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  

a breath of fresh air. It's just so easy to  follow just like those from our sponsor today,

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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.