How to make traditional Irish potato cakes or "boxty"

A recipe for traditional Irish potato cakes – better known as boxty. 
Traditional Irish potato cakes, or boxty, are mostly associated with the north midlands of Ireland in Connacht and Ulster. The people of Mayo, Sligo, Donegal, Fermanagh, Longford, Leitrim and Cavan are particularly big fans of this delicious and simple style of potatoes.

It is thought that boxty dates back to the days of the Irish Famine, presumably to make the potatoes stretch further. There are a couple of different recipes, but all contain finely grated, raw potatoes served fried.

There are some variations on the classic recipe, such as boiling the patty like a dumpling or baking it like a loaf. With the demands of the modern palate being more diverse, some people add spices or vegetables into the mix. However, the plain old griddled style is the original and is wonderfully tasty.

Over the last couple of years, as the Irish have become more interested in their own cuisine, the popularity of boxty has risen. It's now quite normal to see boxty on a menu in a restaurant in Ireland, whereas a decade ago it would have still been considered a 'peasant dish.' However, boxty has always been popular as part of Irish home cooking.

As one traditional (if woefully out-dated) rhyme explains: 

Boxty on the griddle, 
Boxty in the pan, 
If you can't make boxty, 
You'll never get your man.

RECIPE

Ingredients: 
1 cup raw, grated potatoes 
1 cup leftover mashed potatoes 
1 cup all-purpose flour 
2 tsp baking powder 
2 tsp salt 
2 eggs, lightly beaten 
1/4 cup (about) milk to mix 
Butter or oil for frying 
Sugar (optional)

Method:

Place the grated raw potatoes in a clean cloth and twist to remove excess moisture.

Whisk together flour, salt, and baking powder.

Combine flour mixture with the raw potatoes, the left over mashed potatoes, and the eggs.

Add enough mix to make a batter.

Heat a heavy skillet over medium heat and add butter or oil.

Drop potato batter by the tablespoon into the hot pan.

Brown on both sides (about 4 minutes per side).

Butter each boxty and serve hot with or without sugar.

Yield: about 4 servings

Origins of Celtic Christmas

 

Christmas has been marked in Ireland since St Patrick brought Christianity to the island in the fifth century. Over the centuries pagan Celtic customs merged with Christianity to produce some uniquely Celtic Christmas traditions for the winter festival. While not all are practiced today, some can still be seen – customs which date back to earlier, less commercial times.

Before the coming of Christianity the people of Ireland practiced a pagan druidic religion which gave them a keen sense of their connection with the natural world. Like many earlier peoples around the world, the winter solstice of 21^st December was particularly important to the Gaelic Irish. The winter solstice is the shortest day / longest night of the year. However for the Celts it marked the turning point in the year. In the dark and cold of winter, at solstice the sun begins the long journey back towards its midsummer peak.

The Celts celebrated the turning point of the sun with fires in sacred places such as the Hill of Tara. The use of fire to mark the winter solstice may have contributed to the more recent Irish tradition of placing a candle in the window of your house during the twelve days of the Christmas season. It is the time of year when the Celts, just like people all across the world want to rekindle the light of love and hope in their lives.

A candle in the window: As well as a throw-back to the ancient Celtic custom of using fire to celebrate the turning point of the year, this tradition is said to be aimed at welcoming travellers to your home. The candle in the window marks the way to warmth and hospitality to anyone who finds themselves, like Mary and Joseph in the New Testament, without a place to stay at Christmas time.

Greenery: The druids of the ancient Celtic world used evergreen to branches to symbolize the eternal nature of the human soul. In Christian times the tradition of bringing evergreen branches into an Irish home has continued, as a symbol of the eternal life brought about by Christ’s resurrection. In Celtic countries evergreen branches such as holly and yew are more traditional than the German custom of bringing an entire tree into the home.

In Irish (Gaelic) Nollaig Shona Duit means Happy Christmas to you. It is pronounced no-leg show-na ditch.

A traditional Irish Christmas blessing in English is: 'May peace and plenty be the first to lift the latch on your door, and happiness be guided to your home by the candle of Christmas.'

At new years it is traditional in Ireland to say 'Go mbeire muid beo ar an am seo arís.'In English - May we be alive at this time next year...

 

©2016 Linda Sullivan-Simpson
The Past Whispers
All Rights Reserved

Joe Beef

Charles McKiernan (1835 County Cavan, Ireland – 15 January 1889, Montreal, Canada) was a well-known Irish-Canadian Montreal tavern owner, innkeeper and philanthropist.
Charles McKiernan earned the sobriquet "Joe Beef" from his time as a Quartermaster with the British Army during the Crimean War. It's said that whenever his regiment was running low on food, McKiernan had an almost spooky knack of somehow finding meat and provisions, hence the name "Joe Beef".

The man, who would become famous in Montreal as a gruff philanthropist, came to the city around 1864 with his artillery regiment and he was put in charge of the main military canteen on Saint Helen's Island. Discharged in 1868, he opened "Joe Beef's Tavern," an inn and tavern soon known throughout North America, located at 201–207 rue de la Commune in what is now Old Montreal.
Beef refused service to no one, telling a reporter, "no matter who he is, whether English, French, Irish, Negro, Indian, or what religion he belongs to". Every day at noontime, hundreds of longshoremen, beggars, odd-job men and outcasts from Montréal society showed up at his door. 

The clientele of the tavern was mostly working class. Canal labourers, longshoremen, sailors, and ex-army men like McKiernan himself were mainstays of the business. For working class Montreal, McKiernan's tavern functioned as the centre of social life in Griffintown. At the time, the neighbourhood had no public parks, and gatherings and public celebrations were only occasionally held by national societies and church groups. Thus, daily recreational activities were centered around Joe Beef's Canteen.

An atheist, Beef had the following manifesto printed on handbills and advertisements:

He cares not for Pope, Priest, Parson, or King William of the Boyne; all Joe wants is the Coin. He trusts in God in summer time to keep him from all harm; when he sees the first frost and snow poor old Joe trusts to the Almighty Dollar and good old maple wood to keep his belly warm, for Churches, Chapels, Ranters, Preachers, Beechers and such stuff Montreal has already got enough.

The New York Times was not impressed, however, calling Joe Beef's Canteen "a den of filth" and writing that:

The proprietor is evidently an educated man, and speaks and writes well. But he is a little nearer a devil and his place near what the revised version calls Hades than anything I ever saw.

Beef was known for keeping a menagerie of animals in his tavern, including four black bears, ten monkeys, three wild cats, a porcupine and an alligator. The bears were usually kept in the tavern's cellar and viewed by customers through a trap door in the barroom floor. He sometimes brought a bear up from the basement to restore order in his tavern, to fight with his dogs or play a game of billiards with the proprietor. One of his bears, Tom, had a daily consumption of twenty pints of beer and would sit on his hindquarters and hold a glass between his paws without spilling a drop. On one occasion, McKiernan was mauled by a buffalo on exhibit and was sent to hospital for a number of days. Another time, a Deputy Clerk of the Peace was inspecting the tavern in order to renew the license and was bitten by one of McKiernan's dogs.

He ran his tavern from 1870 until his death from a heart attack in 1889, at the age of 54.
 
At his funeral, every office in the business district closed. Fifty labour organizations walked off the job while Joe Beef's casket was drawn through the city by an ornate four-horse hearse, in a procession several blocks long. The newspaper La Minerve reported:

The crowd consisted of Knights of Labour, workers and manual labourers of all classes. All the luckless outcasts to whom the innkeeper-philanthropist had so often extended a helping hand had come forward, eager to pay a last tribute to his memory".

 
Despite a lack of formal education, McKiernan considered himself an intellectual and was an avid reader. He engaged in heated debates on the topics of the day and was a champion for the rights of the common man. He entertained the crowds with poetry and humorous stories which lampooned the figures of authority in the workingman's life, such as the employer, the landlord, or the local church minister.

He acted as an advocate for the working class population of Griffintown and played an important role in the Lachine Canal workers strike of 1877. He provided them with 3,000 loaves of bread and 500 gallons of stew, and paying the travel expenses of their delegation to Ottawa. As they set off, he addressed a crowd of 2,000 in front of his tavern with a rousing speech "delivered in rhymed endings which was heartily applauded." He also assisted strikers at the east-end Hudon textile factory in 1882.

As the focal point of social life in Griffintown at the time, Joe Beef's Canteen provided early social services such as housing, food, and casual employment for the poor and downtrodden.
He was a central character in a play by David Fennario, entitled Joe Beef.
McKiernan was the inspiration behind Joe Beef Restaurant, which opened in 2005 on Notre Dame Street West in the neighbourhood of Little Burgundy.

courtesy – Wikipedia

©2016 Linda Sullivan-Simpson
The Past Whispers
All Rights Reserved

Henry Pyle 1802 - 1898

Henry Pyle was my 3 times maternal great-grandfather born in Crosserlough, Kildrumferton parish, County Cavan, Ireland to Richard and Hariet. He had one sister, Margaret.

He emigrated to Quebec City sometime before 1825, became a farmer and married Jane Griffith, also from Ireland in 1825.

They had 5 children, Jane, my 2 times great-grandmother, Phoebe, Robert, Ann, and Eliza Jane. Their mother, Jane died in 1863 and Henry married again, this time to Jane Gregory in 1865. Jane Gregory Pyle died in 1883, he had also survived a daughter, Phoebe who died in 1876 and his only son, Robert who died in 1875.

Henry died at the age of 96 at the Finlay Asylum for elderly men.

Finlay Asylum - 1860 Quebec City
Dates of Operation: 1857 - 1970

The Finlay Home was an Anglican residence that primarily served elderly men between 1857 and 1970.

With the closure of the Anglican-run Quebec Asylum around 1827, there was no Anglican or Protestant home for the elderly until the 1850s. 
This caught the attention of Margaret Finlay, who willed £200 to the Church of England for this purpose upon her death in 1849.

In 1857, the bishop acquired a wooden cottage in Saint-Jean-Baptiste "to form the commencement of an asylum for the aged and infirm, or otherwise disabled persons and distressed widows, being of the communion of the Church of England.” It eventually became a men’s home, with the women redirected to the Ladies’ Protestant Home.

By 1860, the Church had collected enough for a large building. Designed by Ottawa architects Stent and Lavers, who also designed the Military Asylum, this eclectic building fused together different styles with a predominance of gothic elements. The new Finlay Asylum was inaugurated on August 2, 1862. It was large enough to accommodate the Church of England Female Orphan Asylum in the west wing and the Church of England Male Orphan Asylum in the east wing. The latter remained in the building until the 1960s, by which time it functioned primarily as a student residence. Although they were separate institutions, the young boys were colloquially known as the "Finlay Home boys.”

By 1962, the Finlay Home catered to only eight elderly men. The building was sold in 1968, and the home continued in Sillery until October 1970. The six remaining men were relocated to Saint Brigid’s Home and to another home in the Eastern Townships.

The Finlay Asylum lives on as a charitable trust that provides grants to organizations for the homeless and needy, namely Saint Brigid’s Home.

My 3rd maternal great-grandfather, Henry Pyle born in Crosserlough, County Cavan, Ireland was an inmate of Finlay Asylum as an elderly gentleman with no family left. He passed away in 1898 and was buried in Bourg Louis Cemetery in Quebec City.