Traditional Irish Recipes

Irish potato pancakes are wonderful as appetizers, a side dish, snack, or with a breakfast "fry-up" of rashers (Irish bacon), sausages, white pudding, and soda or brown bread.

Many cultures that feature potatoes in their cuisine have a version of the Irish potato pancake. Certainly, the Jewish cook would put the latke up against the Irish potato pancake, and with no small amount of challenge, but it is the surrounding foods that add a certain extra delish to this dish.

Potato pancakes are light, just-right meal partners for meat, poultry or fish, at lunch or dinner, with omelets or scrambled eggs at breakfast or wonderful anytime by themselves, served with a generous helping of applesauce. Pancakes, tender and golden brown, flecked with onions, are pan-fried, never greasy. Coarsely shred the raw potatoes for better flavor and texture. Larger potatoes are easiest to handle; a vegetable parer gives the thinnest peels possible and avoids wasting potato or the valuable nutrients that are found close to the skin.

(1) Potatoes won't discolor if you shred them directly into cold water.
This reduces or eliminates the exposure of the potato surface to air, which causes darkening.

(2) Secret of crisp-every-time pancakes: extract as much moisture as possible from the potatoes. To do this, simply wring the shredded potatoes and onions in a towel.
This also prevents the batter (a mixture of shredded potatoes, onions, eggs, flour, salt and pepper, stirred smooth) from becoming watery and sticking to the pan while cooking.

(3) Prepare batter just before cooking time. Batter will darken if it stands too long. Though the taste of the pancakes won't be affected, they may be less attractive. Make successive batches rather than doubling the recipe and letting the batter sit.

(4) Lightly flattening pancakes.
Lightly flatten pancakes and slowly cooking them, ensures that they are thin and crisp, thoroughly and evenly done.

(5) Use only as much oil as is necessary to cook them.

Serve immediately.

**Imagine being welcomed into a 400-year-old Irish watering hole with a thatched roof and open fire, the floor strewn with timber shavings and the walls packed with bric-a-brac, sliding into a snug for a pint and a hotchpotch, and instead being served Caramelized Duck Breast with Pineapple Chutney followed by White Chocolate Terrine.

In The Irish Heritage Cookbook, Johnson continues on her mission to inform Americans that contemporary Irish cooking means not just a rustic, stick-to-your-ribs Irish Stew with Brown Soda Bread, but also Green Tomato Tarte Tatin, as original and sophisticated as one found anywhere in Europe.

The book reads like a tourist itinerary for hungry pub crawlers and shares history on favorite pubs and their famous and infamous patrons and proprietors. Leigh Beish's full-page photos deliver elegant interpretations of humble pub grub like Bacon and Cabbage, and Ploughman's Lunch. It's inevitable that the recipes cover some well-trod territory, since it's difficult to imagine an Irish cookbook omitting Shepherd's Pie, but "Blackboard Specials" like Bacon, Blue Cheese, and Courgette Soup tend toward the global gourmet, and some were even developed by Bord Bia, the Irish Food Board, to promote traditional Irish products to modern chefs and consumers.