How To Cook Like Your Grandmother

A Guide to Cooking with Real Food
the Way Your Grandma Used to

3/23/2012

Irish butter? Whazzat?

After last week's recipe roundup, Susan asked:

What is Irish Butter? Where do we get this? Love your recipes!

Well first let me compliment you on your excellent taste. :-) Now as for Irish butter, I didn't know either, so I went and found this excellent description on Chow.com:

Irish butter, as well as Danish and several other European style butters -- have a higher butterfat content than American butters. They are creamier, have a smoother mouthfeel, and sometimes even a slightly cheesy character to their taste.

The butters are made from milk from different breeds of cow that are fed in different climates eating different fodder -- all factors that influence the final product. American butter, by contrast is waxier, blander, and especially when salted, saltier.

That's not to say I don't use American myself -- I don't think the cost is worth the extra 3-5% butterfat. But it is delicious when someone else is paying!

So there you have it. Higher fat content, creamier texture, and possibly a slightly cheesy taste.

Sounds pretty good, actually. As for where to get it, if they don't have it at your local grocery store, click that photo above to order it from Amazon. (Yes, I'll make a commission. Probably like three cents, woo!)

Dublin Coddle recipe

I also got this from Allan:

This is a recipe for Dublin Coddle, it is real, authentic Irish food! In fact it is on the menu in my home tomorrow night. Corned beef and cabbage is a great dinner but it is about as Irish as green beer!

• 8 Bangers (or whatever sausage you have)
• 6 Slices Thick Bacon
• 2 Tablespoons Oil or Butter
• 2 Medium Onions, peeled and diced
• 1 clove Garlic, peeled and smashed
• 5 Medium Potatoes, peeled and cut into 3/8" thick
• ½ Teaspoon Ground Sage
• 1 Tablespoon Dried Parsley
• 1 Cup Chicken Stock
• Salt & Pepper to taste

Slice the bacon into one inch pieces and cook in a skillet and set aside. In the bacon fat cook the onions until translucent, add the garlic and heat through. Set the onions aside with the bacon. In the skillet add the oil or butter, brown the bangers (sausages) on all sides.

Preheat Oven to 350°F

In a casserole dish layer the potatoes, top with onions, garlic and bacon. Add sage, parsley and a ½ teaspoon black pepper. Top with bangers, add stock, cover and bake for one hour.

Enjoy!

And remember Keith?

Keith, the guy with the killer chili recipe that I'm planning to make? Well, I heard from him again.

Even now, I can't cook like my grandmother. She was born in 1874, never been inside a "Supermarket". Never bought anything she could make for herself. All of her veggies came fresh from the garden or from the cellar, (last years harvest put up in jars.)

She never went to a meat market. Everything she cooked came from the farm. My grandpa always butchered his own animals till he got too old, then my dad and uncles did it for him.

They are all gone now, and now I am the "OLD" man. The patriarch the family. Now, I cook for my elderly mother, who is 98 years old, as she can't cook for herself anymore. I cook for my kids and grandkids. I taught my kids how to cook things from scratch. I had to teach my daughter how to make home made dressing for a Thanksgiving turkey, how to make home made giblet gravy.

No, I don't have a lot of modern kitchen appliances. I don't have an electric mixer, I don't have a blender. I make things by hand, the really old fashioned way. But, my cooking will make you want to go home and slap your mama.

I've heard women find self-confidence sexy in a man.

PS: Did you wonder what "colcannon" means?

I was asked this one a few times when I said I was making it. I didn't know, so I looked it up. Here's what I found:

Irish Gaelic cál reflects an ancient Indo-European word for cabbage, literally vegetable on a stalk (IE * kaul ‘stalk’). Related forms are: Old English cal (giving colewort ‘cabbage plant,’ an older name for one loose-leaved variety), Old Scandinavian kal (giving English kale and modern Norwegian kaal), German Kohl (giving Kohlrabi), Latin caulis (think of cauliflower, a plant in the same botanical family as cabbage; think too of various words for cabbage, derivatives of caulis in the Romance languages, for example Spanish col and French chou), Greek kaulos, Medieval Dutch kool (in MD cabbage salad was kool sla, giving modern English coleslaw). Finally, showing the true spread of this cabbage word, a cognate appears in ancient Persian as kelum.

So cole slaw, cauliflower, kohlrabi, colcannon, and kale all come from the same root word, and are all in the same family. Cool. Or is that caul?

Because I'm eating low-carb during the week, I wanted to try this using mashed cauliflower instead of mashed potatoes. What, you didn't know that could work? Yeah, check it out.

So here's what the colcannon recipe looks like, step-by-step.