NIX THE GREEN BOTTLE: IRISH CUISINE & HISTORY DESERVE MORE THAN FOOD COLORING

THIS ST PATRICK’S DAY, DITCH ANYTHING INVOLVING GREEN FOOD COLORING. INSTEAD, CONSIDER THE POTATO, AND ITS BITTER AND SUSTAINING ROLE IN IRISH LIFE, ESPECIALLY IRISH-AMERICAN LIFE.

THEN, HAVE SOME REALLY SUPERB IRISH POTATO-CHEESE SOUP.

I HAVE TWO DELICIOUS VERSIONS FOR YOU, TRADITIONAL AND VEGAN.

Jump here to go directly to the recipe for Traditional Potato-Cheese Soup with Red Ale.
Jump here to go directly to the recipe for Vegan Potato-Cheese Soup with Red Ale.

Food always tells a story: the story of hunger, and how we do or do not satisfy it. And within that story, it tells a hundred thousand smaller stories.

Some of the most tragic and triumphant comes from Ireland, the small island of fabled green, off the western coast of Europe. Its present day population is just 4.6 million. Yet about 33 million Americans have their roots in its soil.

And those roots have to do with… potatoes.

But let us work up to that. Let’s start more simply. With a question that has long sincerely puzzled me: why, in the name of all things authentic and Irish, did the green of St. Patrick’s Day as celebrated in American, become green food coloring?

Let us look at a few archetypal Irish ingredients.

DAIRY PRODUCTS… AND PRESENT-DAY VEGAN OPTIONS

Ireland’s emerald nature has nothing to do with food coloring. Its green, of course, is from the verdant grass covering this ancient, sea-surrounded hilly land.

To my taste, it is the particular character of the soil and grass that you find on your tongue when you sample a bite of Irish cheese, or spread Irish butter over a scone or slice of soda bread. There’s a distinct underlying sweetness makes Irish dairy products like no other.

I would like to think it’s that green, green grass, but I could be romanticising.

But to me there is something present in Irish butter, and in several wondrous cheeses I’ve had from Ireland. These days, there are cheddars (aged and young), and blue cheese. There are smoked cheeses and even, these days, Irish brie.

Many are made from cow’s milk, but a surprising number are made from goat’s milk. Some of the best, as always, are made by small farmers, such as John and Mary Hempenstall’s Wicklow Farmhouse Cheeses, which have both organic and green/sustainability certifications — much more stringent in Europe than here.

(If Irish cheeses are so good, and I am so up on them, why, in the name of all that is holy, am I also offering a dairy-free version of the marvelous Potato-Cheese Soup with Red Ale that follows? Because, also in the name of all that is holy, I believe that everyone should get to sit at the table, especially when something so delicious as this soup is concerned. This includes people who are vegan or outright allergic to milk or just slightly lactose-intolerant. There is also no denying that a plant-based diet is healthier for the planet, easier on the human body, and in general kinder to animals.)

I love both versions of this soup. I have to admit that, authentic or not, the vegan version tastes just as good to me as the dairy, something I once would have found inconceivable. The two do not taste the same, but they are strangely equally satisfying, in the creamy-dreamy way of such soups.

I do want to add, however, that while the finished soup is a delicious creamy off-white, there are quite a few green ingredients in it. And plus, the sprinkle of minced parsley atop the finished bowl.

But not a drop of food coloring.

IRISH ALES AND STOUT

As for green beer … please. As much a travesty as green bagels. I am certainly oversimplifying here, but if you’re talking authentic and Irish as an ingredient, I invite you to do as I do: think ale and think red.

Irish red ale is medium-bodied, malty, a bit fruity, almost wholly lacking in bitterness, and of a distinct golden-red hue (due to the addition of a bit of roasted barley in the brewing process). To me it’s a perfect St. Patrick’s Day choice for cooking with, and for drinking. And any good liquor store will have some. (P.S. If you’re self-quarantining and have no red ale, use any beer you have on hand. If you have no beer? Try white wine — not authentic, not Irish, but I know it would be delicious.)

Then of course, at the other end of the spectrum, there’s Guinness Stout. Almost a sacrament to lovers of the writer James Joyce, it has an entirely different profile from the agreeable red ale. Guinness is dark. And is is decidedly bitter in flavor. And in Ireland it is served at a warmish room temperature. An acquired taste for most American beer-drinkers.

Yet Guinness is oddly perfect, for exactly these reasons, when used with another much-loved dark, bitter ingredient: chocolate. The cake I developed using these unlikely soul-mate ingredients is the best chocolate cake I make — and I make some very fine chocolate cakes. But my Guinness Stout Chocolate Cake should be in the… hey, I just thought of this! — the Guinness Book of World Records!

NOTE: this cake is not light, healthful, gluten-free, or vegan. Someday I may get around to dreaming up a facsimile version that is at least some of these things, for, as I said, I believe in making the table large enough to seat everyone, but this is definitely not it. It is, however, a marvel.

POTATOES & PLAGUES

Warning: here we take a serious turn. This is a tale with special resonance at the present moment, with the looming possible, probable, unthinkable plague of coronavirus headed our way. Yet think about it we must.

And when we think of the tangled history of potatoes, Ireland, and the new and old worlds, we learn (as Covid-19 is showing us, again, in our time) this uneasy truth: fair or not, anything can happen to anyone at any time.

And, again as Covid-19 is revealing, 1. we rarely know the consequences of our actions at the time at the times we make them, and 2. most disasters have natural and unavoidable causes combined with human failings: folly, greed, incompetence, arrogance.

The heart of potato soup is the potato. And the potato is also — in its presence and absence — the heart of the great immigration from Ireland to America.

Of course everyone rightly associates potatoes with Ireland. But, potatoes are not native to Ireland. They come from the Americas (specifically, to present day Peru and Chile).

Why and how, then, did praties (Celtic for potatoes) became a staple in 1589, as soon as they were introduced to Ireland?

Economics initially drove their popularity; I believe fondness and a taste for them came later. This often happens with foods traditionally associated with poverty and survival. (Corn and foodstuffs made of it followed a similar path, among poor Europeans who came to America. First these were perceived as strange foods forced-upon the settlers by necessity and despised because of that. Then, eventually, they were loved, and became part of their eaters’ identity).

POTATOES, POVERTY & POWER

When the potato was introduced to Ireland, in 1589, the Irish were predominantly tenant farmers, growing the majority of crops for export to Great Britain. They lived under England’s so-called Penal Laws: any Irish person practicing Catholicism (the native country’s majority religion) were prohibited from owning or leasing land, voting or holding elected office.

Disenfranchised, economically oppressed, the Irish took immediately to potatoes for their own use,  not export. Potatoes were a fine, reliable, ultra-productive garden-crop.  And despite what many in our present all-too-often-carb-phobic world may think, potatoes were and are nutritious.

High in  minerals, vitamins, fiber and even a little protein (4.3 grams in a medium potato), a small amount of acreage planted in potatoes provided a large yield of calorie-rich staple food for the family, while still leaving acreage available for more income-generating uses: oats, dairying, flax (for the thriving Irish linen industry). Potatoes, with a little of that good Irish dairy added for protein and fat, were pretty healthful as far as poor people’s food goes. And though they didn’t keep as well as beans or grains, which can be stored for years and remain edible, for a fresh vegetable potatoes kept remarkably well: up to nine months if carefully stored. Particularly prized during the cold winter months, when nothing else fresh and edible grew, we see here the origins of Irish potato soups.

For what dish is more warming or agreeable or easy to extend than soup? And with some dairy on hand, what is better?

AND THEN THERE WERE NONE

All went as well as it could (given that Ireland was in effect Great Britain’s colony, insuring — as is  with colonized or semi-colonized people exploited for their goods or services — that the natives were impoverished, without many opportunities to get ahead, living close to survival).

Until 1845, when a blight infected the potato crop on which, by then, the Irish were dependent.

Although by 1829, fifteen years before the blight, the Penal Laws had largely been repealed, their pernicious impact was omnipresent in the form of land-ownership. English and Anglo-Irish families, often absentee, still owned the vast majority of Ireland; most Irish Catholics remained as tenant farmers, paying rent to the landowners. (For a much fuller look at the causal effects of the Great Hunger, please see this page, which I wrote, but then decided did not belong here).

Potato blight rendered vigorous green plants black, their fallen stems and withered foliage rotting in the field. Their treasure of firm brown tubers below the soil also went soft, stinking, rotten and inedible. But it was the post-Penal Law iniquity plus the blight that caused The Great Hunger, also called the Potato Famine; in Irish, An Gorta Mor.

It also, eventually, triggered the largest single wave of Irish immigration in U.S. history.

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POTATOES REWROTE HISTORY

And yet. And yet. In spite of all this, and in the face of virulent and hate-filled prejudice of the type we now hear thrown at today’s immigrants and refugees,  the Irish came. They came and built and made and remade. Story by story, person by person, the newly arriving Irish, like other population waves before and after them, came to make something new of themselves, while remaking America.

Not all of them succeeded, but that was the dream, the hope, on which they left their native country and settled here.

And many of them did succeed.

Much as today’s immigrants are doing.

Much as my paternal grandparents, Jews, did in escaping Russia.

Given all this, when I have been in in New York City on St. Patrick’s Day and seen the travesty of green bagels, obviously , I am appalled, and as much more than a cookbook author who loves real food. I don’t know who bagels tinted with green food coloring trivializes and insults more: the Jews or the Irish?

Yet there they are: green bagels, in a city to which both ethnicities immigrated, in great numbers, when oppression in the old countries grew too great.

Impossible to imagine New York’s New Yorkiness without the Irish and the Jews.

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THAT WAS THEN, THIS IS NOW

According to the Legatum Prosperity Index, 2019, Ireland is now well-off, ranked 2nd among 44 countries in the European region, with an overall economic score well above the regional and world averages.  Its culture is liberal; its government stable. One further irony: Ireland, last year, imported a shocking 72,000 tonnes — metric tons,  each of which weighs 2,204.6 pounds —  of potatoes (nearly two thirds of those potatoes, 44,000 tonnes, were imported from Britain).

Given the Empire’s role in the Great Potato Famine, how does one even wrap one’s mind around that?

And, then there’s this, according to the Irish Times, “The globalisation of the dinner plate has seen our average annual consumption of potatoes drop from 140kg a person in the 1990s to 85kg nowadays. This is still 2½ times the world average, but less than where it was.”

And way less than it once was, when potatoes were pretty much all anyone ate.

Until there were no more potatoes, and few people, left on that green and troubled island.

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CRISIS/ OPPORTUNITY

Famously, the same Chinese character for “crisis” also means “opportunity.” Hard to let that in, to be rah-rah about it, in the actual face of crisis.

Of Potato Famine and Penal Law. Of the Coronavirus pandemic, and our inadequate, tardy response to it.

And yet human beings as a species have been facing the unknown with courage, resilience, and reinvention, for a long time. Even as, along the way, they lost individual humans who they loved so much they could not imagine living without.

When, today, I pass a house being built in my neighborhood and I catch phrases in Spanish, I am not unaware that a century and change earlier, I would have heard Irish speech. In fact, the last of that wave of Irish immigrants still peopled New York when I was a young girl. I heard the music of that speech in taxis. And Mr. John, who gardened for the family up the street and who came to do a spring and fall garden clean-up at our house, was Irish as well.

I thought of all this, as I read about the Great Hunger, as the world has continued to grapple with Covid-19.

I thought also of my grandparents,  and of the maternal grandparents of my partner, Mark Graff.

I am here because my grandparents escaped the Pogroms.

Mark is here because his grandparents, Ballews, escaped Ireland, because of the Great Hunger.

Because of potatoes.

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DEEP FEAST, AGAIN, AND FINALLY THOSE RECIPES

Food always tells a story: the story of hunger, and how we do or do not satisfy it. This is the heart of what Deep Feast, the name of this blog: that we understand that what we eat is as much a matter of life and death as anything can be. That the route by which certain foods ended up on our plates is rarely simple, always fascinating, and frequently filled with somber facts as well as celebratory ones.

In March 2020, with many of us self-quarantining, we had, at least, a little time. To think. To cook. To adjust to disruption (and the possibility of far more terrifying outcomes than inconvenience).

In March 2021, as some of us receive a vaccination and breathe a sigh of relief, while others wait anxiously for their turn, while others spin strange conspiracy theories and refuse (still!) to wear masks…It is still time to think and cook and adjust.

And in the face of  so many contradictions, to love our days and those we with whom we share them.

To eat a bowl of soup together.

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TRADITIONAL IRISH POTATO SOUP WITH CHEESE & RED ALE
8 SERVINGS / vegetarian, with omnivore option (vegan variation follows)

INGREDIENTS

 1/4 cup (4 tablespoons)  butter

2 medium onions, chopped (about 2 cups)

3 medium leeks, white and light green part only, slit lengthwise, de-rooted, very well washed, and sliced

3/4 cup sliced celery (about 3 stalks)

10 medium Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled or not as you prefer, and coarsely chopped

1 can (12-ounce) Irish red ale

4 cups vegetable broth 

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 to 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

3 tablespoons all-purpose flour

4 cups whole milk

7 ounces grated aged sharp cheddar cheese, preferably Irish

3/4 cup finely minced parsley (optional, but very good)

4 ounces crumbled blue cheese, preferably Irish (optional, but very good)

crisp, cooked bacon crumbled (optional)

Instructions

1. Melt 2 tablespoons butter in a 6- to 8-quart stockpot. Add onion, leek and celery; cook over medium heat  about 10 minutes.
2. Add potatoes, ale, stock, salt and pepper, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer until potatoes are tender, about 35 minutes. Mash a few of the potatoes against the pot, to thicken the soup slightly.
3. Melt remaining butter in a medium saucepan; gradually add flour, whisking until smooth. Cook 3 minutes over medium-low heat, stirring constantly. Slowly stir in milk, whisking until hot and thickened. If using cheddar cheese, add it now, and stir until melted.
4. Combine the potato mixture and milk-and-cheese mixture until combined. Cook over very low heat  10 minutes.
5. Ladle into soup bowls and sprinkle with parsley, optional blue cheese and optional bacon, if desired.Makes 8 entree-sized servings (when accompanied by bread and salad).

   

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VEGAN IRISH POTATO SOUP WITH CHEESE & RED ALE

8 SERVINGS / dairy-free

INGREDIENTS

 1/3 cup Miyoko’s Vegan Cultured Butter

2 medium onions, chopped (about 2 cups)

3 medium leeks, white and light green part only, slit lengthwise, de-rooted, very well washed, and sliced

3/4 cup sliced celery (about 3 stalks)

10 medium Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled or not as you prefer, and coarsely chopped

1 can (12-ounce) Irish red ale

4 cups vegetable broth 

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 to 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

3 tablespoons all-purpose flour

4 cups unsweetened, unflavored plant-based milk (I tested this using half almond milk, half macadamia nut milk, boh unsweetened; this was perfect)

1/2 teaspoon turmeric

1/2 cup nutritional yeast

1 7.5 ounces Miyoko’s Farmhouse-style non-dairy cheddar cheese wheel, crumbled

3/4 cup finely minced parsley (optional)

nicely browned strips of smoked tempeh, sch as Light Life’s “Fakin’ Bacon” crumbled (optional, but really good)

Instructions

1. Melt 2 tablespoons of the plant-based butter in a 6- to 8-quart stockpot. Add onion, leek and celery; cook over medium heat about 10 minutes.
2. Add potatoes, ale, stock, salt and pepper, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer until potatoes are tender, about 35 minutes. Mash a few of the potatoes against the pot, to thicken the soup slightly.
3. Melt remaining plant-based butter in a medium saucepan; gradually add flour, whisking until smooth. Cook 3 minutes over medium-low heat, stirring constantly. Slowly stir in non-dairy milk, whisking until hot and thickened. Add turmeric, nutritional yeast, and crumbled Miyoko’s cheddar cheese. Stir until melted (it’s okay if a few crumbles of cheese remain).
4. Combine the potato mixture and plant-based milk-and-cheese mixture, combining. Cook over very low heat 10 minutes. (If you haven’t already browned the tempeh bacon, this would be a good time to do that).
5. Ladle into soup bowls and sprinkle with parsley, and tempeh bacon.Makes 8 entree-sized servings (when accompanied by bread and salad).