My experience with food in Ireland
It seems like this being St. Patrick's Day and all I should say something about Irish food, particularly as we were in Ireland in the fall of 2005.
I wrote a couple of stories for The Sun about our trip -- one general one for the travel section and one on Irish breakfasts for the food section.
I would "reprint" the latter but it was pretty long. (This is great. I've come to realize that with a blog my stories never need die, even if everyone else thinks they should.)
I will copy and paste the end of my travel story on Dublin, the only place in it I talked about food. I was describing the Temple Bar cultural arts district: ...
"The Irish Film Institute's glass-roofed courtyard nearby is a fine place to stop for tea and a pastry. Temple Bar also offers any number of places to eat.
"We had great homemade soup and granary bread for lunch at the artsy little Joy of Coffee on Essex Street East. Dinner at the moderately priced (for Dublin) Fitzers on Temple Bar Square, which bills itself as a modern Irish bistro, will help disabuse visitors of misconceptions about Irish food with dishes such as smoked chicken and prawns over linguine and couscous with grilled Mediterranean vegetables.
"But the Irish aren't quite so cosmopolitan as the guidebooks would like you to believe, our hotel manager told us.
"'They still ask you if you want rice or chips [french fries] with your dishes in our Chinese restaurants,' she said."
(Photo that accompanied my Irish breakfast story styled by Julie Rothman of Irish bacon, link sausages, toast in a toast rack, grilled tomatoes and sauteed mushrooms. Algerina Perna/Sun photographer)
Comments
Irish bacon?
All these years we've been lied to. First, that it's bacon, and now we learn it's not even Canadian.
Posted by: jl | March 17, 2008 1:32 PM
I remember buying Irish bacon at Sutton Place several years ago. It was really not exactly the same as Canadian bacon.
Posted by: Rosebud | March 17, 2008 1:53 PM
Not exactly, rosebud?
What, was it rounder? More ham-like?
Posted by: jl | March 17, 2008 3:01 PM
My experience is now a decade old, but I recall Irish bacon as looking a lot like ours, but a much greater proportion of meat to fat and much tastier. As I mentioned in a previous post, that's what the Irish put in their cabbage, not corned beef.
Posted by: Federal Hill Jim | March 17, 2008 5:15 PM
Fed Hill Jim has the right of it... Irish bacon looks a bit like our slab bacon except ... well if you looked at it sideways to see the layers it would look like one thick layer of meat and one thick layer of fat. And they tend to boil it. Kind of makes me shudder but I'm having meat issues, so that's just personal.
Posted by: Misha the Meatless Maven | March 17, 2008 6:02 PM
What's being described as "Irish bacon" sounds a lot like what I've been served as "bacon" in England. American style bacon is available in England, but there's a different name for it that escapes me at the moment. Maybe "rashers", but I'm not at all sure I didn't conjure that out of the recesses of my brain.
Posted by: Hal Laurent, VoR | March 17, 2008 6:33 PM
So, if I've got this straight, Irish bacon looks like Canadian bacon when it's cooked, but before that, it looks like salt pork?
What an amazing substance.
Posted by: jl | March 17, 2008 8:51 PM
So, if I've got this straight, Irish bacon looks like Canadian bacon when it's cooked, but before that, it looks like salt pork?
If the Canadian bacon I've seen is representative, it's reconsituted from pork into a cylindrical shape. I've never seen a pork cut the same shape as Canadian bacon.
What do Canadians call Canadian bacon?
Posted by: Hal Laurent, VoR | March 17, 2008 9:15 PM
I seem remember to Jennifer and Clarissa (Two Fat Ladies) referring to what looked like American bacon as streaky bacon.
Posted by: Rosebud | March 18, 2008 7:04 AM
If you want American style bacon in the "British Isles" you would order rashers.
Posted by: Misha the Meatless Maven | March 18, 2008 11:20 AM
Did you just make Ireland a British island?
Posted by: voodoopork | March 18, 2008 4:07 PM
I remember Irish bacon as being quite a bit of fat with a little meat here and there, but looking like American-style strips. That was some 25 years ago.
At Tir-Na-Nog (sp?) in the Inner Harbor, their "rashers" look more like the bacon shown above.
Posted by: Rob in the Redneck Riviera | March 19, 2008 10:08 AM
Voodoo... I did. To split a hair, the 1920 Government of Ireland Act provides that Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom and partitioned the island of Ireland into Southern and Northern.
However I don't want this to devolve into politics so I shall reword that to Great Britain and Ireland.
Still the the American style bacon would be rashers.
Posted by: Misha the Meatless Maven | March 19, 2008 1:49 PM