Dublin Coddle

Right. This is amazing winter food and is probably about as far from a ‘real and genuine’ Dublin Coddle as you’re likely to get. It's simple, straightforward and invariably stunning.

Order this in Dublin and you’re likely to be confronted with a plate of flaccid Galtee sausages and pale streaky bacon rashers floating in a thick, clear, parsley-dotted gleet that looks like the kind of snot you get when you inhale CS gas.

This is different. It’s dark, rich, multi-layered and wickedly saucy. It's salty and meaty, smoky and deep. Topped with light dumplings that have been grilled off to make the top bit crunchy, served with warm brown soda bread and pats of rich butter, this is a totally original recipe and therefore an Englishman’s take on Coddle.

My advice, chaps? Take the soup...

You can use new potatoes, incidentally, when you can find them. The crushed garlic is flattened on the blade of a knife, not put through a mincing thingy.

Ingredients

• 8 Cumberland sausages
• 8 rashers smoked streaky bacon
• 2 medium onions, chopped
• 1 pint Guinness
• 1 kg potato in 2cm cube
• 4 cloves garlic, crushed
• 2 tbsp chopped parsley
• 1 tbsp plain flour
• 300 ml good stock
• 1 tsp salt

Dumplings

• 100 mg vegetable suet
• 100mg self raising flour
• 2 tsp dried parsley
• Cold water

In a large, covered, frying pan over a medium heat, dry fry the sausages, turning until they are browned on all sides. Reserve to cool, then slice each sausage into four pieces. Cut each of the the rashers into four pieces, and fry them until well cooked, adding a little oil and the chopped onion. Add in the flour and mix it in well to coat everything, then add the Guinness, the stock and the potatoes. Cook on a low, low heat for 40 minutes, then season, uncover and leave to cool until you’re ready to serve.

Mix the suet and flour together, add the parsley and then add the water until a soft dough is formed. When you’re almost ready to serve it up, reheat the coddle and use a cold spoon to form quenelles of dumpling mixture and dump them onto the surface of the mixture. Replace the lid and steam the dumplings on top of the softly bubbling coddle for 20 minutes over a low to medium heat, then fire up the grill and grill off the dumplings until they brown on top.

Serve with mustard on the side, warm soda bread, lashings of cold butter and a massive, rich deep sauvignon. And drink a toast to alexander.

Bacon, Cabbage and Potatoes

The thermometer’s popping 50 and the humdity’s up and down: everyone’s down to dashing between car and house, car and work, car and mall. It’s that time of year, folks, when you just HAVE to sit down to eat a hot meal of food that was meant to be eaten in cold, winter climates!
This is traditional Irish cooking at its most traditional and Irish. And there’s only one way to cook it, too.

Sarah’s dad is a builder and, as men go, is pretty set in his ways. He’s home for lunch on the dot of noon and home for tea at 6 precisely. This is his favourite food, eaten with a glass of milk and great hunks of golden butter for the ‘shpuds’. And God help anyone that introduced a slip of garlic or, shudder, omitted the parsley sauce. The shpuds are the great challenge because, as anyone who has ever even looked across the Irish Sea knows, Irish shpuds are ‘floury’: there’s nothing like a bag of Irish ‘British Queens’ (and they giggle every time they buy them, because of the name), properly boiled up so that the skins split when they’re removed from the water and put on the hot range to wait for everyone to be good and ready - light, fluffy and just right for that all-important slab of butter to melt across them and soak into them. How can you get a spud like it in the Emirates? Well, you could pile down to the organic, where you’ll likely find ‘Irish potatoes’ on sale (they’re actually African, but let us not to quibble). You can use the red-skinned things that Spinneys sells, but they’re a bit waxy, as are the Lebanese potatoes that are all around us. If you can find something a little ‘older’ with a thicker skin, try it. But whatever you use, it’s very important to shake your head while you’re eating them and talk about how they’re not the same as a ‘good Irish shpud’.

A few words on bacon. Bacon is Irish for ham.

This is the national food of a nation of people that disdain formality and pomp: simple, good grub to line your stomach before you pile off down to Mahers, Molly’s or Mungovans, whichever it may be, for the craic and a few pints. Do give it a whirl - it’s just ideal for the Emirates in August!!!

Ingredients

• @1.5kg piece of bacon
• @750g savoy cabbage
• @1.2kg potatoes

Soak the bacon in a pan, covered with water, ideally overnight but you can do it for an hour or so. You can use green or smoked bacon: entirely up to you: if you’ve got it from Spinneys it should be nicely tied. If not, you’d better know how to tie bacon! Now bring the bacon up to a boil. While it’s doing that, boil a kettle of water. Now remove the water the bacon’s boiling in, including the foam that will have formed around and about, and then pour the boiling water in to cover the bacon and boil it again. Bring the boil down to a lively simmer so that bubbles are forming but it’s not going mad – and now give the bacon around 25 minutes per 500g of weight. At the end of the cooking time, test it by putting a sharp knife through the middle, it should plunge in quite easily. If not, give it a few more minutes and then retest it. Obviously you have to be sensible here, because if you keep going at it like a bunch of senators around a Caesar, you’ll end up with an awful mess of hacked bacon.

While the bacon’s doing its boiling, you can focus on the vegetables. First the shpuds: give these a good scrub, but leave them in their skins. You can either remove any ‘eyes’ from the potatoes or, as is traditional in Ireland, leave ‘em in. Start them off by pouring boiling water over them. They’ll need to boil for something like 25 minutes, but that’s really a product of your cooker – again, a test with a sharp, pointy knife should tell you, you’re looking for a clean plunge with perhaps a slight touch of 'edge' as you get near the centre. Remove them from the heat, drain them and put them somewhere warm in a dish. (While the shpuds are boiling is when I’d usually knock up the parsley sauce.)

The cabbage should be quartered and the tough stalk cut out. Then you can chop it into chunky, 3cm pieces. Incidentally, I would use the tougher outer leaves to make cabbage soup rather than chuck ‘em away.

As soon as the bacon’s cooked, remove it from the boiling water and do not throw the water out! Put the bacon to rest somewhere warm and add the cabbage to the bacon water. This will not take too long to cook, 10 minutes or so. You’re looking for just tender and still with a slight 'bite' rather than grey and slimy. Drain the cabbage and replace it in the pan with a knob of butter.

And now you’re good to go: slice the bacon, add the cabbage to each plate and serve it up along with a dish of piping hot spuds and a boat of parsley sauce for people to serve themselves. And don’t forget the butter for the shpuds!!!

Irish Stew

You might associate Irish Stew with a pale, snot-consistency sauce drooped around some tired vegetables and a few scrawny, fatty pieces of lamb. It's one reason why I rarely, if ever, order Irish Stew when I'm eating out. This isn't like that. This is stew that you'd want to eat.

Garlic in Irish stew? Yup. It tastes great. Irish cook Darina Allen has come up with the lovely justification for this shudderingly un-purist ingredient, claiming that garlic grows wild in Ireland and has done for centuries. Whatever. I'm not sure how I can find a justification for the balsamico... but I'm working on a story about an Italian immigrant to Dublin...

Ingredients

• 1 kg lamb neck chops
• 400g carrots, roughly chopped
• 400g onion, roughly chopped
• 1 tbsp chopped parsley
• 2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
• 2 tsp Worcester sauce
• 3 stalks celery, roughly chopped
• 1 kg potatoes, roughly chopped
• 2 cloves garlic
• 500ml good stock

Fry the neck chops to brown over a medium heat, and pour off the immediate fat that accumulates. Reserve the chops. Deglaze the pan with the balsamic vinegar and some of the stock. Add this to the chops. Add the roughly chopped vegetables to the lamb chops. Fry these in the deep pan for two minutes, then add the stock and parsley, along with the Worcester sauce and garlic, and stir fry for a couple of minutes. Add the stock, and then cook the whole mixture on a low heat for 1 hour. Serve with soda bread.

Mary's Brown Bread

This is a really, really nice soda bread recipe. It takes minutes to prepare, is robust enough to survive very high degrees of incompetence and is therefore an ideal 'first soda bread experience'. I can tell you this with authority, because it was mine. Only after braving this was I ready to move on to Mrs. Webster's famous Ballybrista Bread, which is an experience for more advanced bread makers working in teams with the appropriate equipment. OK, So I'm messing. Sue me.

Ingredients

• 225g coarse wholemeal flour
• 225g self raising flour
• 175g porridge oats
• 1 rounded teaspoon baking powder
• 1 level teaspoon baking soda
• 2 tbsp finely chopped hazelnuts
• 2 eggs
• 150ml yoghurt
• 350ml skimmed milk

Blend the eggs and yoghurt together using a fork in a measuring jug. Make up to 1 pint with the milk. Mix the dry ingredients, including the chopped hazelnuts, well in a bowl, and add the egg and milk mixture. Mix well, adding more milk if necessary to give a slightly wet mixture, and pour into a greased 900g loaf tin. Bake at 190F/375C/Gas 5 for 45-50 minutes. Turn out on a wire tray to cool.