Ireland

Irish cooking is honest and comforting, soda bread, stews, colcannon, and a great tradition of dairy, seafood, and cured bacon. Modern Irish kitchens now celebrate superb local produce alongside those hearty roots.

Soda bread is a nineteenth-century invention rather than an ancient one, only possible once bicarbonate of soda became available to react with buttermilk, and it suited a country baking on a griddle over a fire rather than in an oven. Irish stew is traditionally mutton, potato and onion, with carrots a later addition that some cooks still refuse.

Corned beef and cabbage is Irish-American, not Irish: it took shape among immigrants in nineteenth-century American cities where beef was cheap and bacon was not. At home the pork tradition held, and the modern Irish kitchen leans hardest on what the wet grass supports, which is butter, cream, cheese and grass-fed beef and lamb.

A soft potato pancake made from both grated raw and mashed potato, griddled golden, an Irish comfort classic.