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, HelloFresh. After a long day of
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HelloFresh is that if you want more protein you 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.
You used to have the recipe in the notes underneath the video.. I really miss that.. Would like to be able to check the ingredients at a glance instead of having to pick it up from the entire video. Just for quick reference etc.
Thanks.
The bacon in this recipe is subject to a bit of confusion. You could use any brined ham chucks for the bacon too. Just search bacon on somewhere like tesco dot ie and you'll find a range of bacons. It doesn't necessarily need to be the bacon that's used for breakfast
Bacon is defined as any pork that has been cured through a process of salting, either as a dry-cure or a wet-cure where the meat is either packed in salts or brine respectively.
This looks like one of the best meals as far as effort to taste ratio goes. I might have to make this soon!
Ya couldn't find a coddle recipe? I was so looking forward to you describing a boiled skinless Irish sausage... tee hee!
Man, I never expected to want to cry from watching one of your videos. I knew what happened in a factual sense but the way you delivered it was really moving. Another great video as always! (Also I really appreciate your care with pronunciation, it’s so refreshing!)
I made this today as my first Tasting History meal. And it was amazing.
Aw man. As a person with deep Irish roots, your reaction to tasting the stew brought a bit of a tear to my eye and a big smile on my face. Nothing gives me comfort like a nicely cooked potato.
Eat shit Charles Trevelyan.
As always a great episode, but the bonus is when you can tell you REALLY enjoy the recipe. Those are the ones I want to make
Can't throw in a little nugget like you really liking traditional Irish music without explaining more! Got any tunes?