A Hearty Irish Meal - Dutch Oven Style

A couple of years ago we did some dutch oven cooking at an event with a St. Patrick's day theme. The following are the recipes that we used and are easily adaptable to cook in a dutch oven.

First, a bit about Dublin Coddle -

This traditional supper dish of sausages, bacon, onions and potatoes dates back at least as far as the early eighteenth century. It seems to be more of a city dish than a rural one: it was a favorite of Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels and dean of Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin. The name of the dish is probably descended from the older word caudle, derived from a French word meaning "to boil gently, parboil, or stew". The more recent version of the verb, "coddle," is still applied to gently cooked eggs; and in the case of Dublin coddle, it's become a noun, applied to a dish that is cooked very slowly at low temperatures.

In Dublin itself, coddle retains its reputation as a dish that can be prepared ahead of time and left in a very slow oven while the people who're going to eat it have to be out of the house for a while -- in particular, at a funeral: when everyone returns for the wake, the dish will be ready, and won't have suffered from being left in the oven a little longer than planned. While this is a simple dish, its quality depends entirely on the quality of the raw materials you use to make it -- so it's important to find the best ingredients you can.

The basic ingredients are potatoes, onions, sausages, bacon, and water. The only seasonings the oldest recipes use are chopped fresh parsley and pepper. Some coddle recipes add apples to the mixture, but these seem to be in the minority. The sausages used should be the best quality 100% pork sausages you can get your hands on. Pre-seasoned sausages are fine: the standard US breakfast sausage would work very well in this dish. The potatoes should be baking potatoes, not a waxy salad variety.

Getting the right bacon may be something of an issue. For coddle you don't want North American-style crisp / thin bacon: you want a thicker-sliced bacon, ideally salt-cured rather than sugar- or maple- cured. (Specifically for coddle, some Dublin butchers still sell "bacon off-cuts" -- small leftover pieces from the ends of the cured pork cuts they slice to sell as the traditional Irish back bacon "rashers".) Smoked bacon is fine: and if your butcher can supply you bacon with the rind on, this is best of all, as the slow cooking of the rind will add richness to the sauce that the dish develops.

Many coddle recipes presently found in Irish cookbooks are severely plain, and in some cases so oversimplified that the results are just too bland to be enjoyable. Our version overcomes this problem by grilling the meats briefly before they go into the mixture -- contributing both color and extra flavor to the recipe. (Other recipes suggest grilling or frying the sausages after the cooking is complete... but why wait?)


Dublin Coddle

3-4 pounds baking or boiling potatoes
1 pound good sausages
1 pound thick-cut bacon
2 onions, chopped
2 cups water, and more as necessary while cooking
1 bouillon / stock cube (preferably ham: beef or chicken if ham stock isn't available)
Large handful fresh parsley
Salt and coarse-ground pepper to season

Peel the potatoes. Cut into chunks. Finely chop the parsley. Boil the water and in it dissolve the bouillon cube.

Fry the sausages and bacon long enough to color them. Be careful not to dry them out! Drain briefly on paper towels. When drained, chop the bacon into one-inch pieces. If you like, chop the sausages into bite-size pieces as well. (Some people prefer to leave them whole.)

In a 12- inch dutch oven start layering the ingredients: onions, bacon, sausages or sausage pieces, potatoes. Season each layer liberally with fresh-ground pepper and the chopped fresh parsley. Continue until the ingredients are used up. Pour the water / bouillon mixture over the top. Set pot on coals and bring to a boil. Immediately bring the heat down by moving pot to less coals and cover the pot. (You may like to additionally put a layer of foil underneath the pot lid to help seal it.)

Cook low and slow for at least three hours, replenishing coals on top and bottom of dutch oven as needed. (Four or five hours won't hurt it.) At the two-hour point, check the pot and add more water if necessary. There should be about an inch of liquid at the bottom of the pot at all times.

Serve. Guinness, bottled or draft, goes extremely well with this dish (indeed, adding a little to the pot toward the end of the process wouldn't hurt anything). Another good accompaniment is fresh soda bread, used to sop up the gravy.

To accompany this hearty meal we also cooked the following:

Irish Buttermilk Scones

1 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. cream of tartar
pinch of salt
2 tbsp. butter
1 cup buttermilk
Beaten egg or milk to glaze (optional)

Sift together the flour, baking soda and cream of tartar in a medium large bowl. Cut the butter and rub it into the flour mixture with your fingers until the mixture looks like breadcrumbs. Create a well in the center and add the milk. Use a thick knife to mix in the milk and form a dough. Roll out the dough on a floured board to 3/4 inch thick and cut into rounds or triangles. Put scones onto a lightly floured baking sheet and brush with milk or beaten egg, if desired. Bake at 425 degrees for about 15 minutes until light golden in color.

Irish Drop Scones

This is a great scone recipe. One cup of dried berries, chocolate chips, shredded coconut, or dried cherries can be added in place of the raisins if you like.

Servings: Makes about 14.

Ingredients

2 cups all purpose flour
1/3 cup (packed) golden brown sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) chilled unsalted butter, diced
1 cup raisins
1/2 cup (or more) chilled whipping cream
1 large egg

Preparation

Sift all purpose flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt into medium bowl. Add chilled butter; using fingertips, rub in until coarse meal forms. Mix in raisins. Whisk 1/2-cup cream and egg in small bowl to blend. Gradually add cream mixture to dry ingredients, tossing with fork until dough comes together in moist clumps. Add more cream by teaspoonfuls if dough is dry. Drop dough by 1/4 cupfuls onto large rimmed baking sheet, spacing apart. Bake scones at 400 degrees until golden brown, about 20 minutes. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Irish Porter Cake

Porter was (and is) a style of dark beer which began to be brewed in England and Ireland in the mid-1700's. The stout style now exemplified by Guinness was closely linked to it: indeed, Guinness was originally marketed as a porter before having its name changed to "Extra Stout". The only porter being brewed in Ireland now, however, is the "Plain" porter (as in the famous line from Flann O' Brien's "The Workman's Friend", A pint of plain is your only man) that comes from the Porterhouse group of brewpubs in Dublin.

Somewhere along the line in the 1800's, it occurred to somebody in Ireland that porter would make a good addition to the robust dark flavor of the standard fruitcake: and so porter cake was born. It usually contains, at the very least, raisins or sultanas (golden raisins): often dried candied peel (orange peel, lemon peel, candied pineapple, etc.), and sometimes even glacé cherries, come into the recipe as well. All the alcohol in the porter is of course driven off during the long baking period, resulting in a darkly rich-tasting cake, which is another great standby for those who like to wheel out a well-loaded tea trolley.

This cake keeps very well if stored in a cake tin.

For the cake:

1 pound flour
1/2 pound butter or baking shortening (but butter works best)
1/2 pound sugar
1 pound sultanas / golden raisins
2 ounces chopped candied fruit peel or candied cherries
Grated rind from 1 small lemon
2 eggs
1 cup porter or stout
½ tsp. salt
1 rounded teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon or apple pie spice
1/2 teaspoon allspice

Preheat the oven to 350F / 175C and butter a nine-inch spring form cake pan / tin.

Sift together the flour, salt and baking powder (or pulse them a number of times in the food processor). Add the sugar, the nutmeg and the spices and stir / pulse again. Cut in the butter finely using a pastry blender, or else process the butter with the flour mixture until it achieves a fine cornmeal texture. Add the fruit. (For a finer texture, if using a food processor, add about half the fruit and process it along with the flour mixture until finely chopped. Then add the rest of the fruit.)

Beat the eggs together with the stout. In a large bowl, combine the flour with the wet ingredients and stir until well mixed. Spread the mixture in the springform pan and smooth the top.

Bake for 2 1/2 hours at 350F / 175C. Remove the springform and cool the cake on a rack. As soon as it's completely cool, seal in a cake tin or Zip-Loc bag.

Happy St. Pat's to you all!!