This week we are celebrating St Brigid and the Celtic festival of Imbolc. In ancient Ireland this festival heralded the beginning of spring, the return of light and the growth of crops and livestock. Most of the celebrations surrounded the production of dairy, and superstition around maintaining good yields from live stock. While many will be familiar with the cross, one particular custom, detailed by the brilliant Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire (co-author of this year’s An Post Irish food book of the year on the topic of food history) involved leaving a cloth out on walls or gates the night before St Brigid’s Day. The idea was that Brigid herself would bless the cloth as she passed in the night so it could be placed on livestock to encourage yields of milk. This was known as a Brat Bhríde. Other powers associated with this cloth included fertility, easing the pain of childbirth and providing safe passage on journeys.
Unsurprisingly, most feast days were celebrated with food. Brigid’s Day fare seems to have focused on dishes reflecting the very thing it celebrated: dairy and crops. Folklorist Brid Mahon, another go-to on Irish food history notes: “Butter was always freshly churned and a cake as big as a cartwheel baked on this feast day, made of flour, curds, milk and egg. Mutton, bacon, or a fowl, colcannon, boxty bread, dumplings, rice pudding, and ‘sowans’ (a fermented oat husk drink/flummery) were served at supper. Brigid was also considered the finest maker of ale and mead in Ireland, a welcome addition to any feast.” Mac Con Iomaire suggests boxty cakes were central to more recent menus.
With research complete, what to cook? The first recipe is the classic boxty, a type of savoury pancake using mashed and grated potato, flour and buttermilk. These are basic ingredients that would have been readily available hundreds of years ago. The method incorporates elements of the French dumpling and Italian gnocchi. The key is to heavily season the mix and then fry it gently in a good amount of butter. Once they are nicely caramelised, the time in the oven ensures the raw, grated potato will be cooked through. I’ve added bacon, eggs and a home-made tomato ketchup to the mix. These certainly weren’t on the menu 1,000 years ago but add great value in the 21st century.
The second recipe is very simple. Scones have been made the world over, but there’s nothing nicer than baking a batch at the weekend and filling the house with the smell. Rhubarb jam makes the most of an ingredient that begins to flourish around St Brigid’s Day, while the magic in the scone mix is the addition of great Irish dairy. Yes, scones are seen as simple but there are some really bad versions out there. The key is to barely work the mix. You don’t want to activate the gluten in the flour with your hands or it will become more like bread dough than crumbling, sweetened scone mix. What better way to toast St Brigid this weekend than with a warm scone, butter and jam paired with a nice cup of tea?
