Two nights ago, in honour of my Irish forebears, I made Dublin Coddle for supper. When I mentioned this culinary achievement in an e-mail to a friend in Lincolnshire, he wrote back asking what such a thing could be. I was shocked, thinking that everyone in the British Isles knew of this classic Irish dish of potatoes, bacon, sausage, and onions simmered in broth. How wrong am I?
[mouth watering-e] Send recipe!
Father Steve - is this dish also called colcannon, or is that something different?
Father Steve,
I know Dublin Coddle from St Patrick's Day celebrations in the U.S. South. Maybe Helen will weigh in on its popularity in NYC. As for your friend, quite possibly Lincolnshire is farther from Dublin than is Atlanta.
Angel,
google dublin-coddle and you will find many recipes.
Colcannon is not the same as Dublin Coddle, in that it is a dish of potatoes and cabbage (or kale) without meat.
I thought bubble and squeak was potatoes and cabbage, but maybe bubble and squeak has more of a soup-like consistency.
Colcannon is new to me, but what a cool word! Wonder why "cannon"?
I found over a dozen recipes, just by searching for "Dublin coddle recipe".
This thread sent me searching in a recipe book called Potluck: Potato Recipes from Ireland, by Nell Donnelly (Wolfhound Press). Dublin coddle isn't listed there, but it does have some good recipes as well as some interesting Irish history and folklore, and a sprinkling of poems and songs, including this one:
Over Here
Oh, the praties they are small,
Over here, over here!
Oh, the praties they are small,
Over here!
Oh, the praties they are small
And we dig them in the fall,
And we ate them coats and all,
Full of fear, full of fear.
Oh, I wish we all were geese,
Night and morn, night and morn!
Oh, I wish we all were geese,
Night and morn!
Oh, I wish we all were geese,
For they live and die at peace,
Till the hour of their decease,
'Atin' corn, 'atin' corn.
Oh, we're down into the dust,
Over here, over here!
Oh, we're down into the dust,
Over here!
Oh, we're down into the dust,
But the God in whom we trust,
Will yet give us crumb for crust,
Over here, over here!
I wonder if praties is Gaelic for potatoes. It's used here and there in this little recipe book.
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I know Dublin Coddle from St Patrick's Day celebrations
Duh! Dublin Coddle is something to eat; St. Patrick's Day celebrations are something to drink.
Do you know a ham from a hacksaw?
Do you know a ham from a hacksaw?
Stop bothering the grownups and go play with your AS wordhoard, there's a good lad.
maybe bubble and squeak has more of a soup-like consistency wonders Wordwind
In my experience, bubble and squeak consists of potato and cabbage mixed up dry and usually formed into a cake, but sometimes freeform, and then fried. It should be made from the day before's leftovers. It is delicious and maybe healthy if you use olive oil to fry with.
dxb.
RE: praties is Gaelic for potatoes
the T in praties is pronounced like a d pradies , just as Patty (Patrick) is Paddy- (as in paddy wagon).
We didn't call it a coddle, but a boiled dinner. (and boiled beef, if you had mostly beef in it, instead of sausage) then again, my family were dubliners, and we just called it stew (but our style of stew, (lamb and beef) is called dublin stew by others, Irish stew just has lamb.)
now days, almost everywhere but NY you can get a NY steak (a cut, like T-bone or sirloin) in NY they are just shell steaks!
Just like there is no canadian bacon in canada, and i suspect, no such thing as a "London Broil" (an other cut of meat for steak) in London.
I don't think it's GaelicMacBain's (
http://www.ceantar.org/Dicts/MB2/index.html) et al. list
buntàta as the Scots Gaelic. MacBain's is an etymological dictionary and it gives the Irish Gaelic as
potáta or
fataidhe.
boiled dinnerI've probably mentioned this before but it was a long time ago. Boiled dinner here in Newfoundland means salt beef, potatoes, cabbage, peas pudding, carrots, all boiled together. Also called Jiggs' dinner. (I don't think anyone knows who Jiggs was or what that refers to.) It must be a direct descendant of helen's boiled dinner, since so many people here have Irish roots.
I've only had it once, myself, since I'm not a Newfoundlander. The salt beef tasted like corned beef to me. (Which makes sense.) We had a special treat the night we tried Jiggs Dinner - moose - typically associated with Newfoundland although it was actually introduced here, it's not native to the island! It was yummy.
buntàta as the Scots Gaelic...
Irish Gaelic as potáta or fataidhe.
These words all have an obvious derivation from the Spanish patata, which makes sense given that the Spanish originally brought the potato to Europe from South America. But it made me curious about the original name, presumably given by the Incas or a predecessor people.
AHD yielded the following:
Spanish patata, alteration (probably influenced by Quechua papa, white potato) of Taino batata, sweet potato.
Now, I know a little about indigenous languages of Central and South America (and I emphasize, a little), but I had never heard of Taino. So, I looked it up in AHD and was surprised to discover that it is the origin language for a surprising number of words common today (and that it comes from the Arawak people of the Bahamas and the Antilles): savannah, cay, yucca, hammock, mangrove, cassava, hurricane, and barbecue.
So when the Antipodeans toss some prawns on the barby, they are using an Antillean word. Who ever would have thought that the language of a now-extinct people on a smallish group of islands dominated for centuries by the Spanish would have contributed so many words to English? Kind of makes me interested in words, ya know?
an obvious derivation from the Spanish patata
MacBain's comments that they are from English, but, of course, the English is from Spanish (ultimately from Taino). The Scots contains a bit of folk etymology, the bun meaning root.
The "cannon" in colcannon is from the Old Irish ceannan meaning white-headed. The "coddle" in Dublin Coddle is from the transitive verb meaning to cook in water just below the boiling point. The difference between "colcannon" and "bubble and squeak" might be the difference between English and Irish, but that is only a suspicion.
Well, I wonder how the verb to mollycoddle fits into all this, if at all?
WW
PS: Thanks, Father Steve, for the derivations!
Jiggs was the chief character in the George McManus comic strip Bringing Up Father which ran from around WWI until a few years ago. Jiggs was an Irish laborer who somehow struck it rich. His wife, Maggie, got the Society bug and became super-correct, trying to get in to Society. Jiggs is nearly always drawn wearing formal morning dress with a silk top hat. Although Maggie has made herself over, Jiggs keeps regressing to his old days. He spends as much time as he can in Dinty Moore's saloon (Yes, the canned beef stew is named for this institution) and he always wants corned beef and cabbage. which he can't have at home because it's too low-class. Corned beef and cabbage is the basic boiled dinner, called New England Boiled Dinner in these parts.
Mollycoddle is both a verb and a noun. It appears that the noun came first, as a descriptor for a weak, sissified man. The construction probably derived from molly, which is an Irish diminuitive of Mary, which came to mean any woman, and from coddle, in the sense of treating gently or pampering. Coddling, in 19th Century English, meant to nurse, to protect, to treat with exceeding gentleness, as one would an invalid or ill patient. The modern sense of the verb is to treat with excessive indulgence.
When a recipe for Dublin Coddle warns the cook not to let the broth boil, there is a sense in which the potatoes in it are being coddled -- pampered, treated gently.
That, it strikes me, is the connection ... but I could be wholly wrong, and not for the first time.