Eating My Way Across Ireland

Oisin picked me up from the airport at seven in the morning with a flask of tea already going cold in the cup holder. Nothing goes in my mouth, he said, until he has told me what it actually is.

He had mapped the whole trip around counters, market stalls and one particular aunt's kitchen in Wexford. By the second night I had stopped pretending I could have planned any of it better myself.

What follows is not a list, it is the order we actually ate in. Fourteen days from Dublin south through Wexford and Waterford, around Cork and Kerry, north through Limerick to Galway and the Aran Islands, and finally along the northern coast through Fermanagh, Antrim and Belfast.

Night one, Wexford

Goody

Stale bread, warm milk, and a memory older than the house it was made in.

We did not make it to Cork before dark that first evening, which turned out to be exactly the point. Oisin had already told his mother we would be arriving hungry.

She met us at the door in Wexford with a pot already on the stove and did not ask what I wanted. Goody, or gúidí, is stale crustless bread torn into warm milk with sugar, nutmeg and cinnamon, simmered until it collapses into a soft, spiced pap.

She told me, stirring with one hand and pointing at Oisin with the other, that she had been making this exact bowl since before he could hold a spoon. It was traditionally eaten around community bonfires on St John's Eve at midsummer, though her own kitchen never waited for a calendar excuse.

We ate it standing at the counter because the table was covered in Oisin's father's newspapers. Goody rarely appears anywhere commercially, precisely because it belongs to kitchens like this one rather than menus.

Oisin's mother seemed faintly offended when I asked if anywhere in town served it. Why would you pay for it, she said, when it takes ten minutes and a heel of bread nobody was going to eat anyway.

It was gone eleven by the time we left. Oisin drove the last hour to our guesthouse near Waterford with the windows down, saying almost nothing, which I would learn was his version of being completely content.

Wexford is not the only place still making it either, he added later, since heritage bread workshops and harvest festivals in Kilkenny and West Cork occasionally revive it too. It stays mostly a home kitchen dish everywhere it survives, which he seemed to think was exactly as it should remain.

Morning, Waterford

Waterford Blaa

A roll with legal protection and a shelf life measured in hours.

Oisin woke me before eight, which he justified entirely on the grounds that a blaa eaten after noon is barely worth eating at all. The blaa is one of the few Irish breads to hold Protected Geographical Indication status under European Union law.

It can only legally carry that name if it is baked inside County Waterford itself. He walked me through the history on the short drive into town, how Huguenot weavers introduced the roll in the late seventeenth century, baked in scotch brick ovens and dusted with raw white flour.

The loaf goes stale within hours of leaving the oven, which is why nobody in Waterford treats it as something you plan ahead for. We found ours still warm, and Oisin refused outright to let me save half for later, calling it an insult to the baker.

Stuffed with butter and crisp rashers, eaten standing on the pavement with steam still coming off the top, it disappeared faster than either of us admitted to. He mentioned, wiping butter off his chin, that you genuinely cannot buy an authentic one outside the county.

He pointed out that Number 9 Café and Barron's Bakery in Cappoquin both still bake theirs the traditional way, alongside the Crystal Café where we had actually bought ours that morning. Waterford's food culture still carries a trace of the Huguenot weavers who brought the recipe over centuries ago, a detail Oisin clearly enjoyed knowing more than most visitors ever bother to ask about.

Two days, Cork City and around

Clonakilty Black Pudding

A secret kept in a solicitor's envelope, sliced thick and served without apology.

Cork was the first place on the trip where Oisin stopped narrating and just walked, because this was his city and every counter was already mapped in his head. We went straight into the English Market, which traces its origins to 1788, one of the oldest working municipal markets in Europe still trading on its original site.

It survives today not because of tourism but because it continues serving the same daily shopping function it always has. Stallholders here sell tripe, drisheen and offal cuts to regular customers on ordinary weekday mornings, with no concession made toward anyone passing through with a camera, myself included.

He took me first to a butcher counter he clearly trusted completely and asked for Clonakilty black pudding sliced thick. The pudding began in the 1880s inside Philip Harrington's butcher shop on Sovereign Street, built on a recipe belonging to a farmer's wife named Johanna O'Brien.

Edward and Colette Twomey bought the shop and the recipe in 1976. Colette alone reportedly still knows the full spice blend today, kept sealed with her solicitor rather than risk it being written down.

The Twomey family have since expanded the range to include a white pudding and even a vegetarian version, though Oisin refuses to acknowledge the second one exists. A small visitor centre now stands in Clonakilty itself, running a self guided tour that ends, predictably, with samples.

What genuinely surprised me, watching Oisin enjoy the reveal, is that Clonakilty uses beef blood rather than the pork blood found in most black pudding elsewhere in Ireland and Britain. It gives the pudding a firmer bite and a slightly less iron heavy finish than I expected.

Drisheen

Cork's quietest blood pudding, poached rather than boasted about.

Cork's whole food identity runs on this kind of thing, offal and blood and the parts of an animal other cities discarded generations ago. Oisin says growing up here means learning to see a butcher's full counter, not just the cuts wrapped in cellophane at the front.

From the black pudding counter we walked straight to the Farmgate Café upstairs for drisheen, the dish Oisin was proudest to introduce all trip. It is historically made from a blend of sheep and pig blood, milk, salt, fat and oatmeal, heavily spiced with tansy, a bitter herb almost never used elsewhere in Irish cooking.

It is poached rather than baked, which gives it a smooth, gelatinous, almost custard like texture unlike anything else on the counter. He ordered it exactly the way he said his grandmother always ate it, poached in milk with tripe and a white onion gravy.

He watched my face the entire time I chewed the first piece rather than eating his own. Fewer than a handful of butchers on the market floor still make it by hand, and Oisin said, quietly, that he genuinely worries it will not survive another generation.

He also pointed out that you can buy it raw from the same heritage butchers on the ground floor below the café, if you would rather cook it yourself the way his family sometimes does at home. Almost nobody asks for it that way anymore, which the butcher confirmed without much emotion when Oisin asked directly.

Cashel Blue and Durrus

Two cheeses that never needed a passport because nobody ever asked them to leave.

We circled back down to a cheese counter, eating both standing up with nothing but water crackers. Oisin timed, with real seriousness, how long I could go before asking for more.

Cashel Blue, made by the Grubb family in Tipperary since the early 1980s, was Ireland's first commercially produced farmhouse blue cheese. Durrus, softer and washed rind, comes from the Sheep's Head Peninsula in far smaller batches that rarely leave the region.

Neither appears on menus outside Ireland with any regularity. Oisin seemed almost relieved about that, as though wider fame would somehow ruin something he wanted to keep local.

He told me the Grubb family still ages their wheels in the same farmhouse cellars they started with, rather than a purpose built facility. Durrus, he added, is made in such small batches that a single bad week of milk can affect the whole month's supply.

The stallholder recognised Oisin by name and cut him a heel piece nobody else gets offered. He ate it slowly, the way he seemed to eat everything that actually mattered to him.

Crubeens

Salted trotters, eaten with your hands and no apology.

Cork's pub food culture was built on exactly this kind of thing, cheap cuts turned into something worth queuing for. Lunch that second day was crubeens, which Oisin had been building up since breakfast.

Once the definitive pub snack of nineteenth and early twentieth century Ireland, they are salt cured pig's trotters slowly simmered with onions, peppercorns and herbs until the cartilage breaks down completely. You eat them by hand, sucking meat and marrow straight off the bone.

Most ordinary pubs have dropped them from the menu entirely, but an old school carvery Oisin knew outside the city centre still served the traditional boiled version if you asked directly. He warned me before the first bite that there is no elegant way to eat a crubeen, and that anyone trying to use cutlery is missing the entire point.

A modernised version, crumbed and fried, has started turning up on gastropub menus in Dublin, and Oisin specifically named Delahunt on Camden Street as the place doing it properly. He considers that a different dish wearing the same name, though he admitted he would still order it if we ever made it there.

We ordered a second plate mostly because neither of us wanted to be the one who stopped first. The stout on the table went noticeably flatter than usual while we worked through it.

Skirts and Kidneys

A dockworker's stew that never needed a restaurant to survive.

Later that same day, at a spot Oisin described as the kind of place locals eat lunch rather than the kind of place anyone photographs, we split a bowl of skirts and kidneys. It is a rustic stew made from pig's diaphragm, called locally the skirt, stewed with pork kidneys, onions and white pepper, thickened lightly with flour.

It was built originally to warm factory and market dockworkers on a thin, peppery broth. Oisin ate it the way people eat food they associate with someone specific, quietly and without much comment.

He told me his own grandfather had worked the Cork docks for years and ate a version of this most lunchtimes. The broth, he said, was never meant to be rich, only warm enough to get a person through the rest of a cold shift.

Very few places still make it, and the ones that do rarely write it on a printed menu. You ask at the counter, and if they have it that day, they tell you.

Oisin mentioned specialty pork butchers in Limerick City still turn out their own version too, part of a wider dockside food culture that grew up around cheap, hard working cuts wherever Ireland had a working port. Cork and Limerick rarely get compared directly, but he said their food histories overlap more than either city likes to admit.

Carrageen Moss Pudding

A dessert set by the sea itself, no gelatin required.

That evening we drove out to Ballymaloe House in East Cork, where Oisin admitted, a little sheepishly, this was the one dish on the whole trip he had never actually made at home. Dried Chondrus crispus, known locally as Irish moss, is hand harvested from shoreline rocks, then soaked and simmered directly in whole milk.

The natural carrageenan released by the seaweed sets the milk into a delicate, trembling jelly with a faint mineral finish. It has apparently held a permanent place on the Ballymaloe menu for decades, dressed traditionally with blackberry compote, wildflower honey or cream.

Oisin's mother, he told me over dessert, still harvests her own carrageen most summers from rocks near her childhood home. She dries it on a windowsill for days before it is ready to use, which he says most people now skip in favour of buying it dried already.

The texture surprised me more than the taste, closer to a soft custard than any jelly I had eaten before. Oisin watched me try to describe it and eventually just said, that is what the sea does to milk if you let it.

He mentioned it turns up on seasonal menus at smaller artisan cafés along the Dingle and Connemara peninsulas too, wherever the coastline still supports hand harvesting. It never really left the western seaboard's food culture the way some traditional dishes have, since the seaweed itself only grows where the water stays cold and clean.

Murphy's and Beamish

A rivalry brewed within walking distance of itself for close to two centuries.

We ended the night in a small bar near the river, where Oisin, being from Cork, ordered a Beamish before I had even sat down. Murphy's and Beamish are two stouts brewed within walking distance of each other in this city, and which one a person drinks is treated less as taste and more as a marker of which side of the city they come from.

Oisin clearly considered the matter completely closed before I had a chance to ask which one I should try. He ordered mine too, without asking.

He explained that entire families in Cork have quietly picked a side for generations, often without ever discussing why. Asking a stranger which one they drink, he said, tells you more about them than most direct questions would.

Both breweries survived waves of consolidation that wiped out most of Cork's smaller stout makers. Oisin seemed genuinely proud that neither one had folded into Guinness the way so many others eventually did.

Midleton Whiskey

A bottle kept for occasions nobody explains in advance.

Midleton distillery sits a short drive from Cork city, and Oisin's father, he told me over that second pint, keeps a bottle at home for occasions he refuses to explain. Irish whiskey splits mainly into single pot still, a style legally unique to Ireland blending malted and unmalted barley in the same mash.

That gives it a spicier, oilier character than most Scotch. Single malt whiskey, closer to the Scottish tradition, uses only malted barley from a single distillery.

Oisin said the industry nearly collapsed entirely in the mid twentieth century, down to a handful of working distilleries across the whole country. The wave of new distilleries opening since the early 2010s, including Teeling in Dublin, is still recent enough that his father treats it with mild suspicion.

He poured me a small measure without ice, insisting that anything added to a good pot still whiskey is an insult roughly on par with lemon on an oyster. I did not argue with him twice in one night.

One long day, the Iveragh Peninsula

Sneem Black Pudding

Baked in a tray, not boiled in a casing, and fiercely defended by two rival butchers who will never say so out loud.

We left Cork early to reach Sneem before the shops closed, driving the long way around so Oisin could point out where the road actually meets the water. Unlike almost every other black pudding in Ireland, which is boiled inside casing, Sneem preserves a centuries old method of baking the mixture flat in metal trays.

The result develops a toasted, crusty top with a soft, rich centre, sliced into rustic squares rather than round discs. It holds European Union Protected Geographical Indication status, made exclusively by two competing family butchers, Burns Butchers and Peter O'Sullivan's Butcher Shop.

Oisin made me try both before declaring, very diplomatically, that he could never choose a side out loud in a village this small. We ate our slices sitting on a low wall by the river, and Oisin admitted he had never done a proper side by side tasting before that afternoon.

A quiet afternoon, Limerick City

Packet and Tripe

Sheep's blood set in casing, simmered gently in milk until it forgives you.

Limerick was a detour Oisin insisted on, and it took a phone call to a contact of his before we found anywhere still selling packet and tripe. It is made from seasoned sheep's blood set inside intestine casings, simmered with bleached sheep's stomach in whole milk with diced sweet onions.

It is almost entirely absent from restaurant menus now, sold mainly raw over the counter at heritage butcher stalls around King's Island. Oisin's contact handed us the raw ingredients rather than a finished plate, so we cooked it that night in our guesthouse kitchen.

He kept insisting the milk should never fully boil, only tremble. He stood over the pot the entire time as though the dish might collapse if he looked away.

Packet gets its name from the way the sheep's blood is set inside its casing, sealed like a small parcel before it ever goes near the pot. Oisin's contact told us most Limerick households that still make it learned the method from a parent rather than any written recipe.

We ate it far too late that night, closer to midnight than dinner, at a small table by an open window. Oisin said his own grandmother would have been horrified at the hour but pleased we bothered at all.

Three days, Galway, Connemara and the Aran Islands

Galway Oyster

Cold water, a flat shell, and an argument about lemon that never really ends.

We timed the drive north to land in Galway during the tail end of the Galway International Oyster and Seafood Festival, which began in 1954 when hotel manager Brian Collins was searching for a way to fill his hotel during a quiet September. It has since grown into the longest running oyster festival in the world.

We arrived on the last afternoon, and Oisin bought a dozen native Galway flat oysters, scientifically Ostrea edulis, from a stall near the Spanish Arch. He physically moved the lemon wedge away from my side of the plate before I could reach it.

He said the flat oyster tastes of the exact patch of Galway Bay it grew in, denser and more mineral than the rounder Pacific oysters most people have eaten. Lemon juice, he said, is an apology for a bad oyster rather than a compliment to a good one.

I ate mine plain, standing in a crowd loud enough that we had to lean in to hear each other. He was right, though I did not admit it until the next morning.

Connemara Lamb and Smoked Wild Salmon

What the hill feeds the sheep, the plate eventually admits.

The following day took us out toward Clifden, where Oisin's cousin runs a few fields and walked us along a boundary wall pointing out wild herb and seaweed his sheep graze on. He claimed you could taste the difference blind.

After the plate of Connemara lamb his mother cooked that evening, slow roasted with nothing more than rosemary and its own fat, I stopped arguing entirely. Earlier that afternoon we had stopped at a small family smokehouse for smoked wild salmon, cured slowly over oak chips.

Oisin treated the tasting almost like a ceremony rather than a snack. True wild Atlantic salmon stocks have fallen so far since the 1990s that the fish itself is now genuinely rare rather than simply expensive, a fact he repeated twice.

His cousin walked us right up to the smokehouse door before we bought anything, wanting me to smell the oak chips before tasting the finished fish. He said most visitors never bother to ask what wood was used, which he finds slightly baffling given how much it changes the result.

We ate slices of the salmon standing in the yard, still slightly warm from the smoker. Oisin's cousin refused payment for that first taste, saying a guest does not pay to be shown something he is proud of.

Spiced Mutton Ham

Cured on rock and wind, smoked over peat, sliced cold like a secret.

We took the ferry out to Inis Mor the next morning, the water rougher than either of us expected, so Oisin could track down spiced mutton ham through a contact he had messaged ahead. On the rocky terrain of the Aran Islands, historically better suited to hardy sheep than pigs, leg of mature mutton is rubbed with salt, sugar, coriander and cloves, then dry cured for up to two months.

We ate it sliced cold, sitting on rocks above the harbour, the wind strong enough that Oisin had to hold the wrapping paper down with one hand. He mentioned that a few modern nose to tail restaurants in Galway City, Kai among them, occasionally serve it warm, though he clearly preferred it this way.

The contact who cured it explained that pigs never really took hold on these islands, since the ground is mostly bare rock with only thin pockets of soil for grazing. Sheep and their wool and meat, he said, were simply the more sensible animal for a landscape like this.

Peat for the smoking is cut from the same bog most families have used for generations, dried through the summer before it is ever burned. Oisin asked more questions about the peat itself than about the meat, which told me something about how his mind actually works.

Four days, moving north through Fermanagh, Antrim and Belfast

Crannog Trout

Bog smoke instead of oak, and a taste like a campfire remembered.

The drive north took the better part of a day, and Oisin used most of it to explain why he had never eaten crannog trout himself before this trip. Inland lake brown trout, hot smoked over dense cut peat rather than hardwood chips, picks up an earthy, mossy, almost campfire aroma no wood chip can replicate.

We found it through a seasonal smokehouse near the Fermanagh lakelands that Oisin had to ask three separate people to help locate. He ate his first piece slowly, and admitted afterward it was the one dish on the whole trip that surprised him as much as it surprised me.

The smokehouse owner cuts his own peat by hand every summer rather than buying it, insisting the flavour changes noticeably depending on which part of the bog it comes from. He let us smell two different batches before we tasted the fish, and I genuinely could not tell them apart, though Oisin swore he could.

The trout itself comes from small inland lakes rather than the sea, which surprised me given how coastal most of the trip had been until then. Oisin said freshwater fish rarely get this kind of attention anywhere else in Ireland, which is partly why so few people outside the area know it exists.

He mentioned the same peat smoking method turns up around Killaloe on Lough Derg too, further south where Tipperary meets Clare, carried there by anglers and lakeside pubs who picked up the technique from the northern lakelands. It never became a coastal or seaside habit the way most Irish smoking traditions did, which he found genuinely interesting once he said it out loud.

Dried Dulse and Yellowman

Sun dried sea lettuce meeting a candy that could crack a tooth.

Further along toward County Antrim, we stopped near Ballycastle where a stall connected to the Ould Lammas Fair tradition sold both side by side. Dulse, sun dried Atlantic sea lettuce eaten straight from a paper bag, is salty, leathery and intensely mineral.

Yellowman is a jaw breaking, rock hard toffee honeycomb tinted bright yellow with golden syrup and vinegar. The pairing works because the seaweed's salinity cuts directly through the candy's sweetness.

Oisin bought both without asking if I wanted them, handing me the dulse first and watching my face fall. The yellowman fixed it eventually, after several minutes of genuinely difficult chewing.

The fair itself has run every August for centuries, and the stallholder told us her family has sold both from the same spot for three generations. She keeps the yellowman in a covered tin rather than open air, since she said humidity is the one thing that ruins a good batch.

Oisin admitted he had not eaten either since childhood, and the taste seemed to catch him somewhere he was not expecting. He went quiet for a moment before buying a second bag of dulse for the drive.

He said the whole Causeway coast built its food culture around exactly this kind of thing, whatever the sea and the fair calendar provided rather than what a wider market demanded. Seaside stalls further along in Portrush stock both dulse and yellowman year round too, though he insisted nothing beats buying them at the fair itself.

The Belfast Pastie

No pastry, no relation to its Cornish namesake, all chip shop confidence.

Belfast's whole food culture carries the memory of the shipyards, cheap, filling food built to survive a long shift rather than impress anyone. Belfast itself meant the pastie, which Oisin warned me twice about before I even saw one.

A Belfast pastie has no pastry crust at all, just a seasoned patty of mashed potato, minced pork and onion, often tinted deep pink. The patty is submerged in fish and chip batter and deep fried until blistered.

Locals eat it inside a white bap soaked in malt vinegar, known simply as a pastie bap. It survives almost exclusively in neighbourhood chip shops along the Shankill and Falls roads, and Oisin specifically pointed to John Long's as one of the oldest still doing it the traditional way.

Oisin made a point of ordering it standing at the counter, the same way he had insisted on eating the blaa two weeks earlier. He told me the pink tint used to come from actual cochineal, ground from crushed insects, though most chip shops now use ordinary food colouring instead.

Neither of us could tell any difference in taste, but Oisin still seemed slightly disappointed by the substitution on principle. He said a proper chip shop like John Long's has survived exactly by not changing much else about how it does things.

Ulster Fry

A single well seasoned pan doing all the talking, and farls the south rarely sees.

The next morning we walked through St George's Market, a Victorian covered market dating to 1890, and ate a full cooked breakfast from a stall running a single well seasoned pan. Regulars there credit the flavour more to that pan than to any individual ingredient going into it.

An Ulster fry differs from a standard Full Irish mainly through potato farls and soda farls, flat griddle breads that barely exist south of the border. Oisin ordered both specifically so I would see the difference laid out on one plate.

The stallholder had clearly cooked in that same pan for years, judging by how blackened and seasoned the surface had become. Oisin said a pan like that is worth more to a breakfast stall than any amount of fancier equipment.

Champ

Mash that hides its butter in a well, served at a family table rather than a menu.

Crossing briefly into the border counties, champ was served to us at a family table that evening rather than anywhere with a printed menu. It is buttery mashed potato folded through with chopped spring onion, finished with a well of melted butter sitting right at the centre.

Oisin insisted that was the only correct way to eat it. He would not accept a restaurant version as a substitute, and made a face when I mentioned I had once seen it served with gravy.

Barmbrack

A ring for marriage, a coin for luck, baked into the same loaf.

It was the wrong season for barmbrack when I asked about it, Oisin told me flatly, since the fruited tea bread properly belongs to Halloween. He still tracked down a bakery keeping a batch going out of season.

He explained on the drive back south that the tradition traces to pre Christian Samhain customs. It survived largely by attaching itself to Halloween rather than being replaced by it.

The baker who made ours for us out of season still hid the traditional objects inside, a ring, a coin and a small piece of cloth, each meaning something different if you found it in your slice. Oisin got the cloth, which he claimed meant nothing, though he checked his phone rather quickly afterward.

I got the ring, and Oisin found this far funnier than the situation actually warranted. He spent the rest of the drive making jokes I will not repeat here.

Dublin Coddle

A Saturday leftovers dinner that became a whole city's comfort food.

Our last full day landed back in Dublin, where Oisin, visibly out of his own territory now, still insisted on ordering coddle for me at a spot he had researched. It began as a working class Saturday dish, built from whatever sausages, bacon and potato were left over once the week's better cuts had already been used.

Some food historians trace the name to the French coddler, meaning to simmer gently, a leftover of Dublin's old trading relationship with France. Older Dubliners still treat a bowl of it as an unofficial hangover cure.

Oisin admitted, a little reluctantly for a Cork man, that he had actually never eaten it before that afternoon. He said it tasted exactly like something built to use up leftovers, which he meant as a genuine compliment rather than an insult.

The place he found kept the recipe deliberately plain, without the smoked sausage variations some newer restaurants have started adding. He preferred it that way, saying a dish born from scarcity should not pretend otherwise.

Wheaten Bread

Denser, nuttier, and never quite the same loaf twice.

That final evening, Oisin's aunt in Dublin sent us home with a loaf of her own wheaten bread, denser and nuttier than the soda bread most commonly sold to visitors. It uses coarse wholemeal flour and is measured, as far as I could tell, almost entirely by feel.

Oisin says that is exactly why her loaf never tastes quite the same as her sister's two streets over. He seemed genuinely proud of that inconsistency.

She sent us off with two loaves rather than one, insisting the second was for the flight home rather than for us to finish that night. It did not survive the taxi ride to the airport the next morning.

Oisin blamed me entirely for that, though he had eaten at least half of it himself. Neither of us apologised to the other about it.

Barry's and Lyons Tea

A choice made before anyone is old enough to argue about it.

We spent that last night at his parents place with tea going cold twice because neither of us wanted to stop talking long enough to drink it. The choice between Barry's and Lyons functions closer to a regional identity marker than a preference, Barry's tied to Cork and the south, Lyons to Dublin and the east.

Oisin's household had settled the matter long before he was old enough to have an opinion of his own. He never once questioned which side he had landed on.

His mother poured from a proper pot rather than a bag dropped straight into the cup, which she treats as a small but nonnegotiable standard. Oisin admitted he still cannot make a decent cup himself, despite drinking several a day his entire life.

We went through most of a box of biscuits alongside it, dunked exactly as long as Oisin instructed before they would collapse. He timed at least one of mine and declared it a failure.

Tayto Crisp Sandwich

The unofficial national dish, and nobody is entirely joking about it.

He made me one final Tayto crisp sandwich before driving me to the airport the next morning, pressed between two slices of soft white bread. It is treated by many as the island's true unofficial national dish, judged by what people actually reach for rather than what appears in any guidebook.

It worked far better than it had any right to. I finished it before we even reached the motorway.

Oisin insisted the crisps have to be slightly crushed inside the bag before assembly, never fully whole and never powder. He demonstrated this by pressing the bag flat against the steering wheel at a red light, which felt like a genuine safety hazard.

Tayto itself has leaned fully into the joke, selling merchandise built entirely around the sandwich's reputation as something between a snack and a small act of national identity. Oisin owns at least one item of that merchandise, though he denied it when I asked directly.

Irish Stew, Stobhach Gaelach

The dish everyone asks about first, and the one we never actually ate.

Irish stew never made it onto a single plate that whole trip, which Oisin found genuinely funny by the end. He reminded me on the way to the airport that it carries its own name in Irish, stobhach gaelach, and that he slides between both names without noticing.

It was traditionally made with mutton rather than lamb, since mutton was the more commonly available meat in rural Ireland for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The shift toward lamb happened gradually as mutton became harder to source commercially.

The generous portion sizes we had been served everywhere for two weeks, he said, standing outside the terminal, are frequently traced to a lingering cultural memory of the Great Famine of the 1840s. His own grandmother still says a full plate is a form of respect, a phrase he clearly grew up hearing often enough that it had become his own.

New Irish Cooking

The same humble ingredients, a new generation of technique.

For most of Ireland's history, food was shaped by scarcity rather than choice, built around whatever land and coastline could reliably provide. That inheritance still shapes portion sizes and hospitality customs today, in households far removed from the conditions that produced those habits.

The modern Irish food movement takes the same historically humble ingredients and applies contemporary technique to them. Foraged coastal greens, heritage grain breads and nose to tail butchery now appear on menus that would once have served only meat, potatoes and cabbage.

Oisin remained mildly suspicious of this movement the entire trip, joking that his grandmother invented nose to tail cooking out of necessity decades before any restaurant thought to charge extra for it. A growing number of restaurants across Dublin, Cork and the west now hold Michelin recognition while still building menus around potatoes, cabbage and buttermilk.

Kalyan Panja is a travel writer and photographer with over 20 years of experience documenting food and place. More about the author is available on the behind the scenes page.