Irish Traditional Cooking [Paperback]

`Irish Traditional Cooking' by leading Irish cooking school owner, Darina Allen is the fourth Irish-centric book I have reviewed and the second which warrants attention as a sound source for genuine Irish recipes. The other worthy book on this subject is `the Irish Heritage Cookbook' by Irish-American high school teacher and culinary writer, Margaret M. Johnson. Of the two, Allen's book is the more scholarly in that it endeavors to give a relatively complete and authoritative view of the cuisine of all Ireland. While Ms. Johnson's book is very good, it is a much more personal view of both Irish and `Irish-American' cooking.

One area covered by Ms. Allen which are not covered by Ms. Johnson is the native Irish pantry with items such as homemade sausage, homemade vinegar, homemade marmalade, and the like.

It's interesting that the two books take very similar approaches to Irish cooking. Unlike the classic Italian cookbook, neither proceeds by course, but primarily by principle raw ingredient. And, unlike Ms. Allen's great `ballymaloe cooking school cookbook', this book is totally Irish.

Ms. Allen's chapter subjects are Broths & Soups, Eggs, Fish, Game, Poultry, Lamb, Beef, Pork, Offal, Potatoes, Vegetables, Food from the Wild, Desserts, Pancakes, Breads, Oatmeal & Other Grains, Cakes & Biscuits, and The Irish Pantry. In addition to all the recipes, and there are certainly a goodly number for the price, there is an excellent historical foreword by Irish culinary historian, Regina Sexton. There are also numerous heading sections on groups of recipes such as nettles, herrings, eels, and many others. There is also an excellent little Appendices on Irish cheeses and cheesemaking; The Potato and the Famine; and Cooking Pits of the Fianna (Bronze Age sites associated with Ireland's early pre-Christian heroes such as Finn McCool (Fionn Mac Cumhaill)). The number of Irish Farmhouse cheese sources, 48 in all, is truly impressive. Since I suspect almost all of these cheeses are not available at our local megamart, I wish she would have given commonly available French, Italian, or American cheese equivalents.

Almost all of Ms. Allen's recipes seem relatively short in procedure and in number of ingredients. I am very fond of how Ms. Allen has put her ingredients list in the margin rather than above the procedure, and I am also happy that all units are in purely English units, rather than both English and Metric. This is not because I disapprove of Metric. In fact, I prefer it, but in a book for an English or American audience, it is simply easier to read if all units are in our most familiar units.

One of my more interesting discoveries in this book is the almost total absence of yeast baking. In the chapter on breads, there are 23 recipes, of which only three (3) include yeast. All others are leavened with baking power or baking soda plus buttermilk or both. With the great popularity of beer in Ireland, it is odd that there is no more yeast breadmaking, especially with brewer's yeast. While I am very fond of Irish Soda Bread, I find it lacks something compared to a good yeast bread; however, if you are yeast impaired, 20 recipes for chemically leavened quickbreads is a great source for breadmaking.

I am also struck by the large number of recipes using apples in both this book and in the previously mentioned book by Ms. Johnson. The dessert chapter alone gives us 12 our of 34 recipes with apples. Oddly, the Irish notion of an apple dumpling recipe is quite different from the Pennsylvania Dutch recipe of a single peeled and cored apple encased in pastry. The Irish `dumpling' is much more like what we would call a `crumble' or `cobbler', as it is a layer of sweetened apples covered by a pastry layer. One may have to use a little local knowledge for the apple recipes as Ms. Allen recommends no apple varieties for most recipes and when she does, they appear to be varieties native to Ireland such as `Bramley Seedling cooking apples'. I guess Macintosh apples should do fine here.

This book is a real winner if you happen to love mashed potatoes. Among the champ, colcannon, and boxty recipes, there are at least 12 recipes for mashed potatoes, not counting the various recipes for making dishes from leftover mashed potatoes such as griddle potatoes and potato & caraway seed cakes.

Overall, while Ms. Johnson's book has a great selection of recipes, Ms. Allen's selection is even broader, without being more difficult. If all you want is easy recipes, Johnson is excellent. But, if you want a great lyric evocation of the foods native to Ireland, Allen's book is superior.

My husband and I spent six months in Ireland in late 1999-early 2000, and I wanted to learn how to make some of the dishes we were eating in restaurants. (Irish food isn't nearly as awful as we'd heard it was going to be!) So I bought this book, and it's a wonderful introduction to traditional Irish cooking. There's one section I completely avoided on recipes for -- ahem -- strange parts of cows and lamb, etc. But the rest of the book is lovely and very easy to follow with gorgeous photos. As I indicated in the review title -- a perfect introduction to Irish cooking.

Attention: "The Complete Book of Irish Country Cooking" and "Irish Traditional Cooking" are the same book, under different titles. DO NOT BUY BOTH. As for the book itself, it is more comprehensive than any of the books by Margaret M. Johnson (e.g., "The Irish Heritage Cookbook" and "The Irish Spirit") but less detailed. In other words, Ms. Allen includes more recipes but the instructions in each recipe are not as thorough. Given a choice, I would choose one of Ms. Johnson's books over Ms. Allen's. Ms. Johnson's recipes are more appealing as well, and more accessible. I might eat a bowl of nettle soup if it were presented to me but I would not seek it out or look for nettles to make it. Ms. Allen's book contains many recipes for things like Nettle Soup that most people will never make. Ms. Johnson's books include one mouth-watering recipe after another, each of which makes me want to run to the grocery store for the ingredients.

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