More on St Patrick’s Day – the potato

A few days ago I wrote a post about the distinction between Irish heritage and Irish-American heritage through the lens of corned beef and cabbage.  I said I was, at least for now, more interested in exploring Irish culinary traditions than Irish-American ones.  In the back of my head I’m thinking about a St. Patrick’s Day menu of Dublin coddle, colcannon, and soda bread.  About two hours after posting the piece, I was struck by the irony of focusing on the “authenticity” of coddle and colcannon.  Both are dishes that are built around potatoes and the humble potato didn’t appear in Ireland until the late 16th century, imported from, yes, America.

One of the most important (if least discussed) aspects of the European discovery of the new world was an enormous exchange of food products. Cattle, coffee, apples, carrots, garlic, watermelon, rice, and lettuce were brought from the old world to the new, while potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava/manioc, chili peppers, corn/maize, cacao, tomatoes, and many varieties of squash and beans went the other direction.  These only begin to scratch the surface, but they provide an idea of the enormity of the effect of opening up the entire world to foods that had previously been local.  Can you imagine Italian food without tomatoes or Texas without steak?

Few of these foods had an effect as transformative as the introduction of the potato to Ireland. The potato is native to South America and spread north along the eastern seaboard.  I’ve come across several stories on how it was introduced to Ireland. The most common is that it Sir Walter Raleigh, bringing back potatoes from Virginia, set up a 40,000 acre potato farm near Cork in the late 16th century. The Spanish preceded Raleigh in introducing the potato and by the time Raleigh’s plantation was up and running, potato farms were quite common in Basque country.  This version of history has the potato being introduced to Ireland by Basque traders.

In any event, the potato soon transformed Ireland, particularly the agrarian south (what would eventually become the Republic of Ireland).  It was well-suited to the Irish climate and soil.  More important, though, potatoes were far more nutrition dense than the grains that dominated Irish agriculture and a farmer could devote a much smaller portion of his land to sustaining his family, which meant a much larger portion could be used for grains for market. Since the basic structure of Irish agriculture consisted of tenant farmers working land belonging to a landlord (and the landlords were often English or of English heritage), there was immense pressure to make the land as commercially productive as possible.  It wasn’t long before the typical rural Irish diet consisted exclusively of potatoes and dairy products, a result of dedicating as much land as possible to commercial grain. This transformation of the land was occurring at the same time (and was intertwined) with two other significant trends – the decreasing size of farms (making land for subsistence farming even more scarce), and greater dominance by England.  By the 18th century, Ireland was a part of the U.K.

This is what made the potato famine of the late 1840s so devastating.  When the potato crop was essentially ruined by a fungus, this meant that in large parts of the Irish countryside there was no available food. About one million people died of starvation or related diseases and another million migrated to England, Scotland, the U.S., Canada, and Australia.  In 1848 and the years following, Ireland lost one quarter of its population with the south being most heavily affected.  Those who were left began to look towards independence and a new Ireland.

But this is a blog about food, not about politics, and this discussion of the potato is designed to show just how large the potato looms in Irish culinary history.  Any list of traditional Irish foods these days will list colcannon (mashed potatoes with cabbage), champ (mashed potatoes with scallions), and boxty (fried mashed potatoes). The real iconic dish of Ireland (as opposed to the Irish-American corned beef and cabbage), Irish Stew, is essentially bits of lamb with potato added to stretch the stew.  Coddle, another dish that usually is near the top of any list of traditional Irish foods, was born as an end of the week way of tossing leftover scraps of meat into a stew with potatoes.  The potato was used not only on its own, but as a vehicle for incorporating the rare scraps of other foods like cabbage or lamb scraps into something more. And it only took the importation of this humble tuber and a century or so of commercial pressure to complete change the diet of an entire country.

By the way, I finally found some back bacon, so I’ve decided on the menu for St. Patrick’s Day.  We’ll have some brown bread, colcannon, and a version of Dublin Coddle that includes pork chops, bacon, potatoes, carrots, and a bit of Irish cider in the braising liquid. I’ll tell you how it turns out.