Traditional Foods of Ireland

Irish Stew, by by missayumi

Almost everyone when asked about Irish food mentions two things – Irish Stew and Corned Beef with Cabbage. And almost every visitor to Ireland is surprised to find that neither features commonly on restaurant menus!

In fact corned beef is not traditionally Irish at all – Bacon and Cabbage is.

That isn’t to say that such dishes are no longer eaten, they are, but they are homely dishes, served to family, rather than ones which would be chosen on an evening out. And so their appearance on a restaurant menu is a rarity.

Most traditional Irish foods use simple, basic and cheap ingredients, a reminder of the fact that they originated in a less affluent past. Many have been given a modern twist by a new generation of chefs or incorporated into dishes that better suit the tastes of a more widely travelled population.

Is it really traditional?

Traditional Irish recipes tend to be very simple, with just a few ingredients in most cases. This should be no surprise – it was the food of the poor and they did not have a huge range of exotic ingredients available to them.

So when you come across, as I did recently, a recipe for Irish Brack that included peaches, apricots, prunes and pumpkin pie spices, you can be sure that there is nothing Irish about it – the previous generation of cooks in Ireland would never have heard of some of those ingredients, much less have been able to obtain them!

Whiskey in Irish Cooking

There is a tendency to take any recipe at random, add a dollop of whiskey and then append the word Irish in front of its name! I have even seen it mentioned – horror! – in recipes for bread.

Truth is that Whiskey is not much used in traditional Irish recipes – the Irish always preferred to drink it rather than cook with it!