St. Patrick’s Day feast calls for potatoes
Potatoes deserve to be piled high next to thin slices of corned beef for St. Patrick’s Day. Ever so versatile, potatoes offer big satisfaction for the buck. These days, we eat them rarely in favor of less carby offerings. Not so on one of our favorite food holidays.
We’ll boil and then butter little red potatoes to serve with our breakfast eggs. Perhaps these boiled potatoes will be seasoned with mayonnaise and green pepper for a lunchtime salad. Dinner plans definitely include a mash-up littered with bits of meltingly soft cabbage.
Darina Allen, an Irish cooking school owner and author, teaches us that potatoes mashed with cabbage or kale are known as colcannon. Reminiscent, she writes in her seminal “Forgotten Skills of Cooking,” of “champ,” a popular dish in Northern Ireland made from green onions (fresh peas in the summer), butter and mashed potatoes.
This year, our St. Patrick’s Day table will sport a warm bowl of colcannon made with golden potatoes. For a delicious twist, we’ll boil those potatoes with chunks of celeriac (aka celery root) for a subtly rich anise flavor. A skillet of savoy cabbage, browned in bacon drippings, adds flavor and texture.
To cook potatoes and celeriac together, cut the celeriac slightly smaller. That way, they’ll be mashable at the same time. When mashing, remember the richer the milk, the richer the final dish. I like to use a combination of skim milk and creme fraiche. Of course, butter brings its universal goodness; Irish butter makes sense here.