TD 1
DIGESTED DIGEST CODDLE UP It’s summer but not qui
te, just the threshold. Still a cold bite some evenings, and I hankered for something hearty, so after forty years of avoiding it, I made a coddle. Or is it? It had the constituent ingredients – broth, potatoes, onions, piggy parts floating ambiguously between a soup and stew – but does that make it coddle? I have no idea. We often ate frugally growing up, but coddle never featured, both parents being up from the country like, and coddle was a very Dublin thing. Allegedly. It is a thing that exists in the culinary imagination, but not so often on a plate in front of you. Despite its impeccable literary credentials (Joyce mentioning it in both Dubliners and Finnegans Wake), it has eluded the deconstructivist gaze of the city’s Michelin chefs. Joe Biden was not papped horsing into a coddle on his recent visit. It does not get the nod for state banquets. No paintings of it hang in the National Gallery, Ronnie Drew never sang about it, and neither does Damo. With the honourable exception of The Woollen Mills, I never see it on restaurant menus. I’m informed that regulars in The Gravediggers in Glasnevin are partial to the establishment’s coddle, and I applaud any publican holding the line against the current mania for offering nothing but pizza to soak up our pints. Back when Gruel on Dame Street was teaching us how to be diverse people getting along by eating together, Billy Scurry might have knocked one out, but that could just be nostalgia on my part. Of course, coddle gets plenty of touristy blather, along with other stuff the locals would barely recognise. Who knows, Temple Bar could be a cauldron of coddle excellence and bold innovation, but like 34 any sensible person, I walk with brisk purpose and do not pause to dine there. Similarly in the identikit Irish bars without which other global cities are incomplete, I doubt the diaspora are crying into their shit Guinness over the lack of a good coddle. The last few days I have been canvassing keen eaters if they ever dabble in the coddle. Responses have ranged from ‘grand’ to ‘disgusting’, and more the latter than the former. Even its defenders struggled to recall when they had last partaken of it, the median response being ‘about twenty years ago’. Like Romantic Ireland in Yeats’ September 1913, coddle seems to be with O’Leary in the grave. It appears coddle is a food from our past that few are keen on eating in the present. Perhaps it carries a stigma that evokes the grinding poverty that was the miserable lot of most Dubliners in Joyce’s time, or fifty years earlier, the thin gruel served by well intentioned Quakers in the famine soup kitchens west of The Shannon. A food you never really wanted to eat, but the alternative was to go hungry, or worse. A bia bocht, a poverty food. In antiquity, oysters, monkfish and lobster were also seen as bia bocht, an irony we can all laugh at as we look at the eye watering prices they command today. But nobody’s laughing about coddle. Speaking of jokes, there’s an old one among academics that the three slimmest volumes in any library are those on Italian war heroes, Scottish philanthropists and Irish recipes. That’s no longer so, and Irish bookshops today are a groaning all-you-can-read cookbook buffet. Some of them gamely include a coddle recipe, though it hardly warrants one, in the same way you shouldn’t really need instruction on how to scramble an egg. As coddle tradition dictates, most will call for the boiling of the sausages. This is very problematic. Surely the whole point of sausages is that bronzed exterior acquired through direct heat and Maillard action, that slight resistance between your teeth before the skin snaps to deliver the textural contrast of whatever porcine mystery is waiting inside. Anything else is just an affront to sausages, and coddle fundamentalists can ask me bollix if they think I am going to boil mine. I have my principles and so does Donal Skehan, whose method gives the boiled sausage a hard no, and on this matter I find myself in agreement with the telegenic conjurer of uncomplicated dinners in his spotless kitchen. People who know me will tell you this is a first. Here’s what I did do. Made a chicken stock and wasn’t too picky about skimming off its fat. Sautéed without colour some onions, spuds, and a few garlic cloves ‘cause I have notions. Plopped them in the stock, handful of thyme, cooked it out until the potato started to offer just enough starch to give the broth a little body. Found some cheapo smoked bacon offcuts in the German discounter, which was good, because I like my coddle dirt cheap. Fried those off in unruly chunks. Ditto some little meatballs I made, equal parts sausage meat and coarse ground pork. Big seasoning in those – woody herbs, fennel seed, nutmeg, even a little flaky chilli. Closer in flavour profile to an Italian salsiccia than Hafner’s, Olhausen, Granby or any other venerable Dublin banger. More notions. After the frying there was a nice sticky fond on the base of that pan, so I deglazed it with some of the stock and lashed it in with the other gear. Seasoned the whole lot vigorously with ground white pepper, that seemed historically correct, and finally a fistful of parsley. A doddle.