What are some less commonly known traditional Irish food?

Answer 1

Irish cuisine can be divided into two main categories – traditional, mainly simple dishes, and more modern dishes, as served by hotels etc. for tourists.

There are many Irish dishes involving potatoes. Colcannon is a dish made of potato and one of wild garlic (the earliest form), cabbage or curly kale, (compare bubble and squeak). Champ consists of mashed potato into which chopped scallions (spring onions) are mixed.

Other examples of simple Irish meals are Irish stew, and also bacon and cabbage (boiled together in water). Boxty is another traditional dish. A dish mostly particular to Dublin is coddle, which involves boiled pork sausages. Ireland is famous for the Irish breakfast, consisting mainly of pork, and, particularly in Ulster, fried potato farls.

Seafood has never been a mainstay of the Irish diet, despite the country being an island, but many dishes have developed nonetheless, and it has gained popularity, especially due to the high quality of shellfish--e.g. Dublin Bay Prawns, Galway Oysters (an oyster festival is held in Galway every September where oysters are often served with Guinness). Salmon and cod are perhaps the two most common types of fish used. Hotels might also serve oysters and mussels.

Traditional Irish breads include soda bread, wheaten bread, soda farls, and blaa, a doughy white bread roll particular to Waterford.

Contents [hide]
1 Food in early Ireland
2 The potato in Ireland
3 Food in Ireland today
4 Myths
5 References
6 See also
7 External links



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Food in early Ireland
There are many references to food and drink in early Irish literature. Honey seems to have been widely eaten and used in the making of mead. The old stories also contain many references to banquets, although these may well be greatly exaggerated and provide little insight to every diet. There are also many references to fulacht fiadh. These were sites for cooking deer, and consisted of holes in the ground which were filled with water. The meat was placed in the water and cooked by the introduction of hot stones. Many fulacht fiadh sites have been identified across the island of Ireland, and some of them appear to have been in use up to the 17th century.

Excavations at the Viking settlement in the Wood Quay area of Dublin have produced a significant amount of information on the diet of the inhabitants of the town. The main meats eaten were cattle, sheep and pigs. Poultry and wild geese as well as fish and shellfish were also common, as were a wide range of native berries and nuts, especially hazel. The seeds of knotgrass and goosefoot were widely present and may have been used to make a porridge.

From the middle-ages, till the arrival of the potato in the latter half of the 17th Century, the dominant feature of the rural economy was the herding of cattle. The meat produced was mostly the preserve of the gentry and nobility. The poor generally made do with milk, butter, cheese and offal, supplemented with oats and barley. The practice of bleeding cattle and mixing the blood with milk and butter (not unlike the practice of the Masai) was not uncommon. Blood pudding remains a breakfast staple in Ireland.

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The potato in Ireland

Potatoes form the basis for many traditional Irish dishesThe potato was introduced into Ireland in the second half of the 17th century, initially as a garden crop. It eventually came to be the main food crop of the poor. As a food source, the potato is extremely valuable in terms of the amount of energy produced per unit area of crop. The potato is also a good source of many vitamins and minerals, particularly vitamin C (especially when fresh). Potatoes were cultivated by much of the populace at a subsistence level and the diet of this period consisted mainly of potatoes supplemented with buttermilk. Potatoes were also used as a food for pigs that were fattened-up and slaughtered at the approach of the cold winter months. Much of the slaughtered pork would have been cured to provide ham and bacon that could be stored over the winter. The reliance on potatoes as a staple crop meant that the people of Ireland were vulnerable to poor potato harvests. Consequently several famines occurred throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. The first great famine of 1739 was the result of extreme cold weather but the famine of 1846 to 1849 (see Irish potato famine) was caused by potato blight which easily spread throughout the Irish crop which heavily dependent on a single variety, the Lumper. Nearly 1,000,000 people died and another 2,000,000 emigrated, and some 3,000,000 people were left destitute.

Fresh meat was generally considered a luxury except for the most affluent until the late 19th century and chickens were not raised on a large scale until the emergence of town grocers in the 1880s allowed people to exchange surplus goods, like eggs, and for the first time purchase a variety food items to diversify their diet.

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Food in Ireland today
In the 20th century the usual modern selection of foods common to Western culture has been adopted in Ireland. Both US fast-food culture and mainland Europe's dishes have influenced the country, along with other world dishes introduced in a similar fashion to the rest of the western world. Common meals include pizza, curry, Chinese food, and lately, some West African dishes have been making an appearance. Supermarket shelves now contain ingredients for traditional, European, American (Mexican/Tex-Mex), Indian, Chinese, and other dishes.

The proliferation of fast food has led to increasing public health problems including obesity, and one of the highest rates of heart disease in the world. Traditional Irish food and diet is also somewhat to blame, with a large emphasis on meat and butter. Government efforts to combat this have included television advertising campaigns and education programmes in schools.

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 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 the Irish stew, Dublin coddle, the Irish breakfast, and potato bread, have enjoyed a resurgence. Schools like the Ballymaloe Cookery School have emerged to cater for the associated increased interest in cooking with traditional ingredients.

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Myths
The commonly-held belief that corned beef and cabbage is an Irish dish is incorrect. Corned beef has never been a popular foodstuff in Ireland. In reality, corned beef is an Irish-American innovation to the traditional dish of bacon and cabbage, where corned beef was used as a replacement for the bacon joint when immigrants had difficulty buying it due to a combination of inavailability and cost.

Answer 2

That thing about the pheasant and the maggots must surely be a joke...

Do you know Barm Brack? It is a type of tea bread / cake. You can get it all year round but it is also traditionally bought or made at halloween.

Old-fashioned lesser-known Irish food would be things like Crubeens (pig's feet), now more likely to be found served up in the local Chinese restaurant than on the dinner tables of Ireland...

Answer 3

Okay well this is Welsh, but it is sometimes consumed in Ireland. And I doubt you could make this at home, nor would you want to. Take a pheasant, kill it, and pluck it. Hang it up outside until there are maggots. Throw the whole shebang in a pot with some veggies and cook it. Gross eh?

Okay seriously, there's Boiled Boxty (potato cake type things), bangers (sausage), rarebit, oat cakes or bannock, soda bread, coddle (bacon and sausage and herbs..mmmm!), limerick ham, beef with guinness, etc.

My husband's grandfather is so Irish he has a birthmark the shape of a shamrock (just kidding) so I loved learning to cook all the recipes my hubby's grandmother used to make that everyone loves. Good nosh!

Answer 4

Residing in a broad bay, Dublin lies between Howth in the north and the headland of Dalkey to the south and the River Liffey separate the city in two making using this town an interesting city that you will have the chance with hotelbye to visit it. Dublin has provided the planet such well-known fictional like: Yeats, Beckett, Joyce, Shaw, and Wilde. Dublin was a UNESCO Town of Literature this season therefore is definitely an intriguing town to go to particularly if you intend to visit Bewley's Oriental Café ;.Many might claim that Bewley's Oriental Café may be the gem in the crown. Bewley's Oriental Café is a company which was built in 1927.

Answer 5

i say make Shepherds Pie. I did that at school for my GCSE Food Tech coursework prep. Make the instant mash in class and make the sauce at home in preparation, and just cover the sauce with the instant mash in school. I used Quorn Mince instead of beef and made a bolognaise-type sauce. It was well good!!! Oh yeah, and sprinkle a bit of cheese on top before you bake it. And if your presentation is being assessed, get a fork and run forklines in the mash, you know, for presentation sake. Yaaaay! goood luck!!

Answer 6

an island this small doesn't exactly HAVE less commonly known cuisine. stew, coddle, our own take on a fry up, bacon/ham and cabbage, turnip. we also have a slight tendency to occassionally make desserts "irish".......

Answer 7

both are roughly the same except when it comes to protein. EVERY veggies include a good amount of protein; fruits does not.

Answer 8

The word fresh fruit has different meanings depending on context.

Answer 9

Irish mixed salad, it consists of mashed potatoes, boiled potatoes fied potatoes and chips,

Answer 10

My mum used to make a kind of stew called a coddle.

It had sausages and bacon in it, potatoes (of course), and proper dumplings. That is all I can remember.

Answer 11

Yes,The Potato Famine Supprise, It contains no potatoes!