Simmer until the vegetables and fish are cooked. Remove the bones from the fish and return the flesh to the soup.

Discard the bay leaf and finish with the nutmeg, half n half, and parsley.  Serve with brown soda bread.