Danish Cookies, Irish Butter
Inspired by Danish butter cookies, made with Irish butter
I’m not exactly sure when it was that Danish butter cookies became a feature of Christmas in our house, but feature they did for several years, with their round, swirled and pretzel shapes and their always-buttery taste.
Spud Sunday: Crisps A Go-Go
Hard to believe, but I have been taken to task in certain quarters for having included on these pages a recipe for so simple a thing as the crisp sandwich. Yes, in these days where tv chefs and cookbook authors are falling over themselves to produce ever easier and ever simpler recipes, this might have been construed as a simplification too far.
My point, of course, was not to teach anybody how to make a crisp sambo per se, but to acknowledge the fact that it sits proudly in the pantheon of spud classics, as much as any buttery mash or creamy gratin. And the same, it has to be said, goes for its close cousin, the crisp toastie.
This week's crisp toastie
This particular toastie featured some of the new Keogh’s crisps that I sampled last week. What better place for a handful of the salt and vinegar variety than smushed between two slices of toasted batch bread, with some mature cheddar, tomatoes, spring onions and mayonnaise for company. It was a little piece of midweek lunch perfection.
Figuring that you might fancy making some toasties of your own, Keogh’s have offered to send one lucky Spud reader a sample of their new range, which includes Dubliner Cheese and Onion, Atlantic Sea Salt and Irish Cider Vinegar and Roast Beef and Irish Stout flavours. The rest of the toastie is, naturally, up to you.
Anyone with an address in the Republic of Ireland can enter and I’ll leave this open until midday GMT on Monday December 12th, after which I’ll pick a winner from the crisp bag.
Have Your Cake And Tax It
To be fair, it’s not the first time that brioche has been called cake.
That famous quip attributed to the ill-fated Marie Antoinette, “qu’ils mangent de la brioche,” is most often translated to great dramatic effect as “let them eat cake.”
Brioche - is it bread or is it cake?
It seems that the Revenue Commissioners, in what they are calling a ‘clarification’ of the current VAT rules, have decided that brioche might as well be cake, because it will now attract VAT, as cakes do, at 13.5%, whereas previously it would have been classified along with bread, which escapes the VAT net. And it’s not just brioche: other items, such as croissants, bagels and even garlic bread are no longer sufficiently bread-like to qualify for zero VAT status. Really.
This came to my attention as I was leaving the hallowed halls of Trinity College, which had been the venue for the Bord Bia Irish Food & Drink Industry Awards last week. I happened upon Suzanne Campbell, who was discussing the issue and how it would hit small bakery businesses, with William Despard of the Bretzel Bakery (he who had made such an impression at the recent Savour Kilkenny Foodcamp). William was understandably exercised about the VAT hike.
Spud Sunday: Spuds On The Shelf
If you want to see a man get exercised about potatoes, just suggest to Stephen Hennessy of The Boxty Bakers that his boxty slices are like a bit like potato waffles.
The poor man who said as much to Stephen at this weekend’s Taste of Christmas event didn’t realise quite the passion that Stephen has for his boxty slices, a traditional product which he would consider far superior to your typical potato waffle. It is, I would expect, unlikely that the gentleman who made the unfortunate waffle comparison came from Leitrim.
People who hail from that particular neck of the woods, including The Boxty Bakers themselves, don’t need to be told about boxty. Even as the gentleman to my right was being enlightened in the matter of boxty versus waffles, a lady to my left declared her Leitrim connections and chatted with Stephen about her own family’s traditions, which included the use of a nail to punch holes into pieces of metal which were then used to grate the raw potato needed for large boxty batches.
Not waffles but boxty
Spud Sunday: Falling Out Of Flavour?
I was just on my way out the door last Thursday when I heard it first. Right at the end of the Morning Ireland radio show on RTE.
The interviewee was Lorcan Bourke from Bord Bia and the subject was spuds – specifically, that our renowned Irish love of the tuber was on a downward trajectory, at least if the steady decline in spud sales was anything to go by. I, needless to remark, was all ears.
I mean seriously folks, what's not to love?
Tales Of Wales
Flying the flag for Wales
We were all packed up and in the van, ferry bound.
There was just one last mission to complete before leaving Wales – to secure some creamy blue Perl Lâs cheese. We swooped with singular focus on several of the better supermarkets en route – Morrison’s in Caenarfon, Waitrose in Menai Bridge, even a supermarket in that town with the impossibly lengthy name – but Welsh artisan cheeses of any description were thin on the ground. In the end, I had to board my ferry cheeseless and (not for the first time) found myself pondering the harsh realities of modern food retailing, which mean that truly local food can often be one of the hardest things to find in your local shop.
The hills of North Wales: it could be Ireland, y'know...
Spud Sunday: Searching For Breakfast
My friend and fellow potato enthusiast, Dave Langford, is in the habit of sending potato-related snippets my way. The latest to hit my inbox was this little snapshot which, needless to remark, brought a smile to my face:
It also prompted the creation of a suitably spudly breakfast dish (because I am, in matters potato, nothing if not predictable).
My Indian potato pancake, otherwise known as breakfast
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Spud Sunday: Michelin Spuds
Stéphane Robin smiled enthusiastically: “You must let us know if you try any of the recipes.”
I was sitting in a reception room at Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud at an early hour perusing a copy of “Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud: The First Thirty Years” while around me, preparations were getting underway for the official launch of the book later that day. Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud is Ireland’s only two star Michelin establishment, an honour that it has held for almost 16 years, and Stéphane, the longtime manager of the restaurant, and founder Patrick Guilbaud had paused to chat informally about the book in between attending to the various tasks that comprised the business of, what was for them, a very special day.
