At breakfast time in the Killarney Great Southern Hotel everyone seemed to be ignoring cornflakes and muesli and queuing up for the enormous copper tureens of bubbling porridge. A man ahead of me quietly admitted to his proclivities, how he took his porridge with prunes and pears, along with a little dash of honey. Cream on Sundays. With a dreamy expression, he lowered his voice and issued the word strawberries. Porridge and fresh strawberries. All over Ireland people are devouring this grey lava like never before.
Students in trendy cafes are eating it with tears in their eyes, reverting to childhood and wholesome mother-food. Gone is the Daddy Bear image of lumpy porridge with an impenetrable, leathery skin. People are going back to fundamental foodstuffs or what has become known as comfort foods. Like porridge, mashed potatoes, Irish stew and cocoa before bed. "It's all to do with the greening of our diet," says Luke Dodd, who set up the Strokestown Famine Museum. "Irish people for the first time in a long time want to eat what's indigenous to their country. I'm not surprised at all at the big comeback with porridge. It's a bit like the comeback with mashed potato. It's the genetic thing and it's come at a time when we're ready to deal with it again. We just have a natural predisposition to that kind of food. I very definitely believe in the notion of comfort food. Here in Ireland potatoes and oatmeal were always the traditional fare and there's something incredibly comforting about those foods.
"At this time of the year, the end of winter, the potatoes can be really good and if the weather is cold there's nothing better than mashed potato or potatoes in a stew. Oatmeal usually has to be had with milk, which is the other great primary food source. It sets you up for the day. If you have a bowl of porridge in the morning you're not going to be hungry again until lunchtime." "You wouldn't be reaching for a slice of quiche or a head of lettuce if you're looking for comfort," says Luke Dodd. "It just wouldn't do it for you." John Harvey of Harvey's Coffee House in Trinity Street, Dublin, says his porridge does a flying business, especially on Sunday mornings when a bowl of oatmeal porridge with fresh fruit such as bananas, apples and pears costs £2.25, with honey, cinnamon and cream.
"Young people are discovering it for the first time as well as others who are used to the lumpy old stuff and are enjoying the new dimension to it. It's the foundation they're after. You get your cup of coffee and your bowl of porridge and there will be no nibbling after that. People go for the bowl of porridge instead of a pain au chocolat or a scone. You can serve it all kinds of ways, using the oatmeal as a base and adding whatever you wish." Michael Fleming, of Fleming's restaurant in Tivoli, Cork, said that for many Irish people porridge was little more than a flavourless gruel. He likes to make his porridge with a bit of a kick by adding a drop of booze. Not too much, mind. "We like to do everything our own way here," he says. "We make the porridge with milk, honey, cream and a teaspoon of Irish Mist." Michael Fleming believes there is a huge revival in the demand for traditional or "comfort foods". Irish people have experimented and tried exotic foods like couscous and polenta but now have a yearning to return to what's natural for them. I have people coming here from New York, and what do you think they want? Swedes, cabbage, corned beef and Irish stew.
I've had people from Australia looking for crubeens, for queen of puddings and, of course, the bread-and-butter pudding. That beats them all. We'd add a bit of Grand Marnier to the queen of puddings, and the baked rice pudding always flies out the door. People say to me things like, `I haven't had this since I was a child' or `my wife won't let me cook cabbage because she says it stinks out the house'." Luke Dodd, who has spent the last few years organising the archives at the Irish Film Centre, will shortly be leaving for London, where the the Guardian newspaper has commissioned him to set up an archive. Growing up on a dairy farm in Boyle, Co Roscommon, Dodd has strong opinions about the basic foodstuffs.
"The problem with going to London is that you can't always get good potatoes. England is desperate for them, maybe because everything is so dominated by supermarkets there. I'll miss shops like Mortons down the road here in Ranelagh, which always has lovely organic potatoes. There are people who still insist on having the dirt on the potatoes rather than buying the prewashed ones because it keeps them better, the skin intact. I remember eating potatoes that were kept in a rick all winter, and by the springtime they had the most wonderful gnarled skins on them. You'll rarely taste a potato like that nowadays. Dodd describes the perfect potato as one that is floury, not too dense and having a good root vegetable taste. It's the same with turnips, parsnips and carrots - the kind of earthiness that gives you comfort and bulk as well. "There are people down the country that I know who would still eat eight or 10 potatoes for their lunch or dinner. There is a statistic that a man before the Famine would eat up to 14 pounds of potatoes a day. I saw a piece of archive footage from the 1920s of a man with a huge wooden trough of potatoes in front of him at a lunch table and just eating them one by one, like you would eat apples. Dodd is just as fond of pasta as he is of potatoes, though he finds it amusing that Italian and Chinese restaurants here pay tribute to our Irish predilections by offering chips with your lasagne or your chop-suey.
Luke Dodd's grated, fried potatoes
At the moment I'm making a lot of these grated, fried potatoes. They call them rosti but I think that's too fancy. The recipe I have is you dice up an onion fairly finely and then you put an egg and then about two dessertspoons of cornflour into a bowl and mix with salt and pepper, then put the pan on with a good deal of oil in it. When the oil is beginning to get really hot you grate the potato onto a tea-towel and ring it to remove the starch. Then put the grated potato into the cornflour and onion mixture and straight onto the pan before it begins to lose any of its moisture and then it becomes very crisp. Make them into thin rounds and fry them for two or three minutes on either side. They have a really clean taste and are perfect with a fillet steak made with a rich sauce of blue cheese.
Luke Dodd's mashed potato
You put some butter on a pan and fry some onion and throw in a good deal of salt and black pepper. Fry until the onion is soft but still has a little texture. Then pour in milk or cream, whatever you have in the house. Bring it to the boil and reduce slightly. Then mix in a some herbs, parsley, thyme, maybe a little rosemary or sage. Let it simmer for a bit and then turn it off and let it sit on the pan and leave it until the potatoes are cooked. When the potatoes are ready to mash put this mixture through them. It makes a really creamy, heavily flavoured comfort food. Always make up extra, so you can make up potato bread the next day.
(With thanks to Patsy Duignan in Strokestown)
Potato Bread
The best time to do this is when you're doing the washing-up when the left-over potatoes are still a bit warm. If you want to be really serious about it, you should set aside some of the mixture before you mash it too finely because you want to get a few lumps in the potato bread. Throw in a fistful of flour and a good deal of pinhead oats to give it a nice nutty flavour. You probably don't need any liquid to bind it but if you want you can throw in a dash of buttermilk to give it a hit. Shape them into rounds and fry them in olive oil and butter. They're lovely with a fry.
Luke Dodd's favourite porridge recipe
Dampen the oatmeal slightly with water and then grate a full apple into it and cook it. Then pour some cream over it and some very good rich dark sugar. Eat it. It's gorgeous. The worst is washing the saucepan. My advice is do it immediately, no soaking.