Happy Patrick's Day! Irish Boxty

In honor of my Irish heritage and about a thousand years of family tradition, we are celebrating the lovely holiday of St. Patrick's Day! Scott, Anya, and I are all wearing green and for dinner we are having a traditional Irish-American dinner, corned beef and cabbage (one of my favorite meals), and some genuinely Irish boxty (bacstaí or arán bocht tí in Irish meaning "poor house bread"). I spruced up the corned beef and cabbage with some other Irish staples: potatoes, carrots, and onions.

St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, used to be honored by people wearing blue instead of green. That has changed, obviously. He preached Catholicism to the native pagan Irish and used the three-leafed clover to depict how the Holy Trinity is. Pretty clever, I think. While I believe that the godhead is made up of three distinct personages, they all do have one purpose, and I think that the clover depicts an LDS view of the Godhead just fine too.

Irish Boxty Recipe

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups grated raw potatoes

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 cup leftover mashed potatoes

1 egg

1 tablespoon skim milk

salt and pepper to taste

1/4 cup olive oil

Procedure

1. Toss the grated potatoes with flour in a large bowl. Stir in mashed potatoes until combined.

2. In a separate bowl, whisk together the egg and skim milk; mix into the potatoes. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

3. Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Drop in the potato mixture, forming patties about 2 inches in diameter. Fry on both sides until golden brown, 3 to 4 minutes per side. Drain on a paper towel-lined plate. Serve warm.

I have also read that there are zillions of different ways to prepare these, from using different sorts of potatoes (garlic mashed potatoes, cheese mashed potatoes, etc.) to making them flatter like crepes and filling them with stuff (like beef and onions, lemon shrimp with a sauce) or just like this recipe except with stuff on top (one lady said that she always served them with ground beef and onions on top with chicken gravy). The main point is that there are tons of different ways to make this dish, but as far as I can tell, it's the Irish people themselves offering the recipes for the variations.

This particular recipe has been vouched for by MANY Irish people as "just like my mother/grandmother used to make" so I figure it's about as close as any to the real thing. It was found in a 1937 Irish textbook along with the poem:

"Boxty on the griddle,
boxty on the pan,
If you can't bake boxty
sure you'll never get a man."

Pretty fun, eh?