Irish Amish Cooking: Memories of the Emerald Isle IV

Frugality is a risky business for cooks. “Please don’t ask me where these courgettes are from,” I thought as we gathered around the table. “I don’t want to jeopardize anything.”

It was springtime, and things were looking up for Comeragh Camp. Two social workers had come to visit, and they were friendly and relaxed and had agreed to stay for lunch. No youth were at the camp right now, so I had made lunch for the staff, plus our guests who were visiting as part of camp’s efforts to get registered with Ireland’s Youth Services.

We were in the new building now, and ten people sat comfortably around the square table that gleamed with the brightness of new wood and clear varnish. The Irish summer was beginning its green glory outside.

The social workers complimented my cooking, including the courgettes I had stuffed with mashed potatoes. “Lovely,” they said.

No one asked where the courgettes had come from, and I could relax.

In case you’ve never heard, “courgette” is the European word for zucchini, and it was just one of the many food terms that differ between Ireland and America. Eggplants were aubergines. Chips were crisps. Fries were chips, as in “fish ‘n’ chips”. Jell-O was jelly in Ireland, and American jelly was unknown, everyone used jam instead.

In Ireland, bangers and mash were sausages and mashed potatoes. What Americans call biscuits were scones in Ireland. And what Americans call cookies, were called biscuits by the Irish. Digestive biscuits, disgusting as they sound, were delicious chocolate-dipped cookies.

Naturally, I called many things by the wrong names. Irish folks were generally forgiving of my slip-ups. The Americans who had been in Ireland longer than me, were not.

When I had been in Ireland about two weeks, I mentioned making shepherd’s pie for dinner, thinking I couldn’t go wrong with such an Irish-sounding dish.

One American (who I won’t name), asked, “Are you making it with beef or lamb?”

“Beef,” I replied, puzzled. Lamb was as expensive in Ireland as in the USA.

“Then it’s cottage pie. Shepherd’s pie is made with lamb.”

I pointed to my cookbook. “The recipe says ‘Shepherd’s Pie’.”

“That’s an American cookbook. It’s cottage pie.”

I didn’t call it shepherd’s pie again.

I learned to cook Irish dishes my Pennsylvania Dutch mother had never taught me—colcannon: blended mashed potatoes and boiled cabbage; Golden Mash: cooked carrots and parsnips with plenty of butter. I would boil bacon, and then throw in chopped cabbage for bacon ‘n’ cabbage, served over potatoes, of course.

I baked cakes and breads with castor sugar, plain flour, and wholemeal flour. Brown soda bread was made with wholemeal flour with baking soda rather than yeast as a rising agent.

Of all the food terminology, pudding was perhaps the most confusing. In America, cold pudding is a creamy dessert made with milk and sugar. In Ireland, pudding could be used as a generic term for dessert, as in, “What will ye be having for pudding?” or for a specific dessert, such as a hot (never cold) creamy pudding, or steamed Christmas pudding, which was rather like fruitcake. One Irish friend, Rosie, was amazed when I told her our family never had Christmas pudding in America.

Or pudding could be a type of breakfast sausage. There was white pudding, and black pudding, which got its color from dried blood.

If you are a Pennsylvanian, black pudding is kind of like scapple, loved by the locals, maybe not so much by visitors.

For a full Irish breakfast, you eat toast, eggs, pork sausages, black pudding, white pudding, fried tomatoes, and bacon rashers (sliced bacon). And tea, of course. Black tea with milk was drank at almost every meal.

In Ireland, mannerly people compliment the food by saying, “It’s nice!” or “lovely” or “grand” rather than “good”. When you set the table, the spoon goes above your plate. Europeans eat with forks in their left hands and knives in their right hands. You use your knife to push food on your fork, and eat off the back of your fork.

I mastered the fork-in-left-hand fairly well, except I never did figure out how to get peas to stay on there. I knew there was a reason I never did like peas!

To get food for camp, I made weekly trips to Clonmel, the nearest large town. I did most of my grocery shopping at Aldi and Lidl, the cheapest places to shop.

Grocery shopping was the biggest chore of the week. Right after lunch on Tuesday, I loaded the white van with shopping bags and boxes and drove thirty minutes through the countryside to Clonmel.

Inside the grocery store, I had a clipboard-long list of items, including very specific items for the boys’ menus they would cook themselves over a campfire during the two days a week that I had off.

I pushed my shopping cart, called a trolley, up and down the aisles, filling it up and marking off my list. Everything in Ireland came in smaller packages than in the USA, so I had to buy multiples of almost all the items on my shopping list. I got to know both Aldi and Lidl like the back of my hand.

After I found everything on my list, it was time to head to the till (cash register).

Neither Aldi or Lidl had baggers, and you had to bring your own bags and bag your own. First, I had to unload all the groceries on the belt, and then rush to other end to start bagging and loading everything back in the trolley. Those Lidl cashiers were fast at the till, and they didn’t help their customers bag. But I had so many groceries that I couldn’t keep up, and soon the whole process would stall.

There were always more customers than tills, and always a line behind me. Most Irish people have small families and go grocery shopping almost every day, so the other customers had small orders and stared at the American girl with the massive pile of food.

To make things worse, cashiers in Ireland (at least those working at the efficient German grocery chains of Lidl and Aldi) aren’t trained to make small talk with their customers the way American cashiers are. Instead, the cashiers sat on tall stools behind their tills in silence as I shoved groceries in my reusable grocery bags and tried to fit everything back in the trolley.

I learned using two trolleys would make things easier. One time, a kind cashier at Lidl got off his stool to help me.

I also started doing some grocery shopping online. We could have it delivered for less than the cost of diesel to fuel the white van’s trip to Clonmel. The delivery man would bring groceries right into my kitchen and unload them on the table.

(Side note, there’s been talk of grocery stores in the US ceasing to use plastic bags. I’m all for cutting down on trash, but, seriously, there are some downsides to consider for shoppers who are buying food for a lot of people. It would be even worse if you had small children with you.)

So after I bagged everything, I pulled my one or two trolleys out to the white van, and loaded everything up. Then I drove back to camp, unloaded everything and put it away, then finished getting supper ready. It was always a joy to have grocery shopping done.

Of course, being a frugal Irish Amish cook meant I didn’t get quite all my food from grocery stores.

Note: I have been a Mennonite all my life but for the two years I was in Ireland, I was part of a Beachy Mennonite church community known as the Irish Amish, and there was just no point in trying to explain the difference between the Amish and Mennonites to most Irish. Rather than trying, I just nodded if an Irish person asked me if I was “Amish.”

The soup pictured below is rabbit stew. There were loads of wild rabbits running around camp, and some of the guys set snares for them. They asked, “Miss Susan, will you cook rabbits if we bring them to you?”

“If the rabbits come to me, skinned and gutted, I’ll make them,” I promised. The guys brought me rabbits that looked like they were from the butcher shop, and I cooked the rabbits for hours in a slow cooker with bacon for tasty rabbit stew.

Rabbits aren’t part of a modern-day Irish diet. They were associated with poverty in the past, and no one wanted to eat them now. Except for us frugal Irish Amish.

One of the Irish Amish community members, named Jon, had a pig (fattening up a pig in the backyard was common enough among the Irish Amish) and Jon had a deal with the local SuperQuinn supermarket to get the rubbish from their produce section. But the produce rubbish wasn’t the smelly garbage you’d expect, instead it was ripe produce in a clean bin, packaged in plastic, and most of it was still edible.

A few times Jon generously shared the rejected produce with the rest of the church community, just like good Amish and Mennonites in America do with their extra food.

Miss Naomi and I happened to get courgettes from the produce bin one day, and since there were no youth at the camp, and I was only cooking for staff, I figured serving the courgettes recused from the bin would be just fine…

Frugality can be risky, but in end, it all worked out, as smooth as jam and creamy Irish butter spread on a slice of toasted brown soda bread and washed down with plenty of black tea and milk.