One of the great dividers in Irish society lies between those who love nothing more than a hearty Irish stew and those who prefer to stay far, far away from it, and these are the days when arguments on this important topic reach their annual peak.
If you see a steaming bowl of stew on St Patrick’s Day as a dream come true, our chef columnist Mark Moriarty has the perfect recipe to whet your appetite. He wrote over the weekend that the perfect stew should be “a powerfully flavoured broth, with roasted lamb fat pearls suspended in a sea of braised vegetables and greens”. Mmmm, we hear (some of you) say. He went on: “The lamb should be slow-cooked, the barley overcooked and soft. Made properly, it rivals any traditional dish for anywhere in the world.”
If you agree, check out his recipe here. If not, you could try his pork cheeks glazed in balsamic cider vinegar with colcannon as a very valid Irish alternative. Moriarty advises that these should be cooked until just soft before being glazed in a rich sauce finished with Irish apple balsamic vinegar.
Veering slightly away from tradition while remaining true to the national day, Moriarty’s recipe for crispy bacon and cabbage cakes with gribiche might appeal. For this chic take on our beloved bacon and cabbage, you’ll need some delightfully retro Paxo golden breadcrumbs.
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Digging further into the archives of The Irish Times, we find an even more subversive bacon and cabbage take in chef Brian McDermott’s bacon and cabbage with orzo pasta recipe. This one involves a big pot of water for the pasta alone, with the bacon and sliced cabbage sizzling in a frying pan within minutes. You could even (look away now, purists) substitute chorizo for the bacon.
Elsewhere in our online store of recipes, we find two lovely guides to making chowder, a very Irish dish that sometimes feels more beloved by tourists than residents of this fair, snake-free land. Seafood chowder with seaweed from Carmel Somers in 2018 is particularly local, using carrageen seaweed and streaky bacon. Somers notes that chowder should never have flour added, the only thickener being the potatoes.
There’s also a delicious 2014 vegetarian chowder from the Happy Pear twins, Stephen and David Flynn, which features samphire, fennel and cider.
And if you feel like getting serious with our archive cooking this St Patrick’s Day, you could leap back to 1973 and our recipe (available on epaper.irishtimes.com) for cider beef stew, which not only contains cider, but also sultanas. The addition of these dried grapes apparently adds to the fruitiness of the dish, alas possibly diluting its Irishness in the process.
