The World That Was - Medieval Irish Beef Pottage

Hello and Welcome to The World That Was!

This week was St Patrick's Day, an Irish holiday - and so I decided to make some medieval Irish beef stew to celebrate. Ireland, being a huge producer of beef and dairy products, relied on these foodstuffs in antiquity to modernity. This recipe is an adaptation from a reconstruction made by Maeve L'Estrange - a culinary archaeologist from UCD!

In any case, let's now take a look at the world that was! Follow along with my YouTube video above!

Ingredients

500g lean beef

1 onion

parsley

cloves

salt

pepper

2 tbsp butter

wine vinegar (or just regular vinegar)

50g breadcrumbs

thick slice of bread

Method

1 - Chop Ingredients

To begin with, we need to prepare our onions. Halve and mince a whole onion. Toss a few pads of butter into a large pot. Place this over a medium-high heat until it melts. Toss your chopped onions into this, and let them cook away for a few minutes.

Also roughly chop some parsley by rolling it into a ball, and mincing it. You can leave the leaves whole, but I prefer chopping them so they have a better texture in the final dish.

2 - Cook Beef

While your onions cook, go cut your meat into small cubes. Cattle was a sign of wealth in early medieval Ireland (and still is). So this is definitely a recipe suited for richer palettes (at least in antiquity). In any case, toss your beef cubes into your pot with the onions when the onions are translucent. Let your beef sear for a couple of minutes per side, until you can no longer see red meat. At this point, pour in 500ml of water on top of everything, so the water just about covers the meat.

Bring this to a rolling boil over a high heat. When it hits a boil, turn the heat down to low and let it simmer away for about an hour. Foam might form on the surface of the soup, this is still edible! You can ladle this off if you want to pretty it up, which I didn't do.

3 - Add Seasonings

After an hour, add your salt, pepper, and cloves to the pot, and give it a stir. Also toss in your head of parsley. Leave this to simmer for about 10 minutes, while you combine your breadcrumbs and vinegar in a small bowl. Depending on your tastes, you can add more or less vinegar than I did - I used about two tablespoons here.

Toss your vinegar-soaked breadcrumbs back into the pot, and stir it around. The pottage should take on a lighter colouration - but this is fine! Let this simmer away until the meat is tender, and the breadcrumbs absorb water and makes it act like porridge.

Serve up over a chunk of bread - preferably stale, hard bread - and dig in warm!

The finished dish is super filling, and has an extraordinarily meaty flavour - really amplified by the vinegar. It's fairly simple to make, and requires very little time to prepare - and since its a pottage, it can be left on a low heat for hours, to tenderise the meat, as was common with many pottages from the medieval period.

This might seem fairly plain - in terms of spices and seasonings - but this is due to the fact that spices were not very common in Irish medieval culinary traditions - given the cost of having to import most spices from the Mediterranean world to a small island in the Atlantic. However, herbs such as rosemary, would have been used in abundance - given that they were native to the island. Beef is also one of Ireland's most important resources - given how the country has large amounts of pastoral land, and archaic law-codes make reference to cattle very frequently. They even form the core of some mythological cycles - such as the Ulster Cycle. So beef would have been an annual staple in the diets of Irish settlements - prior to the colonisation of the island by its neighbours.