Irish food

Today is Saint Patrick's day. Happily drinking (heavily) in town, people wear the national colours in every way. Shorts made of the national flag, painted shamrocks on the cheeks, and having a bit of craic (Irish expression you can translate by having fun with everything, especially nonsensical conversations in pubs during hours).

So because today is supposed to celebrate everything that is Irish, let's talk about another feature that defines a country: its cuisine. I was inspired by this article of the Guardian (here) and was a bit at loss myself when the question asked is "what do Irish people eat traditionally?". While I am writing this, my (Irish) flatmate is frying carrots and bacon and is putting this on pasta and cheese. Surely there is something more Irish than this improbable combination of ingredients.

If you go to Temple Bar (the most touristic place in Dublin) you will find "traditional Irish restaurants" where you can eat seafood chowder, oysters with a Guinness and everything with soda bread (a kind of very light and friable bread made with chemical yeast) and butter. There are as well black pudding and the element imported from the enemy country (i.e. England), bacon. Soup is a very traditional Irish meal, you can still eat it at every meal in every eatery, sandwich place or even chic and pretentious places. Potatoes (spuds) are to be included with everything. And this food is good, tasty and unpretentious.

But this is not what Irish people eat in their everyday life. First reason: a lot of them do not know how to cook and have no idea how vegetables grow. Second reason: this country is so Americanised that the traditional meal in here is composed of a hamburger or BLT sandwich (or crisp sandwich: take two slices of white bread, put a ton of mayo in it, half a packet of crisps, crush the whole and eat with delight). Chips can be served with everything too, including lasagna. Third reason: the immigration factor. Ireland has welcomed so many different nationalities for the past 15 years that it seems natural to everyone to go out and have some Indian / French / Italian / Polish food instead of the traditional Irish stew. So it is pretty much a happy combination of everything that defines the way Irish people eat now. They integrated other cultures, other ingredients and thanks to the wealth created since the 1990s they can afford other things than cabbage.

It is a bit of a pity though, because I discovered myself a whole side of the Irish food that I had no idea about until very recently. Products that are still made in small farms, using raw milk for the cheese, breeding lamb in the fields etc. A lot of the food you can buy on markets and coming from the country are absolutely fabulously tasty and nice. Surely a bit of work on how to get back to the land and a lot of cooking lessons would make people even more aware of the beautiful stuff they have at hand and bring a lot of national pride.