This article explores the history and traditions of St. Brigid's Day, a Celtic festival marking the beginning of spring. It delves into ancient customs like leaving a blessed cloth for livestock and the importance of dairy and crops in the celebrations. The article then presents two simple recipes – boxty cakes and scones – that reflect the traditional fare of St. Brigid's Day, offering a taste of Irish culinary heritage.
Dairy and crops are at the heart of the traditional Celtic festival, and these simple recipes go back hundreds of yearsand the Celtic festival of Imbolc. In ancient Ireland this festival heralded the beginning of spring, the return of light and the growth of crops and livestock. Most of the celebrations surrounded the production of dairy, and superstition around maintaining good yields from live stock.
Unsurprisingly, most feast days were celebrated with food. Brigid’s Day fare seems to have focused on dishes reflecting the very thing it celebrated: dairy and crops. Folklorist Brid Mahon, another go-to on Irish food history notes: “Butter was always freshly churned and a cake as big as a cartwheel baked on this feast day, made of flour, curds, milk and egg. Mutton, bacon, or a fowl, colcannon, boxty bread, dumplings, rice pudding, and ‘sowans’ were served at supper.
With research complete, what to cook? The first recipe is the classic boxty, a type of savoury pancake using mashed and grated potato, flour and buttermilk. These are basic ingredients that would have been readily available hundreds of years ago. The method incorporates elements of the French dumpling and Italian gnocchi. The key is to heavily season the mix and then fry it gently in a good amount of butter.
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ST BRIGID's DAY CELTIC FESTIVAL IRISH TRADITIONS DAIRY CROPS RECIPES
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