La Fheil Padraig sona daoibh! Happy Saint Patrick's day.
That first one was maybe in Irish. I asked six different people
from Ireland how to say it and they all gave me something slightly different.
So let's just stick with St. Patrick's day. The day when we of Irish descent and those
of non-Irish descent come together clad in green, and drink a pint of Guinness.
So in honor of that patron Saint of Ireland who was not Irish, I'm going to show you how
to make a nice bowl of Stobhach Gaedhealach, or Irish stew using a recipe from 1900.
We'll also take a look at one of the most
important if heartbreaking episodes in Irish history, The Great Potato Famine.
So thank you to HelloFresh for sponsoring this video as we celebrate Saint Paddy's day.
So I actually had a lot of trouble finding an historic recipe for
something Irish from Ireland. Most of the recipes that I could find from the 18th or 19th century
that had Irish dishes were actually from England written by English authors
and I don't know why that is but I can venture a guess based on how the English treated the Irish
especially in the 18th and 19th century... BUT a viewer named Jackie Murphy did send
me an Irish cookbook from the year 1900. Not only from Ireland but written in Irish,
so that is what we'll be cooking from today. Stobhach Gaedhealach - Irish stew.
Ingredients: 1/2 pound lean mutton, 1/4 bacon, 2 onions, 12 potatoes,
1/2 pint water, salt and pepper. Method: cut the meat into neat pieces.
Clean, peel, and wash the potatoes. Peel and cut the onions. Put
a layer of potatoes in the pot.
A layer of meat on top of that, onions, salt and pepper, and so on until the pot is full.
Have a layer of potatoes on top. Pour in the water and turn on the fire. Let it boil,
pull it to the side, and let it simmer an hour and a half.
Take it up; put the meat in the middle, the potatoes around it, and the grease down on it.
I have to say as someone who's used to reading medieval or ancient recipes this one sure is
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can order some, they're very flexible. Something that you might also want to do with today's
stew because you'll notice by the ingredient amounts that the amount of meat to potatoes is
well... not a lot of meat. Meat was expensive than so yeah, but going with the recipe what you'll
need is: a 1/2 pound or 225 grams of mutton or lamb, a 1/4 pound or 113 grams of bacon.
So this is Irish bacon or back bacon and if you can find that that's what you want to use,
but in the U.S. it is hard to find so go ahead and use Canadian ham or Canadian bacon. That's
going to be the closest thing, just don't use American bacon because it's very, very different.
2 onions chopped, 12 potatoes washed, peeled and chopped. So what size is a potato what size were
potatoes in 1900. I'm not entirely sure. I went with fairly small ones but you can get smaller.
Don't use big baking potatoes, or if you do then obviously don't use 12 of those,
probably three would be fine. 10 ounces or 295 milliliters of water, and you're going
to have to be flexible on that because one it might boil away and you don't want that.
Also depending on the size of your vegetables it's going to vary so just work with me and
some salt and pepper so usually I would sear the meat before putting it into the pot,
but this recipe is actually pretty specific in how it wants it like layered so I ain't searing
and neither is he. I used to think his name was Cirián Hinds, but it's actually pronounced
Kieran or Kiran Hinds, my favorite Irish actor.
So put a layer of your potatoes on the bottom of a large stew pot
and then top that with a layer of the mutton or lamb, and then the bacon
then the onion, and add the salt and pepper and finally another layer of the potatoes. PO-TA-TOES
Then pour in your water and set it over high heat.
Once it's boiling turn down the heat and let it simmer for 90 minutes.
Also my favorite thing about this dish was the sound of the simmering.
If there is a sound that was like a warm hug that is it. Also notice that there is not a lot of
water for this stew in comparison with a modern stew. A lot of older stew recipes have very,
very little broth but you still don't want it to boil completely away, or it will burn. So do add
a little bit more if you need but it's not like a soup. So we are making this iris stew in honor of
Saint Patrick's day, one of my favorite holidays partly because I am obsessed with traditional
Irish music, and until recently and even now the holiday is much bigger here in the United States
than in Ireland itself and that's partly because we here in the U.S. have seven times more people
of Irish descent than Ireland has, and the reason that my ancestors and oh so many of our ancestors
came over from Ireland is none too pleasant, but it is a very important chapter in food history.
So just as the 12 potatoes in our stew might suggest the Irish have always had a love of spuds.
Actually that's not quite true because it wasn't until 1589 that sir Walter Raleigh introduced
the potato to Ireland and even then it actually took quite some time for it to really take off,
but once it did boy howdy it really became the staple crop of many of the poor soiled areas
of Hibernia or Ireland. Unfortunately it grew so well that it actually became the sole crop
for much of the population, especially the poor population and that's something
called monoculture and even in the 1840s they knew that that could be a dangerous thing.
"It would be impossible adequately to describe the privations which
the Irish labourer and his family habitually and silently endure...
in many districts. Their only food is the potato, their only beverage water."
All well and good if you like potatoes and water, and
if your potatoes don't have blight.
Now that quote was from the Earl of Devon in February of 1845,
and the previous year Irish newspapers had talked about
crops failing in the Eastern United States due to a potato blight,
which is kind of like a fungus but isn't,
but it was all the way across the Atlantic ocean and even if it did come to Ireland
that was okay because the Irish had dealt with parts of their potato crop failing before but
then in 1845 just months after the Earl of Devon's report on the state of Irish families the blight
did come to Ireland and it was very different than it had been before because instead of just hitting
certain parts of the country it hit all of the country and the population had grown quite a bit
since the last time that a crop had failed. Up to 8 million people now lived in Ireland.
Now much of Northern Europe was dealing with the same blight so when news from Ireland
came to Sir Robert Peel the Prime Minister in London he admitted that the reports were "very
alarming" but also that there was "always a tendency to exaggeration in Irish news."
Spoiler alert, they were not exaggerating.
One William Trench, a land agent in County Cork,
wrote "The leaves of the potatoes on many fields I passed were quite withered,
and a strange stench, such as I had never smelt before,
but which became a well-known feature... for years after, filled the atmosphere adjoining each
field of potatoes. The crop of all crops on which they depended for food had suddenly melted away."
By the end of 1845 half of the potato crop had been lost to blight and in 1846
three quarters were lost, making it hard to plant future potatoes for the next year.
Now to be fair to Prime Minister peel he did try to take some action.
He secretly bought 100,000 pounds of American corn, or maize, from the U.S.
and it had to be secret because the British corn laws forbade the import of low-cost grain,
and he did finally get those laws repealed but he had to go against his party to do so, and we
will get back to that in a bit. Now unfortunately the mills in Ireland were not properly equipped
to grind maize in the right way. Nor were the Irish people properly equipped to digest it.
It made many ill and it became known as Peel's brimstone, and I kind of wonder if the process
of nixtamalization had not gone over to Ireland with the corn, and if you don't nixtamalize corn
it's very, very hard to to digest it properly, or at least get most of the nutrients from it, and
I really go into depth on that in the quesadilla and the tamale episode. So if you want to watch
those i'll put a link in the description. But well digested or not at least something
was getting through to Ireland for them to eat. Unfortunately that wasn't going to last very long
because as I mentioned Peel had to go against his party and in doing so he peeled the party apart.
*ba dum tss
And this new split party made way for a new Prime Minister, the Whig party's Lord John Russell.
Now it is not fair in a 15-minute video or however long this video ends up being
to pass judgment on John Russell's entire career. He was a very complicated man as
were British politics at the time but when it comes to Ireland he gets an F.
See Russell put a man named Charles Trevelyan in charge of the government relief
program but unfortunately Trevelyan didn't believe in government relief,
and he would say things like "The judgment of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson,
that calamity must not be too much mitigated...
The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine,
but the moral evil of the selfish perverse and turbulent character of the people."
Shockingly he was not a popular man in Ireland. The best thing that he did was
send people to work houses and even then the workhouses
were overcrowded and couldn't take everyone, and the conditions were so abhorrent that in
the words of Charles Dickens "Many can't go there and many would rather die." And if a
Christmas Carol hadn't been published three years earlier I would really think that Ebenezer Scrooge
was based on Charles Trevelyan, but he wasn't alone in his disdain for the Irish. Much of the
English population blamed the Irish for their plight because they were dependent on one crop.
The ones who often blamed them the most were the landlords and the landlords
were mostly English living in England and had never or very rarely went to Ireland.
One bailiff at an eviction in 1846 was quoted as saying, "What the devil do we
care about you or your black potatoes? It was not us that made them black.
You will get two days to pay the rent and if you don't you know the consequences."
So like I said one reason that people often blame
the Irish was because they were dependent on one crop.
You fools they said but in actuality the Irish were growing lots of different crops.
Unfortunately much of that was going to feed cattle
which most of the Irish population could not afford.
They couldn't afford beef, and that grain that wasn't going to feed cattle
wasn't usually staying in Ireland. "The circumstances which appeared most aggravating
was that the people were starving in the midst of plenty, and that every tide carried
from the Irish ports corn sufficient for the maintenance of thousands of the Irish people."
Now records show that that food being exported was still not enough to cover the entirety
of the potato crop that was lost, but
even so, one cow gone is one cow too many. So clearly the government was not much help,
nor were the landlords and so the Irish came to depend on the kindness of strangers.
There are records of donations being sent in by the Tsar of Russia, the city of Calcutta,
the Pope, the young congressman Abraham Lincoln, and the Sultan of the Ottoman empire.
Now this might be a legend but it's said that the Sultan offered to donate 10,000 pounds and
he was actually convinced to lower that to 1,000 pounds so as not to outshine the 2,000 pound
donation that Queen Victoria made.
It's kind of like too horrible not to be true.
One of the most famous donations came in 1847 and was for $170 and it came from the Choctaw Nation
who only 16 years before had been moved from Mississippi to
Oklahoma on the infamous Trail of Tears. It came from a people who very recently had experienced
extreme starvation, and even then were still very, very poor, and in 2017
there was a monument in County Cork that was erected called Kindred Spirits dedicated
to the relationship between the Choctaw and the Irish. And I really wish that I had been able
to see it last time that I was there a couple years ago, but I didn't so reason to go back.
Perhaps the most impactful relief though came from the Society of Friends,
or the Quakers who donated tons of food. Literally tons of food and orchestrated
it so that "The railroads carried free of charge, all packages marked Ireland."
They also started soup kitchens which even though the soup kitchens were always overwhelmed
was one of the best things that did happen during the famine,
and their soup kitchens came with no strings attached.
If you came and you wanted food you got food as long as there was food left to give.
That couldn't be said about all the soup kitchens though.
Protestant Bible Societies set up soup kitchens around the country that would only serve the Irish
Catholics IF they converted and those that you know were desperate enough, they were starving
that so that they did convert ended up being called Soupers by their fellow Irish people,
and it was a stigma that lasted for generations all the way up until the 1920s.
There are records of people being called Soupers as a derogatory
name, basically synonymous with traitor.
The other alternative that most people had if they were starving was to leave Ireland all together.
Now there had been a great deal of immigration to America from Ireland for centuries at that point,
but it was the Great Famine that really kicked it into high gear, and many of those same English
landlords who were evicting many of their tenants were offering to pay the passage
for tenants that hadn't been evicted because there was a tax to help pay for the famine,
and the relief there was a tax on those landlords, and it was based on how many tenants they had.
And so they found it easier to send them off to America rather than pay that tax.
So between 1845 and 1851 there were over a million deaths and a great deal of emigration so that
the population fell from 8 million to 6.5 million and down to 4.5 million by the end of the century,
and it was actually this depopulation more than anything else that finally ended the Great Famine,
and the Irish Census of 1851 callously starts, "We feel it will be gratifying to your Excellency
to find that the population has been diminished in so remarkable a manner by famine,
disease, and emigration. The results of the Irish Census of 1851 are, on the whole,
satisfactory demonstrating as they do the general advancement of the country."
And Trevelyan that Thanos-like head of the government relief effort
said that the famine had been, "A direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence...
the sharp but effectual remedy by which the cure is likely to be effected."
I hate that guy. Anyway that is your history of the Great Irish Potato Famine.
So while you're drinking your pints of Guinness, and painting shamrocks on your
face or whatever else you do for Saint Paddy's day, do spare thought for the
reason why so many of our ancestors left their homes in the first place. Definitely a downer.
What is not a downer is a wonderful bowl of Irish stew.
So once your stew is cooked for about an hour and a half it should be all ready to dish up.
Now the recipe says that you're supposed to put the meat in the middle and then the
potatoes around that and then put some sauce or whatever juice is left over over that, but
seeing as it's in layers I don't really get how you're going to do that because
the potatoes would need to be first, and so if you if you mix it all up then that's
not going to work unless you're picking out meat and potato. I just put mine in a bowl.
And here we are Stobhach Gaedhealach, or Irish stew.
It looks so much simpler than what you'd find in an Irish pub or whatever
because usually they put a lot of other vegetables and there's like I said a lot more
juice and stuff, but it smells divine.
Let's give it a shot.
*_*
This is an evening sitting by the fire wrapped in a blanket with the cats,
and those that you love in a bowl. This is the happiest meal that I have had in a long time,
and I wish now that I had made twice as much because I'm gonna be eating this
all week. It's wonderful. It's cooked all the way through.
The meat is not dried out, you know we didn't sear it so- but it's wonderful. It's plenty moist,
there's tons of flavor. The onion really- I used sweet or yellow onions so it really added a lot of
that that flavor, and then I did use a good amount of pepper. Oh it's just- it's divine.
I love this. Is a wonderful meal and I bet it's gonna taste even
better the second day because that's what stews like this do.
Now for those who are still watching there's a little poem about Irish stew from 1828 that I want
to share with you. It's long so I'm going to just share a couple stanzas but it's just adorable.
"If you'd ask a young lover to dine, and have him prove kind unto you,
to make love come out of his beautiful mouth, you should stuff it with
Irish stew. Then Hurrah for an Irish stew, that will stick to your belly like glue.
It's seasoned so fine, and it's flavors divine oh good luck to an Irish stew."
So go to hellofresh.com and use code tastinghistory12 to
get 12 free meals including free shipping, and I will see you next time on Tasting History.
Just lovely.