Cuisine Irelandaise

It is probably a well-known fact that the inhabitants of the British Isles have very interesting culinary tastes. It’s not only the drinking tea with milk or having baked beans for breakfast, but also other food habits that foreigners might consider peculiar. It seems as if the Irish follow a certain nutrition guideline, which I liked to refer to as the “seefood diet”: They see food and they eat it.

Let me start with something I faced pretty much every day. The canteen at the ITT was actually really good and the prices were okay. Compared to the cafeteria in Salzburg, they offered a wide variety of food, and after tasting my way through most of it, I soon found out what was eatable and what I would rather flush down the toilet. Having a Subway inside the college building was excellent, but what the Irish were doing to some of their Subs made my stomach turn. Buying a normal Sub and a pack of crisps does not seem like an odd thing to do, but then they started to fill their Subs with crisps, telling me it would be the best thing I had ever eaten. It wasn’t.

Living with two Irish housemates made observing their eating habits quite easy. I spent some time wondering why one of my housemates’ shelf in the fridge was always empty. I also spent some time wondering what that container next to the coffee machine was used for. Then it struck me like a lightening: a chip pan! Over the course of my stay this woman fried her food every single evening leaving the house permeated with the smell of used cooking oil. But these weren’t the only situations where I noticed that the Irish must have a certain love for fried food. It’s nothing unusual that there is a MacDonald’s on every corner, but providing nothing else but fried food besides the Subway in the canteen seemed unusual to me. A very popular combination was chips, sausages and beans. The sausages in Ireland are different to the sausages we have in Austria. Not only are they tiny and chemical-looking, they also taste as if they had been lying around for quite a while somewhere. Another popular combination was chips and curry sauce. Don’t get me wrong, I am indeed a big fan of chips and of curry sauce but I prefer them to be on separate plates.

Going to restaurants turned out to be a challenge as well. Being very critical about food in general, the traditional Irish dishes weren’t necessarily appealing to me. And knowing from an earlier visit to London that “fish and chips” weren’t anything I’d ever eat again, I bravely decided to try something called “Bacon and Cabbage” (see picture). Everybody knows, you eat with your eyes first, and judging from the looks of it, this was supposed to be really great. And it was! Finally, I had found something truly Irish that actually tasted excellent and I can only recommend everyone to go and have a try when you’re in Ireland. The equally traditional “Irish Stew” on the other hand is not be something I would recommend. Firstly, I wasn’t able to figure out what the ingredients were and secondly, it gave me the worst stomach ache imaginable. Interestingly enough, international dishes were also served differently in Ireland. When ordering a simple lasagne, I was asked if I wanted it with chips or with a salad on the side. As if lasagne didn’t have enough calories by itself, ordering it with chips sounded excessive (and not very tasty either). The brave Belgian I was at the restaurant with, who actually dared to do this ended up being sick, so I’m glad I went with the salad.

You might have figured out by now I call the Irish nutrition guidelines a “seefood diet”. It didn’t matter to them how weird their food combinations were, they saw the plate and ate everything on it. I know that food is a very cultural matter, but it still made me scrunch up my nose from time to time. A habit I took up over the course of the year was drinking black tea with milk, which is indeed very tasty. Also, it makes it more readily drinkable because you don’t burn your tongue on the scalding hot water. All in all it was interesting to see how narrow my “food-horizons” were, but I’m proud of myself for giving most of the dishes at least one try.