Irish Traditional Cooking: Review
Darina Allen runs the Ballymaloe Cookery School and has written many cookery books celebrating simple Irish cuisine. She lives in Shanagarry Co. Cork with her family. Today I want to review one of her books: Irish Traditional Cooking
For all my friends abroad who are thinking of a good Irish mean then this is the book for you. Take a look at the chapter subjects: Broths & Soups, Eggs, Fish, Game, Poultry, Lamb, Beef, Pork, Offal, Potatoes, Vegetables, Food from the Wild, Desserts, Pancakes, Breads, Oatmeal & Other Grains, Cakes & Biscuits, and The Irish Pantry. It brings back memories
Don’t expect flashy glossy photos like you’ll find in Margaret Johnson’s books on traditional Irish cooking. Darina sticks to what a cookbook is all about – cooking.
If I can be a little bit politically incorrect here one of the advantages I found with Irish Traditional Cooking
was that the recipes were not overly complicated and like her television programs Darina describes everything as though she was standing there in front of you.
Most cookbooks that I’ve seen tend to do one recipe on a particular food and then move on. rish Traditional Cooking is different in this regards in quite a few cases as it presents quite a few recipes for a particular type of food, e.g. famous Irish Stew, and Irish Soda Bread
The variations are not great and it is only for a select few types of food that she does this. Sporadically through the book Darina does include beautiful color pictures and full length one-page essays on a variety of topics related to Irish cookery.
A great addition to your cookbook library!
In addition to all the recipes, and there are certainly a goodly number for the price, there is an excellent historical foreword by Irish culinary historian, Regina Sexton. There are also numerous heading sections on groups of recipes such as nettles, herrings, eels, and many others.
Two points struck me about Irish Traditional Cooking. The recipes are relatively quick to produce and don’t require massive amounts of ingredients. For me I like how she has the list of ingredients set in the margins. Her measurements are purely in English units rather than both English and Metric. This might put some Metric fans off but considering that the book is aimed at an American/English/Irish audience I can understand her thinking.
Surprisingly in the chapter on breads, there are 23 recipes, of which only three (3) include yeast. The majority are leavened with baking power or baking soda plus buttermilk or both.
My home county is Armagh and it is often refered to as The Orchard of Ireland because of the number of apple trees in it and apples are a very important product in the country so I was delighted to see that of the 34 desert recipes 12 used apples in one form or another!
Talking about apples, did you know that the Irish notion of an apple dumpling recipe is quite different from the Pennsylvania Dutch recipe of a single peeled and cored apple encased in pastry. The Irish `dumpling’ is much more like what we would call a `crumble’ or `cobbler’, as it is a layer of sweetened apples covered by a pastry layer
If you are after a fantastic cookbook and want a great lyric evocation of the foods native to Ireland, then Irish Traditional Cooking: Over 300 Recipes from Ireland’s Heritage by Darina Allen is for you.