Black Pudding, Rashers, and Beans....oh my!

The Traditional Irish Breakfast

When I was in school in Galway, we would have class for two hours in the morning from 8-10am. We would then get a half hour break before our next class started. At University College Galway UCG, as it was called then and now titled National University Ireland-Galway (NUI-Galway), the cafeteria just below our classroom, so each school day during our break we would wander down to it and have breakfast. For my friends and myself, this usually included a biscuit and a piece of fruit- filling but not at all heavy- and a cup of hot tea. Even though it was summer, hot tea was always part of our meals because it went well with the omnipresent morning drizzle that had come during our walk to class, or while we were in class, or was waiting to creep up on us as we walked in to town. The school was going through some changes and so we often shared our cafeteria moments with some very nice construction workers, who may have only seemed so nice because of even foul language sounds like nectar with an Irish accent. Each day these workers would sit down to a Full Irish Breakfast while we watched in amazement at their eating capacity and wondered how they could eat it every single day.

The Full Irish Breakfast is full of traditional Irish fare that simply consumes the entire plate and easily your stomach. This breakfast of champions includes the essentials of starting your day.

• Always a hot cup of tea, usually with cream and sugar
• A wonderful piece of brown bread with a side of sweet, creamy butter. Brown bread is dense and thick, prefect for soaking up soup or any remains on the plate and has no comparison on a cold day for making you feel cozy. It is made with milled wheat and each county supposedly has their own versions which all originated in monasteries around the country.

Now on to the hard stuff,
We will start with the potatoes and work the description around clockwise.
1. Some traditional breakfasts I've seen do not include the potatoes and perhaps this is because there is no more room on the plate to stick them. The potatoes in the picture our sliced thick, seasoned with salt, and fried, baked, or boiled. Paddy cakes, Irish potato cakes, can also grace the plate.

2. Bangers, mildly spiced sausages, usually two because only one on the plate would just be silly.

3. Slab of ham

4. Irish Beans

5. Rashers- Bacon in Ireland is back bacon. From my
research, and not my taste, back bacon is a meatier bacon than
what Americans eat, resembling Canadian bacon. It looks almost
like a tennis racket in shape and are cooked soft not crisp.

6. Pudding- Black and White. You will find black and white pudding
all over Ireland and many tourists are weary about a sampling. 'Why?' you may say, 'Bill Cosby always made me want pudding'. This pudding is...well... to my knowledge, different from the chocolate creaminess of Jell-O pudding. Black pudding, also called blood pudding, is made from pig blood. The recipe I found calls for, 1 quarter pint of fresh pig's blood, pieces of bread, milk, barley, beef suet, oatmeal, and seasonings. White pudding is essentially the same but without the blood. Interesting wikipedia fact, pre-1990 versions of pudding often used sheep brain matter as a binding agent- not sure why they stopped but prions usually aren't a welcome addition to my breakfast. (Just in case you're asking, suet is raw, hard fat from around the loins and kidney of cattle or sheep. Now you've learn another new thing, go spread your knowledge!)

7. And last but not least, 2-4 eggs, fried and left runny so that you can sop up and drips with the bread.

8. Not included in the beauty of a plate picture above is the tomato. Every plate of in the UCG cafeteria included a broiled half of a tomato.

For those wanting to try the enchanted breakfast but not wanting to pocket the airfare, Barrys-Tea.com has posted a recipe so you can learn the beauty and intricacies of making the fry-up at home. Enjoy to your heart's clogging desire! (...I'm going to go have some yogurt)