In 1947, a woman named Bridget Malone in a two-room cottage outside Strokestown, County Roscommon, fed eight children through the worst winter in living memory on a pot of stirabout, a handful of nettles, and one bag of oats she had been rationing since October. The eldest child was 14.
The youngest was 11 months old. She never lost one of them. That pot of stirabout is number 25 on this list. Number one, kept families breathing through the hungriest decades of the 20th century on less than sixpence worth of ingredients. Hi, my name is Peter, and this is Lost Irish Foods. Number 25, stirabout, a pot of water, a cup of oatmeal, a pinch of salt.
That was stirabout, and for hundreds of thousands of Irish families from the 1800s all the way through the 1950s, >> >> that was breakfast, sometimes lunch, and on the hardest nights, dinner as well. You stirred it constantly because if you stopped, it stuck to the bottom of the pot and burned, and you could not afford to waste a single spoonful.
In Connacht and Munster, grandmothers made stirabout every morning without thinking about it. The same way you make coffee now without thinking about it. A bowl cost a fraction of a penny. It kept a working body moving until midday. Buttermilk poured cold over the top was the only luxury. That contrast of hot oat porridge and cold sour milk was the closest thing to pleasure a hard morning could offer.
Nobody calls it stirabout anymore. They call it porridge, and they charge €4.50 for it in a cafe with oat milk and a drizzle of honey. Your great-grandmother would have something to say about that. Number 24, champ. Mashed potatoes with spring onions, butter, and hot milk. That is the entire recipe. The potatoes were boiled, drained, and beaten with a wooden spoon until smooth.
The spring onions were chopped raw, then stirred in with a generous knob of butter, and enough hot milk to make the whole thing soft and billowing. In County Down and across Ulster, a bowl of champ was placed on the table with a well of butter melting in the center. You ate from the outside in to preserve the butter pool as long as possible.
Children understood this >> >> instinctively. A pot of champ cost almost nothing because potatoes grew in every garden and spring onions appeared without being asked. Your grandmother made this on a Tuesday simply because the potatoes needed to be used. It was not a side dish.
It was the meal. >> >> And it was better than most things that cost 10 times as much. Number 23, boxty. Half raw potato, half mashed potato mixed together with a fistful of flour, a pinch of salt, and enough buttermilk to bind it. Then fried in a pan until both sides had a crust that crackled when you pressed it with a fork.
In Leitrim, in Cavan, and in Fermanagh, they had a rhyme about it. Boxty on the griddle, boxty on the pan. If you cannot make boxty, you will never get a man. That rhyme is either charming or alarming depending on your outlook, but the bread itself is extraordinary. It was invented to make a small number of potatoes feed more people than they had any business feeding.
The raw potato gave it moisture. The mashed potato gave it body. >> >> The flour held everything together. 1 lb of potatoes became a meal for four. That kind of mathematics was not taught in school. It was taught standing at the pan. Number 22, drisheen. This one will separate the room. Drisheen is a blood pudding made from sheep’s blood, milk, breadcrumbs, and tansy, a herb with a sharp, almost medicinal flavor.
It originated in Cork City, where it is still made by a handful of butchers, though fewer every year. When a sheep was killed on a farm in West Cork in the 1930s, nothing was wasted. Not the offal, not the fat, >> >> not the blood caught in a basin while it was still warm. The blood went into a casing with milk and crumbs and was simmered gently until it set.
Sliced and fried in a pan with butter, it had a soft, almost custardy texture and a deep, mineral richness that nothing else tasted like. Families who kept sheep made drisheen because it cost nothing and because throwing away blood while your children were hungry was not something your grandmother was capable of doing.
Today, most people under 40 have never heard the word. >> >> Number 21, goody. Stale bread torn into pieces, covered with hot milk, sweetened with a little sugar, and flavored with a pinch of nutmeg or cinnamon if the house had any. That was goody. It was what you made when the bread had gone too hard to eat and the children were hungry and there was nothing else on the shelf.
In counties all across Leinster and Munster, goody was the sick day meal, the late night meal, the meal you made at 10:00 when everyone had been put to bed and someone crept back down saying they were still hungry. The bread softened in the hot milk into something between a soup and a porridge. The sugar made it feel like a treat even though it cost nothing.
Your grandmother did not call this a recipe. She She She called it making do. Making do kept more Irish children fed through more difficult winters than any government program ever managed. Number 20, nettle soup. Every ditch in Ireland grew nettles. Every hedge, every roadside, every field margin was lined with them.
For free from March through June, and your grandmother knew exactly when to pick them. She picked only the young tops, pinched off before the plant flowered, wearing an old pair of socks on her hands because she did not own gloves. The nettles went into a pot with a diced onion, a potato for body, water, and salt.
20 minutes of simmering and the sting disappeared entirely. The soup turned a deep, vivid green that looked expensive and tasted of the Irish countryside in spring. It was thick, earthy, and warming. It cost nothing because the main ingredient grew wild without anyone planting it. In the 1940s and the 1950s, families who picked nettles were not considered resourceful.
They were considered poor. The nettle was the vegetable that announced your circumstances. It turns out the nettle was right all along. Number 19, dippy eggs with bread soldiers. A soft-boiled egg in a cup, a slice of bread cut into thin strips, buttered while still warm, stood up like soldiers around the egg.
You crack the top of the egg with a teaspoon, peeled it back, and dipped the soldiers in one by one. When you hit the yolk, the whole thing collapsed into gold. This was the Sunday morning treat in kitchens across Ireland from the 1930s through the 1970s. It cost one egg and one slice of bread per child.
For a family of six, that was sixpence in 10 minutes. No family called this cooking. No grandmother thought she was doing anything remarkable. She was making breakfast. But the child who sat at that table and dipped their first soldier into a runny yolk remembers it with a clarity that no expensive meal has ever matched.
Some of the best food in the world costs almost nothing. The egg knew that before anyone else did. Number 18, crubeens, pigs’ feet. Boiled for 3 hours in salted water with a bay leaf and an onion until the collagen broke down and the skin went soft and yielding, and the whole pot smelled like a Saturday in a farmyard. They were cheap because nobody with money wanted them.
The butcher in every town in Ireland in the 1940s would set them aside for the families he knew needed them. In Galway and Limerick, crubeens were sold from stalls at the fair and the market. >> >> You ate them with your hands because there was no other way to eat them. They were sticky and rich and deeply satisfying in the way that only long-cooked bones can be.
A pair of pigs’ feet cost pennies. The gelatin that came out of them after 3 hours of simmering was better for a sick body than anything a doctor could prescribe. Nobody calls them medicine. Your grandmother just knew the pot worked. Number 17, colcannon. Mashed potato with kale or cabbage cooked through it, finished with butter and hot milk, and sometimes a few scallions stirred in at the end.
In Ulster, they hid things inside the colcannon on Halloween. A ring for marriage, a coin for wealth, >> >> a button for bachelorhood. If you got the button, the table laughed. You did not laugh. Colcannon was made all year long in Irish kitchens, not just at Halloween. And it was made because kale and cabbage were the hardiest vegetables in any Irish garden, and potatoes were always there.
Together in one pot, they became something that tasted like the country itself. Rich, plain, honest. A pot of colcannon in 1950 cost about 3 p. For a woman For a woman feeding a husband and five children on a farm laborer’s wages, 3 p was the difference between a meal and an empty table.
Number 16, yellow man. A hard golden toffee made from golden syrup, brown sugar, butter, vinegar, and bread soda beaten until it frothed and foamed, then poured onto a greased tin to set. When the bread soda hit the hot sugar, it exploded into a pale honeycomb that crackled and splintered when you broke it with a hammer.
At the Old Lammas Fair in Ballycastle, County Antrim, yellow man has been sold since the 1700s. The song asks, “Did you treat your Mary Ann to dulse and yellow man at the Old Lammas Fair in Ballycastle, oh?” The recipe cost almost nothing and produced something extraordinary. Children were given a piece wrapped in paper as a reward for being good at the fair.
It stuck to your back teeth and pulled slightly when you chewed. That stickiness was the whole experience. Almost nobody makes yellow man at home anymore. The fair still sells it, but the kitchen version is gone. Number 15, seaweed broth. Along the western coast of Ireland, from Donegal down through Connemara and into Clare, women collected seaweed from the shoreline after storms when it had been thrown up onto the rocks in heaps.
Dulse, carrageen, and sea lettuce were rinsed in fresh water and added to a thin broth with a piece of salt fish or a bone if there was one or nothing at all if there was not. The broth tasted of the Atlantic, sharp and mineral, and something else underneath that you could not name. It was intensely nourishing in the way that food from the sea always is.
It cost nothing because the ocean left it on the shore. Coastal families who ate seaweed in the 1930s were not considered ahead of their time. They were considered the families who lived where everything else was scarce. The seaweed kept them going. The ocean gave freely when the land could not. Number 14, pratie oaten. Grated raw potato mixed with fine oatmeal, formed into thin flat cakes, and cooked on a dry griddle with no oil or butter.
They came off the griddle slightly crisp on the outside and soft through the middle with the oat and potato flavors locked together. In counties Armagh and Tyrone, pratie oaten was the bread you made when you had no flour and no money for the shop. Two ingredients, both grown on the farm, both costing nothing beyond the labor of growing them.
Your grandmother did not follow a recipe for pratie oaten. She made them by feel, the same way she made everything else. She knew how much oatmeal to add by the texture of the grated potato in her hands. That knowledge was not written anywhere. It existed in her palms. Number 13, cock-a-leekie soup. One old hen that had stopped laying, three leeks, a handful of barley, water, and salt.
That was the recipe. The hen went into the pot whole and simmered for 2 hours until every bit of flavor had come out of the bones and into the broth. The leeks softened and sweetened. The barley thickened everything slightly, so the soup had body and substance. Then, the chicken was pulled apart by hand and returned to the pot.
In the border counties of Ulster and Leinster, this was the meal you made when a hen stopped being useful in the yard. She had given you eggs to my sons for 2 years. Now she gave you dinner for 3 days. Nothing was wasted. The bird that could no longer earn her keep earned her keep one final time from the inside of a pot.
That was the economy of the Irish farmyard, and it was efficient and unsentimental, and it fed everyone. Number 12, blind scouse, scouse without meat. A stew of potatoes, carrots, onions, and whatever else was in the kitchen, simmered until everything broke down into a thick soft broth that was more vegetable than liquid.
>> >> In the port towns of Dublin, Cork, and Derry, where working families lived close to the docks and close to poverty, blind scouse was the meal that appeared when wages had run out before the week did. It was called blind because it could not see any meat. That is either a very good joke or a very sad one, depending on which side of the pot you were standing on.
A pot of blind scouse cost less than 6 p and fed four people twice. No restaurant has ever put it on a menu. No cookbook has ever given it a chapter, but it kept dock workers’ families alive through the lean weeks of a dozen decades, and it asked for nothing in return. Number 11, spailpin stew.
The spailpín were the seasonal laborers, men who walked the roads of Connacht and Munster in the harvest season looking for work on other people’s farms. They carried their food with them or they found it along the way. A spailpin stew was made from whatever could be gathered, begged, or traded. Wild mushrooms from the hedgerow, a turnip from a sympathetic farmer, a handful of barley carried in a pocket, water from a stream.
Everything went into one pot over an open fire. There was no fixed recipe because there was no fixed kitchen. The stew changed every night depending on what had been found. It was the original one-pot meal for people who did not have a pot they could call their own. A meal without a home made by men without homes that tasted like whatever Ireland had been willing to give that particular evening.
Number 10, stirabout, oatmeal bread. No yeast, no kneading, no waiting. Fine oatmeal, plain flour, buttermilk, bread soda, >> >> and a pinch of salt were stirred together in a bowl until they just came together. Then the mixture was turned into a tin and put into a moderate oven for 40 minutes. This was the bread of urgency, the bread you made when the shop loaf had run out and the children needed something to eat with their soup.
In Sligo and Mayo, women made stirred oatmeal bread twice a week as a matter of course without measuring anything, with one hand holding the bowl and the other stirring. The oatmeal gave it a slightly rough texture and a deep nutty flavor that plain white bread could not touch.
It was better toasted the next day with a scrape of butter than it was fresh. Some things improve with a night’s sleep. This bread, um, was one of them. Number nine, flummery. Oatmeal was soaked overnight in cold water, strained through a cloth the next morning, and the starchy liquid was simmered slowly until it thickened into a smooth pale jelly that set firm in a bowl when it cooled.
It was eaten cold with buttermilk poured over it or warm with a little honey if the house had bees. Flummery is ancient. It appears in Irish manuscripts going back centuries. It was made in Wales and Scotland, too, wherever oats grew and winters were long. In the Irish Midlands in the 1940s, older women still made flummery because their mothers had made it and because it was free.
The oats were already in the house. The water was from the well. Nothing was bought. Nobody made flummery after the 1960s because it felt old-fashioned and Ireland was trying hard to feel modern. It disappeared not because it failed, but because the country was embarrassed of it. Number eight, dripping toast.
The fat that collected in the roasting tin after a piece of beef or a chicken was poured off into a white ceramic bowl and left to set in the cold of the larder. It went solid and pale with a layer of dark jelly underneath. Spread thickly on a slice of bread, held over the fire or pressed under the grill until the dripping melted into the bread and the edges crisped.
That was dripping toast. In every farmhouse in Ireland in the 1940s and 50s, the dripping bowl sat at the back of the larder as a matter of course. You did not throw away beef fat. That would have been genuinely offensive to your grandmother in a way that is difficult to fully explain today. The fat was free.
It was a byproduct of a meal you had already paid for. It It tasted extraordinary. Nothing was wasted. That was not a philosophy. It was a necessity that became a habit that became a way of life. Number seven, dulse broth. Dulse is a dark red seaweed that grows on rocks all along the northern Irish coastline. At the Old Lammas Fair in Ballycastle, it was sold dried in paper bags for a penny.
You chewed it dry as a snack, salty and leathery, and tasteening of the sea. Or you dropped a handful into a pot boiling water with a potato and an onion and let it simmer for 20 minutes into a thin, deeply savory broth that warmed you from the inside in a way that had nothing to do with temperature.
In County Antrim and Donegal in the 1920s and the 1930s, dulse broth was winter medicine. >> >> It was made when someone had a cold, when the wind had been coming in from the north for 3 days, when the body needed something from the ocean. The dulse cost a penny. The potato cost less. The broth cost almost nothing.
The effect was considerable. Number six, carrageen moss pudding. Carrageen moss is a small frilly seaweed collected from the rocks at low tide along the Irish west coast. Rinsed and dried in the sun, it keeps for months without spoiling. When you want to use it, a small handful goes into a pot of whole milk with a strip of lemon peel >> >> and a spoonful of sugar.
Simmer gently for 20 minutes, then strain the liquid into a bowl to set. The carrageen contains a natural gelling agent that turns the milk into a soft, trembling pudding with a faint flavor of the sea beneath the sweetness. In Connemara and in Clare and in Kerry in the 1940s, carrageen pudding was made for sick children and elderly relatives because it was gentle and nourishing, something the body could take when it could not take much else.
The main ingredient grew on the rocks for free. The pudding it produced tasted like something a careful person had made with great deliberation. It was that, just not expensive deliberation. Number five, pandy, potatoes mashed with whatever the kitchen had. Buttermilk if there was buttermilk.
Butter if there was butter. Milk if there was milk. Nothing if there was nothing. Just the potatoes beaten hard until the lumps gave up. Pandy is the most reduced version of the Irish relationship with the potato, no additions that cost money, no technique beyond a strong arm >> >> and a wooden spoon.
In counties Cork and Kerry, pandy was what you ate on a Friday during Lent when meat was forbidden and there was nothing else in the house anyway. Children ate it from a bowl with a spoon. Adults ate it from the pot if the bowl was needed for someone else. It filled the stomach completely. It cost almost nothing.
And your grandmother made it without thinking twice because the potato had been keeping her family alive in one form or another for her entire life >> >> and she trusted it the way she trusted very few other things. Number four, bran bread. Wheat bran mixed with a small amount of flour, bread soda, buttermilk and a pinch of salt baked into a dense, dark loaf.
It came out of the oven heavy as a stone, tasting of earth and grain with something almost sweet underneath. The bran was the part of the wheat that the flour mill separated out from the white flour. In the 1930s and ’40s, you could buy bran cheaply or collect it from the mill yourself because most people did not want it.
Your grandmother wanted it. >> >> She knew a loaf of bran bread would sit in the stomach for 4 hours and keep a working man from coming home early. The loaf cost almost nothing because the main ingredient was what everyone else had thrown away. That is the recurring theme of this entire list. The meals that kept Irish families alive were built almost entirely from the things that nobody else wanted.
Number three, crubeens and cabbage. Crubeens are pig’s trotters, smaller and more delicate than the crubeens you already know about. They were simmered for 4 hours in salted water with a bay leaf and a few peppercorns until the meat fell from the bone and the broth went thick and glossy from the collagen.
A head of cabbage was added to the pot in the last half hour and cooked through in the pig broth until it was tender and had taken on every flavor the trotters had given up. The whole thing was served in a bowl with the broth spooned over it and a piece of bran bread on the side to mop up the liquid.
In Cork and Limerick in the 1940s, this was a Friday night meal, a Saturday dinner, a Sunday supper. It cost less than a shilling and it fed a family of five with enough left in the pot for the next day. The pig gave everything. Your grandmother wasted nothing. Number two, praisach. The word means a mess, a jumble, a confusion of things.
It is also the Irish name for charlock, a yellow-flowered weed that grows in cornfields >> >> and along roadsides throughout the country. In the hungry years before and after the famine, praisach was collected from the fields by families who had run out of everything else. The young leaves were boiled in water with whatever else the pot contained, a piece of turnip, a handful of oatmeal, a bone that had already been used twice.
The result was a thick, >> >> rough green soup that tasted bitter and strong and absolutely nothing like anything you would choose to eat unless the alternative was not eating at all. In the 1930s and ’40s, older women in Connacht still made praisach in early spring before the potato crop was ready because they had learned it from their own mothers who had learned it from theirs.
The weed that grew for free in the fields was the meal that stood between a family and hunger in the cruelest weeks of the year. Number one, potato soup with buttermilk. Potatoes, water, salt, buttermilk stirred in at the very end just before serving so it did not curdle but cooled the soup slightly >> >> and gave it a sharp, sour edge that cut through the starchiness of the potato and made the whole thing taste alive.
That was the meal, not a starter, not a side dish, the meal. In every county in Ireland from Donegal to Cork, from Clare to Wexford, potato soup with buttermilk was what appeared on the table on the evenings when there was nothing to put with the potatoes. When the salt fish was finished, when the bacon had been stretched to its last slice, when the eggs had all been sold at the market because the family needed the money more than the protein.
Those evenings were not rare. They were ordinary. And on those ordinary evenings in ordinary kitchens with one pot over a turf fire and eight people waiting at the table, your grandmother made potato soup with buttermilk and she made it without complaint and she made it well and it was enough. A woman in a cottage outside Strokes Town made it in 1947 through the worst winter in living memory.
She kept her eight children alive with it. The stove was lit. The pot was full. That was her declaration. She was still here. Her kitchen still had a pulse. And the meal she made from almost nothing carried everyone at her table through to the other side. Make one of these this week. Just one. Boil some nettles from the garden if they are growing.
Make a pot of champ on a Tuesday for no reason. Fry some boxty on a Saturday morning and eat it at the table, >> >> not standing at the counter. Call your grandmother if she is still there. Ask her what she used to make. When she tells you, write it down because those recipes are not in any book.
They live in the memories of women who never measured a single thing and never thought what they were doing was worth remembering. It was worth remembering. These dishes were never about being poor. >> >> They were about refusing to let the people at your table go hungry. About looking at a pot of water and a handful of nettles >> >> and deciding that was enough to work with.
About a woman standing at a fire on a frozen morning in County Roscommon in 1947 stirring a pot that was going to feed eight people not because she had plenty >> >> but because she had decided that what she had was enough. That decision made in thousands of kitchens across Ireland for hundreds of years is the whole story.
Tell me in the comments which of these your family still makes. Tell me if your grandmother ever made praisach or flummery or dulse broth. I want to know if the boxty gets more love than the colcannon because these are not just recipes. They are proof that the simplest food made in one pot in one kitchen by one woman who refused to give up can still be an act of love.
