In other words, a bowl of champ depends partly on the inspiration of the moment, partly on which flavoring greens are in season, and partly on the particular contents of the cupboard. If you want a bit more, eat it with some sausage or strips of bacon, or follow one of her subsidiary recipes. For instance, “champ and scrambled eggs” takes an ordinary mound of champ (scallion, nettle, chive, whatever), makes a good “dunt” in the center, and fills it up with the scrambled eggs; “champ and poached eggs” does the same with a poached egg or two, but this time sprinkles the whole thing with grated cheese and slips it under the broiler until the cheese is melted and the mashed potato is crusted and flecked with brown. This is about as fancy as it gets.
CHAMP
[serves 2 as a meal or 4 as a side dish]
6 medium or 4 large all-purpose potatoes
sea salt
about 1 cup of milk
flavoring green (see below)
black pepper
Peel the potatoes and set in a pot with a tight lid. Mix half a teaspoon of sea salt into a cup of water and pour over the potatoes. Cover and bring to a boil, lower the heat until the water just seethes, and cook for about 20 minutes, or until the water is gone and the potatoes are cooked through. Experience will teach the exact amount of water to use; the trick is to catch the potatoes just before they scorch. If this seems too risky or bothersome, the potatoes can be boiled in the usual way, then covered with a clean cloth and “dried” over very low heat for a few moments.
Meanwhile, prepare the milk-and-greens mixture, as directed below.
When the potatoes are ready, mash them by hand until they are free of lumps. Then, over the heat so that the champ remains piping hot, work in the milk-and-greens mixture. The consistency should be thick but creamy—add more milk if necessary. Season well with salt and black pepper. Eat your bowl of champ with plenty of butter and wash it down with a glass of buttermilk—if you can get hold of the real thing.
Flavoring Greens
Scallion.Use 1 bunch (6 to 8), minced, including the part of the green that isn’t wilted or damaged. While those who love scallions can mash them into the potatoes uncooked in the traditional Irish fashion, Irwin suggests that anyone bothered by their acrid aftertaste (and digestive effects) should not only cook them in the milk but first put them into a bowl, sprinkle them with a little salt, and pour boiling water onto them. Drain this away and add the scalded scallion bits to the milk. Bring this just to a simmer and hold it there for 5 minutes until the flavor has suffused through the milk. Proceed as directed above.
Chive.Use ¼ cup, minced. Again, these are traditionally beaten into the potatoes uncooked, but those who would like them a little tamed should simmer them in the milk for 5 minutes before working the mixture into the potatoes. Proceed as directed above. (Irwin notes that a chive patch ensures “green onion during the winter for broth and champ…. No matter how small the garden, a corner should still be found for a clump of chives.”)
Green Pea.Use 1 cup baby peas. Cook in the milk until tender, about 6 minutes. Then, as you prefer, either mash these into the champ with the milk or strain out and reserve to be stirred in whole just before serving. Proceed as above.
Parsley.Use ¼ cup, finely minced. Heat for 3 minutes in the simmering milk and proceed. Other herbs to consider include watercress, lovage, and mint.
Nettle.Choose only the tender tops; wash and chop these finely. Simmer for 10 minutes in the milk and proceed as directed above.
And so on.Our own favorite champ is made by finely chopping a leek or a bunch of scallions and sautéing the result over low heat in melted butter with a minced clove of garlic until everything is soft and golden. Beat hot milk into the potatoes, stir in the buttery mixture, and serve and eat at once.
Like any dish that has long existed on the before side of a written recipe, the art of presenting it on the page is not to strive for exactitude but to attempt a kind of evocation. Champ is the mashed potatoes of the Irish rural poor, lifted out of insignificance by the sheer amount of labor that went into making them. There was that huge pot, remember, filled with sufficient potatoes to meet the hunger of all who sat waiting, a main dish to be dressed up, if it could be, with a bit of greenage and some lovely rich milk. Here is the one time Asenath Nicholson ate mashed potatoes in an Irish cottage; see how the passage radiates a kind of occasion, of special comfort:
Mary now added a pile of dry turf to the fire, lighting up a white-washed cabin, and white-scoured stools, table, and cupboard. She had nothing but the potato and turnip, and “Sure ye can’t ate that.” “Put on the pot,” said Will, “it’s better than nothin’ to her cowld and wet stomach.” When the potatoes and turnips were boiled, they were mashed together, some milk and salt added, put upon a glistening plate, a clean, bright cloth spread upon the deal table, and Mary sat down.
This is the sort of dish where hunger itself is happy to provide the recipe.
So, too, with another dish she briefly mentions: “The next day I dined on kale and excellent potatoes [no lumpers here!] at the house of a Roman Catholic.” Called colcannon, it is an Irish dish so much like champ that at first it seems hard to understand how they are told apart. As Bríd Mahon describes it inLand of Milk and Honey:
Traditionally the first crop of new potatoes was a cause for celebration. A special meal was prepared. A basket of potatoes was dug and the tender skins rubbed off. A three-legged pot was filled and the potatoes mashed with a pounder or beetle. Salt, pepper, finely chopped onions, cooked green cabbage or kale were mixed in to make that most delicious of all traditional dishes, the much-loved colcannon, known in Donegal asbruítín.
According to theOxford English Dictionary, “cole” comes fromKohl, the German word for cabbage (as incoleslaw ); to “cannon” into something is to smash into it. The Irish differentiate between champ and colcannon by calling the one a potato dish and the other a kale or cabbage dish. But what truly makes the difference, I think, is the introduction of a skillet, which lifts the latter dish one small social step above its ruder brother. (Perhaps because of that, colcannon has been elevated to holiday fare. It is traditionally served on Halloween, with a wedding ring tucked in, its finder, if eligible, to be married within a year.) Unlike most contemporary recipes, which simply mash the potatoes and cabbage together, Florence Irwin’s coarser-textured version produces a magnificent skillet-sized potato-and-cabbage pancake.
FARMHOUSE COLCANNON
[serves 4 to 6]
4 to 6 medium all-purpose potatoes, boiled and peeled
milk as necessary to moisten
1 small head of cabbage, cooked until just tender and grated or chopped as if for making coleslaw
2 tablespoons bacon drippings or butter
1 medium onion, chopped
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
Mash the potatoes until there are no large lumps, adding just enough milk to make the mixture pliable but not creamy. Stir in the chopped cooked cabbage and season to taste with salt and pepper. Meanwhile, melt the fat in a large skillet and add the chopped onion. When this has turned translucent, spread the cabbage and potato mixture on top of it, and sauté until the bottom begins to brown. Then cut it roughly with a spatula, turn it over, and continue cooking until that side, too, is touched with brown. Serve hot.
It is impossible to read about traditional Irish food without a shifting of understanding—about dairy-based cultures versus meat-based cultures; about rural-based cuisines versus “civilized” city-based ones; about who gets to write the history books and, consequently, how we might then choose to read them; and also, perhaps, about what all this might mean for ourselves, whether we be vegetarian or carnivore, restrictive or permissive of appetite.
A bowl of mashed Kerry Blues and scallions has more in common than I ever imagined with a bowl ofdandan noodles or vegetables and pasta. Irwin tells us to keep champ “very hot,” but in my experience the real trick is to cool it down enough to not burn you
r mouth. Mashed potatoes hold heat; they demand to be eaten slowly. They fill the stomach with warmth. That they also feed it well is something my culturally biased culinary instincts have resisted believing, but it is true and I am starting to come around.
Interestingly, neither champ nor colcannon seems ever to be made by mashing buttermilk into the potatoes, although it is traditionally drunk while eating them. I would like to think that this fact reveals, buried deep in the communal memory, an awareness that buttermilk was there before the potato and remains, however long dethroned, the spiritual center of all Irish food. The role of the potato is not so easy to place. At times, reading through the texts that underlie this narrative, I felt it to be—as the bitter young farm laborer, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, described it to Asenath Nicholson—a kind of curse.
However, in time I came to think the opposite. The potato, in Ireland, soon separated itself from the English who brought it there and aligned itself with the poor and the oppressed. It flourished in Ireland as it did in no other place, among a people who were as easygoing and generous as it was. And when the landowners wanted to starve out the poor to get rid of them altogether, it was potato and point that allowed them to hold on, and, sometimes, to do more than that.
The Irish peasant dogs, like their masters, are patient and kind; many a one has met me at the door of a cabin, and instead of barking as a surly dog would, by the wagging of his tail and invit ing look of the eye, said, “Walk in, walk in; my master will make ye welcome to our fire and our potato.”
— Asenath Nicholson,Ireland’s Welcome to the Stranger
A WORD ON THE IRISH COTTAGE
We all know the thing: its oversized format, its glossy pages, its brilliant color photographs, its come-hither text, its title with the wordstyle always in it and usually the wordcountry—French Country Style, En-glish Country Style, and so forth, on and on. The idea, of course, is that for the perceptive home decorator, the belongings of the world are there for the plucking—if not the things themselves, then certainly their shapes, their colors, and the unstudied, harmonious interplay of these that can make the interior of a rustic cottage or a Caribbean shanty as pleasing to the eye as any country estate.
Claudia Kinmonth’sIrish Country Furniture: 1700–1950 is a brilliant if unintentional rebuttal to that kind of empty-headed chatter, that shameless theft. At first you might pick up the book thinking it another of the same: same coffee-table size, same glossy paper, same luscious photographs, same evocative prose. But Kinmonth’s love of the beauty of her subjects—the ordinary chairs, tables, beds, cradles, storage bins of the Irish country cottage—is tempered with a sadness that is an awareness of loss, and an appreciation that is no prelude to appropriation but a deepening respect for roots.
In fact, I suspect the book’s title was the publisher’s idea, not the author’s, since she limits herself to the household items of rural cottagers, which means almost entirely the working poor. Apart from clothing and tools, these things were all they possessed, and as each was passed down from generation to generation, repaired, adapted, expanded, put to new use, it became more and more a repository of the family’s sense of itself.
In other words, a house has life to the extent that its inhabitants and its contents are able to nurture each other, thus gradually sustaining a larger, jointly shared identity. From this perspective, it might even be said that a chair also possesses a psychology, affecting, by its size, shape, and comfort, our relationship to the table it is pulled up to or another, different chair it is set beside.
Kinmonth is skilled in the verbal art of taking a thing apart to show how it is made and where it comes from and why this particular piece is shaped the way it is, but she is even better at explaining the role each plays in helping to define a home. As ordinary as any one of these items may be, it plays a part in a story that grows in complexity and richness as piece is set next to piece. In this, an Irish room is not unlike an Irish song: here the fiddle, there the pennywhistle, the accordion, the drum. As lovely as the song is when the singer starts alone, how much more is added as each of the other instruments joins in.
Consider, for instance, the dresser. Apart from the fireplace, it was the most important part of the cottage kitchen and often the most imposing piece of furniture in the house. It also seems rather complicated, since its role embraced both protection and display. It had a closed cabinet below; a work counter, known as the “bed,” for tasks like cutting bread; and open shelves above, designed to display prized pieces of table and servingware: platters, plates, bowls, jugs.
What display and protection have in common is the cottager’s house pride. In essence, the dresser was the domain, the representative place, of thebean a ti, the woman of the house. Understanding this, you can see why the bottom of the dresser was often not a cabinet per se but a poultry coop, providing a safe, warm, dry nesting place for egg-laying geese and hens. Not only would a hen, fed on potato scraps and kept warm in the kitchen, lay eggs in the winter when otherwise it would not, but these same eggs were the woman’s personal source of income, her wealth, and their place in the dresser affirmed this—as did, in other instances, a butter churn and pails of cream and milk.
Above all this, she displayed—in the words of the old song—the treasures she bought with this money:
Three noggins, three mugs, a bowl and two jugs,
A crock and a pan something lesser,
A red fourpenny glass, to draw at for mass,
Nailed up to a clean little dresser.
As she acquired more, the dresser grew to accommodate the new. To it were added wooden strips with hooks for suspending decorated mugs, guardrails against which platters might lean, and a rack for displaying silver teaspoons (often the only tableware in the house). In a dark and undecorated cottage, the dresser radiated brightness, cleanliness, and grace. Although such dressers have long been sought by collectors as desirable antiques, once they are ripped out of this living context and put to merely decorative ends, each becomes nothing more than its own elegant sarcophagus.
Food writing has a similar suspect habit of persuading indigenous cooks to surrender recipes for their most treasured dishes and then presenting these trophies (“discoveries” is the preferred term), torn from their surroundings, in cookbooks as pretentiously glossy as their style-book cousins. With food and furnishings as with persons, heedless possession can quickly snuff out first spirit and then life itself.
Irish Country Furniture,however, is full of both, because it is, at bottom, a book about the life of rooms, and especially—because Irish cottages had few rooms—about the aliveness of the Irish cottage kitchen. Most of us are already aware of how much the changing nature of kitchen work, however justified, has robbed that place of vitality; it is all the difference between sitting down by the hearth with a basket of peas to pod and slipping a heat-proof plastic bag of peas and butter sauce into the microwave.
What Kinmonth teaches us is how much has also been lost by crowding that room with stock players from culinary central casting—all eminently replaceable, and so all without any individuality or depth. In the Irish kitchen, thedramatis personae make up instead a tight knit repertory company. In these pages, chair, bed, and table (or often, as noted above,absence of table) speak out eloquently, as do the settle, the meal chest, the food press, and the creepie. And what tales they tell.
Finally, and by the by, in her chapter on tables, Claudia Kinmonth records that a local historian, Patrick Hennessy, recalled
that some of these tables had special holes drilled in their tops, near the edge, for eating boiled eggs out of. In many poor households, eggs formed an important part of the diet, and such a detail made more sense than spending precious money on eggcups.
A nice detail and a persuasive explanation. But some explanations become less convincing when an alternative case is offered, and it seems to me that Thomas Carlyle does just this when, inSartor Resartus, he quotes a visitor to an Irish cotta
ge observing the use its occupants put to just such a table.
The family, eleven in number, at dinner: the father sitting at the top, the mother at the bottom, the children on each side, of a large oaken Board, which was scooped-out in the middle, like a trough, to receive the contents of their Pot of Potatoes. Little holes were cut at equal distances to contain salt; and a bowl of Milk stood on the table: all the luxuries of meat and beer, bread, knives and dishes were dispensed with.
CUISINE OF THE CRUST
I lest loin le temps ou l’on mangeait du pain avec un petit bout de quelque chose: aujourd’hui on mange quelque chose avec un petit bout de pain.[It’s been a long time since bread was eaten with a little mouthful of something else; these days, the little mouthful is the bread.]
— Madame Guinandeau-Franc,
Les secrets des fermes en Périgord noir
When I first wrote aboutbruschetta back in 1984, despite the title of the piece—“Bread & Olives”—my eye was on the olive.45At the time, I was intoxicated by the realization—as naïve as it may seem almost ten years later—that what gave extra-virgin olive oil its throaty, complicated richness was its direct connection to the olives from which it was pressed. However one gets corn oil from corn, it isn’t from simply squeezing the kernels; consequently, corn exists in one cupboard of the mind, corn oil in another.
Thanks to such early investigations as Maggie Blyth Klein’sThe Feast of the Olive, what had once seemed equally separate concepts—olives and olive oil—were now joined in my imagination, filling my mind with vivid images: the vat of olives crushed under the huge millstones; the resulting fragrant, coarse-textured mass spread on mats set in a hydraulic press; the dribble of deeply perfumed, dark green oil emerging from the spigot. That crust of bread thrust under it to sop it up and bring it to the nose, the mouth, was so immediately understood, seemed so entirely necessary, that I didn’t absorb, then or later, how arbitrary was its presence there, how much it was a gift.
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