Real Irish Food: 150 Classic Recipes from the Old Country

I have several Irish cookbooks and this one is the best. Beautiful, high-quality and lots of pictures! Great recipes too!

As a dubliner who married an American and has lived far too many years away from the home of my birth and my family I am delighted to have this book. The recipes are delicious and authentic. Irish food is far from bland like one person stated. It is not screaming with spices or any overpowering flavors. Our recipes are multi dimensional. Each flavor subtle, but layered. You taste every ingredient in every bite rather than one overly emphasized note. . Like all great national foods it uses native local simple ingredients and cooked correctly you will produce delicious hearty homey gastro goodness. As I said we use mostly native locally sourced ingredients so we do not eat a lot of garlic and therefore it is rarely if ever found in authentic traditional recipes. To the earlier reviewer who thinks garlic is necessary to make food taste” perhaps you should buy an Italian cookbook, it seems to be more your speed. (Also Irish people did not leave Ireland because of bad food. They left because they were being starved to death by the British during the famine.) We Irish eat lots of onions and leeks, and root vegetables which are native to our beautiful land. A half decent home cook will be able to make these recipes and put a big smile on their families faces. Hearty, simple, delicious recipes with beautiful photos to accompany them.

I bought this book after reading carefully through other online reviews about this and other Irish cookbooks. I was sold on the fact that the author is Irish, that photos accompany the recipes, and that its recipes are decidedly authentic. If you're looking for authentic soda bread, colcannon, Guinness-based stews and desserts, and are a fan of casserole-like dishes or meals that come baked in pie crust, you'll enjoy this book.THE GOOD:I'm a pretty healthy eater, so it was fun to cook my way through recipes laden with butter, whole milk, and cream, and to justify the ten pounds I gained just while I was experimenting out of this cookbook. For many of the recipes, such as the buttermilk "rock cakes" (drop biscuits), stuffed porkchops, fish pie, and the leek and cheese pie, the tightened waistband is definitely worth the indulgence. I got a kick out of many of the anecdotal and historical notes that accompanied the recipes--such as memories of eating cauliflower cheese, his wife's misinterpretation of Irish coffee cake, and the historical value of oysters among the Irish poor. It's always fun to learn about the food you're eating.As others have stated, the pictures are phenomenal. Almost every single recipe has a photo that shows the final product, and there are several images of Irish landscapes and cityscapes that had me dreamily browsing expedia travel deals.I had a tough time finding a lot of the ingredients in this book for recipes that I wanted to make because I live in the rural Midwest. Things like lamb kidneys, pigs blood, and even simple Irish sausage or smoked whitefish are next-to impossible to find. This means that a large number of the recipes I had to improvise or simply skip, which makes me sad as I would have really enjoyed the challenge of trying them out. If you live in a city with a large Irish population, like Boston, you might have a lot more fun with this book than a lady like me who lives in a farm where the nearest grocery store is a Walmart 15-miles away.THE BAD: After spending a month steadily working my way through its recipes, I have to say... I think we can see why so many of our ancestors left Ireland! This isn't the fault of the author since the recipes appear to be authentic according to other reviewers, but many of these meals are simply bland, bland, bland, and seem to be variations of one another. For example, the soups and stews chapter seems to feature the same general set of ingredients (stewing meat like lamb or beef, potatoes, carrots, onion and thyme) but are distinguished merely by concerns with whether or not it's topped with a pastry puff, pie crust, or a mashed potatoes.As I worked my way through this cookbook, I often wondered whether or not every recipe had been tested or even carefully proofread by anyone other than the author. Some of the directions include notable no-no's in technique. To make pie crust, for example, Bowers instructs you to cut in cold butter and encourages you to use your hands. This is fine if texture isn't your concern, but if you're out to make a flaky pie crust, the heat from your hands will destroy the pockets of cold butter that eventually steam and create the air pockets that make crust flaky. There are also a few recipes that call for ingredients that don't appear in the directions, so you end up with odd left-overs by the time the thing is in the oven. Small stuff, I know, but I noticed.On a minor note, I was also surprised by the nearly complete absence of garlic in any of the recipes! It was so noticeable that I went online to research whether or not the Irish actually eat garlic or if it grows there. (Fact: It does). Its absence indicates to me that the author must simply not like garlic (?????) and chose to exclude it from almost every recipe where it would typically appear, like in stews.VERDICT:This is a book worth buying if you have a distinct interest in authentic Irish cuisine and are willing to sacrifice a little flavor for amusement. I definitely got a kick out of this book and can see myself returning to it on cold gloomy nights when I need some comfort food and, of course, on St. Patrick's Day.

The book has a good blend of commentary with many excellent recipes. It also includes links to U.S. websites that sell key Irish food ingredients

Visiting Ireland has always been on my bucket list. I won't make it. My Mom and her Mother were both Irish and always had a wish to visit but age, poverty and illness didn't let them. This is a very interesting book. Each recipe is preceded. by a little story about it. They are well written and very easy to follow. Not all ingredients will be in your near by store but she provides you with places to try. The weights and measures are in ours. The recipes make your mouth water and you read through them. I have found my mother and grandmother both cooked Irish recipes the way the lower class or even the farmers would have done. It just makes me want to try others as I find the ingredients. Any level cook should be able to follow along with no problems. No unusual or professional tricks to cooking are used. Reading it on an e book doesn't let you read the first few pages with conversion tables.

This book is near perfectly laid out with a mixture of history and recipes side by side. Everything is easy to follow, weights and measures are clearly marked where anyone from a novice to a pro can follow right along. They included references where you can even obtain real Irish staples outside of Ireland. I have already tried several recipes from this book and they were a pleasure to both make and eat. By far one of the best purchases I have made while trying to advance my kitchen.

My husband and I have always wanted to travel to Ireland, We decided to just spend a year eating the food. This book really was quite brilliant, since we live in California and our ingredients won't be the same as the ingredients in Ireland. The author gives us good substitutes for certain ingredients. My husband loved every item I made from this book. It is still in my kitchen for St. Pat's Day and for whenever we are feeling like a little something different. The ingredients, like flour, can take some pre-planning. I have to order some items off of Amazon because they aren't available in the stores here in California.

This book has so many traditional Irish recipes that look delicious! Coming from an Irish background there are many that I remember my mother making when I lived at home. The photos are beautiful and there are nice descriptions and anecdotes throughout the book. I'm happy with this purchase.

I am getting an English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh cookbook, and this is my Irish one. The stews look great.

Idéal pour ma mère qui a le mal du pays, recettes traditionnelles en anglais. Juste, pour les français: imprimez un tableau de conversion sur le net.Lovely present to cure my mom's homesickness, traditional recipes in english. For french people: print a conversion table.

Excellent and well written. Can almost get a taste of home while reading the recepies.

I can't believe I just read a cookbook cover-to-cover. I love all the background and information about regional palates. Now, I will have to get of the couch and get cooking.