We’ve gone on a bit about the great food in Dublin: Irish stew, scones, soda bread, cheese, whiskey. (We haven’t mentioned Guinness because you assuredly know all about that. Also, because we don’t love stout…) But we realise, from more than one heated conversation with strangers in pubs, that we have only just begun to scratch the surface of the foods of Dublin. The four dishes we discuss here are surprisingly difficult to find, some because they are associated with home cooking, others because tourists don’t tend to like them. And they’ve been gussied up for the tourist market, sometimes to their detriment. So here are some lesser-known dishes we think are worth tracking down: boxty, coddle, barmbrack, and colcannon. (You won’t be surprised to learn that three of the four feature potatoes.)
Barmbrack
Barmbrack is a tea loaf (=Irish ‘speckled bread’, the food historians mostly agree), with sultanas (aka currants) and raisins soaked in whiskey. The dough itself is a little sweet, and the plentiful fruit makes it more so. It’s hard to find in stores; we suspect this might be because everyone but us has a loaf cooling at home. (It’s also more common in the autumn.) Traditionally, fortune-telling goodies are baked into the barmbrack during Halloween, along the lines of a king cake in New Orleans during Mardi Gras. A ring signifies marriage, a twig a bad marriage, a pea no marriage, a coin good fortune, and cloth bad fortune. We feel okay about our marriage and our luck, but we still eat this bread every time we can find it.
Boxty
This old favourite, we have been told, is a lot like a potato latke, grated potatoes in a liquidy flour dough. So we were super-keen to try it! Unfortunately, it’s hard to come by in restaurants. We went to Gallagher’s Boxty House in Temple Bar. We found there many tourists, high prices, and boxty in three forms, dumpling, pancake, and fries. The dumplings tasted like gnocchi, and the pancake tasted like a pancake. Both a bit stodgy, frankly, not aided by the cream sauce on our (salmon and samphire) dumplings and (beef, mushroom, and whiskey) pancake. We have read a million reviews claiming that this place is amazing, but at least on our visit, we didn’t feel the love. In both cases, the potato bit was the least interesting part of the dish. We haven’t given up, though, and are still on the lookout for a proper boxty.
Coddle
This is the most Dub of Dublin foods, best served on a cold winter’s day. It combines sausages, back-bacon, onion, and potatoes. It’s a leftovers-using dish, though, so cooks would put other things in, such as carrots, cabbage, or barley. (It is not usually so colourful as the above picture suggests.) The ingredients are ‘coddled’, i.e. left to cook under the boiling point.
This is one of the Dublin foods that Dubs seem simultaneously fiercely proud of and also embarrassed by. It’s certainly a very pork-y dish, and we confess that we do prefer the (inauthentic) versions with more veggies in them. But we think this dish has nothing to be ashamed of.
Colcannon or Champ
This has a grandiose name, but it’s really mashed potatoes with greens, butter, and milk. The greens are nearly always cabbage, sometimes with kale added. In the case of champ, scallions are substituted. You might know this as bubble and squeak (where the potatoes are usually cubed). Here again, restaurants often fight the dish’s humble origins, or adding luxury ingredients or messing with it in other ways. No need: this is a solid and beautiful dish.
We are delighted that strangers in pubs told us about these four Dublin foods, and happy we could share them with you!
