Warming stews
Probably the most famous of Irish meat dishes is the Irish stew; in which layers of lamb or mutton, potatoes and onions are topped up with water or stock and stewed for 2-3 hours - perfect timing for a busy sheep herder to leave the pot bubbling while finishing the evening’s work.

Other well-loved stews include beef cobbler (a cheese scone-topped beef stew), Dublin coddle (a sausage, bacon, onion, potato and carrot stew) and Guinness beef stew.

Daily bread
Ireland is particularly known for its bread, including soda bread, soda farls and blaa, a soft white bread roll from Waterford City. Soda bread is made with baking soda rather than yeast, which reacts to the buttermilk in the dough and causes the loaf to rise. It cuts out much of the proving time required to make yeast-based bread, saving plenty of time for the busy farm wife.

Soda farls are made by spreading the dough into a circular shape over a griddle, before cutting into quarters and turning each piece over to cook the other side.

Barm brack is a round loaf enriched with butter or lard, sugar and eggs, and is considered the national fruit bread of Ireland. Influenced by North American culture, many Irish children now celebrate Halloween, when a charm may be added to the barn brack dough, bringing luck to the child who receives the slice with a charm.

Butter and cheese

Ireland’s heavy rainfall creates lush, green pastures, perfect for producing richly flavoured milk, butter and cheese. Irish people like to spread lavish amounts of butter on freshly baked soda bread, stir it into mashed potatoes or enrich pastries with its heavenly flavour.

The range of cheese produced in Ireland is exceptional – some of the main cheese-making areas include County Cork, Tipperary and Waterford. There are far too many cheeses to describe in detail here, but a few examples are earthy Ardrahan, Camembert-style Cooleeney, creamy blue-veined Cashel Blue and Coolea, a nutty Gouda-like cheese.

Fruits of the sea

Despite being an island, seafood is not particularly central to the Irish diet; though Irish oysters, mussels, crab, salmon, trout, mackerel and cod are among the most popular.

Irish cooking also makes use of edible seaweed found in the Atlantic, such as dulse, kelp or Carrageen moss. The later is named after an Irish village (Carragheen), one of its sources. You can add it to soups and sauces, use as a garnish or make an aspic-type jelly from it. One of its most popular uses is as a set milk pudding.