...there's both eatin' and drinkin' in it
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.
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.
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.
© 2025 The Daily Spud
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
Whaddya Sayin’?