What’s for Dinner? is a Saturday evening get-together where friends share recipes, talk about good food and help others answer culinary questions.
We welcome you to our virtual table every Saturday evening 4:30 PT/7:30 ET. If you would like to write a post for an upcoming date just send a message to ninkasi23!
So a few weeks ago, Chef John posted a recipe for something called “Dublin Coddle”, which he basically said was a sausage and potato stew. I decided I wanted to make this because I didn’t know I had a craving for some REAL sausage from my local (15 minute walk) Polish deli until I saw the video.
Coddle is one of the National Dishes of Ireland. But what is it? Why is it called “Coddle”?
Coddle is basically a stew made traditionally with streaky bacon (or just bacon in the US), potatoes, onions, and sausage. It most likely got its name from the French word ”caudle”, meaning to gently stew or boil. See “coddled eggs”.
Dublin Coddle is considered food for the working class. It was reputedly a favorite dish of the writers Seán O'Casey and Jonathan Swift, and it appears in several references to Dublin, including the works of James Joyce.
From the website of the Dublin City Council:
Apparently, coddle dates back to the first Irish famine in the late 1700s where anything to hand got thrown into the pot.
The famine of 1740–41 was due to extremely cold and then dry weather in successive years, resulting in food losses in three categories: a series of poor grain harvests, a shortage of milk, and frost damage to potatoes. At this time, grains, particularly oats, were more important than potatoes as staples in the diet of most workers.
Families would use up any leftover meat on a Thursday, as Catholics couldn’t eat meat on Fridays. Country people who moved into Dublin to find better work opportunities brought hens and pigs with them to raise for food. After a pig was slaughtered and sold the remains were used to make sausages. The sausages and streaky rashers were boiled up with root vegetables to make a cheap and nutritious meal.
Indeed, before takeaways existed, it was a typical Dublin thing to cook up a pot of coddle early in the day and let it cool down for later. The dish could be reheated for supper after work, or a night out at the pictures, or the pub.
As this is a basic “throw everything in a pot and boil it” recipe, there are many variations. One variation is to brown the meat instead of just slow boiling it. This is what I’m doing using, of course, Chef John as a guide:
So here’s the amounts I used in mine:
2 pounds bacon (I love bacon, plus I had a 2lb pack of ends and pieces in my freezer)
2 ½ pounds tiny potatoes (I use Little Potato Company instead of full sized potatoes most of the time)
2 LARGE (biggest you can find in the store) yellow onions
A knob of butter (usually 2tbsp)
2 bunches of green onions
3-3½ pounds of Biała Kiełbasa, or fresh polish sausage
1 can (14oz) Guinness stout
1 box chicken stock
4 minced garlic cloves (they were on the big side otherwise I would have used most of the head)
Seasonings: dried parsley flakes, dried thyme, pepper, cayenne, and Knorr’s granulated bouillon because MSG.
NOTE: You will notice the absence of salt in my seasonings. I put a big pinch on the onions when they went in, and the Knorr’s had some salt in it, but that was it. The insane amount of bacon and the sausage provided the rest of the salt.
So I began, as most delicious things do, with cooking the bacon. Keep in mind this is 2 pounds of bacon pieces.
Next came the onions, and there’s nothing like the smell of bacon and onions cooking together.
Then the green onions and seasonings.
I deglazed with the Guinness, reduced it by over half, then added the potatoes and stock, and when it started to simmer, I added the sausage, after pricking the sausage skin so no explosions happened.
I put it in a 300 degree F oven with my Dutch oven’s lid on, and set to wait. HOWEVER—Story time here—what I didn’t realize was shortly after I put it in the oven to cook, the reset button on the outlet tripped. It started smelling lovely and then it stopped. I went to check and had to press the reset button. I estimate the oven was off for like 45 minutes. So I got it going again, and let it go for like 3+ hours. I took it out, took the lid off, and let it go for another hour-ish so the sausage would brown and the broth would reduce a bit. The top picture was the result. I let it cool then cut the sausage into bite size slices and mixed everything for meal distribution.
Now, as you know, I used a LOT of bacon, and sausage is very fatty. Even though I blotted out a good amount of fat when the bacon was ready, I skimmed almost a full cup of fat after it came out of the oven. I believe the finished picture above is pre skimming. You can really see how deep that fat layer goes. How much fat YOU decide to skim is between you and your cardiologist. You are, after all, the Fatboy Slim of how much fat to skim. As it is, I now have a nice stash of sausage flavored lard just in case.
Traditionally, the best way to enjoy this is with a pint of Guinness and plenty of Irish soda bread to sop up the broth, and the broth is well worth sopping up. I gave some to a friend, and she used mashed potatoes for the broth sopping. And the broth, again, is truly amazing. Cooking for that amount of time, the broth picked up first and foremost the garlic and marjoram flavor of the sausage, but the sausage didn’t lose any flavor. Osmosis is a wonderful thing.
So anyway, that’s Dublin Coddle. From all the research I’ve done, it’s a pretty accurate traditional version. This yielded WELL over 20 meals for me. I’m not going to tell you the calories, but believe me it would have been rather less if I had only used the 8oz of bacon in Chef John’s version instead of the 2 pounds I did. But it’s full of protein, filling, and delicious. Make this. You won’t be disappointed.
Next week, I’m taking a Chef John creation and putting my own twist on it. I’ll give you a hint: It’s a New England favorite, supposedly created in a swank resort in Rhode Island where the New York riche came to play in the summer.
So, do YOU have a “turn it on and forget about it” peasant food dish in your regular rotation? Let us know in the comments!