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| Mrs. Miller, inventor of an Irish potato casserole. |
The first actual recipe I could locate comes from the previous year, from the The Ouachita Telegraph of Monroe, LA. On July 5, 1873, they offered a recipe on how to boil a potato.
It involved putting a potato into a pot with water and salt, boiling the water. They then recommend emptying the pot of water and letting the excess water boil off a little. "This is an Irish recipe," the paper tells us, "and a good one." This exact recipe, with the exact same wording, made the rounds of newspapers for about a half a decade.
So that's it. The first food Americans associated with the Irish was the lowly potato, which is not an Irish food at all, but American from Peru. The potato made its way to Ireland sometime about 1570, supposedly brought to Cork by Sir Walter Raleigh, and, over the years, moved to dominance in the Irish diet, and then became the source of the Irish starving.
By 1873, Ireland's famine had been over for about 20 years, had killed more than a million people, and had caused the mass exodus of a quarter of the Irish population. And so the Irish brought the potato back to America. If any food can claim to be the first Irish-American food, it is this.
But I'm not here to tell you how to boil a potato. We haven't even been given a recipe, but instead a technique for making one of the base elements of a recipe. I mean, sure, you could just boil up a potato and eat it like that if you wished. You could also live in a dark room without sunlight and take a vow of silence, if a monastic dedication to blandness is your preference.
No, we yanks are known for our culinary inventiveness, and today I will offer a recipe for "Irish potatoes" invented by a Texan in 1950 and printed in the Dallas Morning News. It's called the One Dish Casserole Meal, which is perfect, because what could be more 1950's than casserole?
The creator was Mrs. Jack Miller, although she had never really settled on one recipe, making it up every time she cooked it, a technique of winging it called "guess and gosh." Pressed to write it down, here's what she came up with:
ONE-DISH MEAL
Ingredients: Two peeled and sliced potatoes, 1 large white onion, 4 ground meat patties, 1 large or two small tomatoes, salt and pepper, 1/4 cup water, bread crumbs.
Method: Line casserole with butter and arrange sliced potatoes as first layer. Top with layer of sliced onion. Fry meat patties, seasoned with salt and pepper, in skillet until rich brown. Pour 1/2 cup water in skillet to make gravy. Place meat on top of onions and tuck small slices of okra around meat patties and on top.
Last, use sliced tomatoes as top layer and sprinkle lightly with bread crumbs. Pour meat juice all over and bake in 350 degree for one hour.
Of course, there's nothing especially Irish about this, although one must applaud the nod to traditional southern cooking with the addition of okra. Thankfully, American cooks always knew the secret to making a dish more Irish, which was the addition of corned beef.
Here is a recipe from a publication called The Repository, published in Canton OH, from March 15 of 1951:
CORNED BEEF AND POTATO CASSEROLEThis sounds like a parody of 1950s cooking, of course. Corn flakes? So does the following recipe, from the Augusta Chronicle from March 9, 1956:
3 cups warm seasoned mashed potatoes
2 cups (one 12-oz. can) chopped corned beef
3 cups corn flakes, crushed
1 cup milk
1.2 cup catsup
1/4 t pepper
3/4 t salt
Spread mashed potatoes lightly over bottom and sides of greased baking dish 8 x 8 x 2 inches. Combine remaining ingredients in order and mix well. Place corned beef mixture in potato shell letting potatoes form border around edges. Bake in preheated moderate over (350 F.) about 45 minutes. Yields six servings, about one cup each.
ST. PATRICK DAY CORNED BEEF POTATO CASSEROLEThere is something about the idea of combining butter, ketchup, and mustard into a single sauce that makes me tremble.
8 slices cooked corn beef
4 hot boiled potatoes
2 large tomatoes, cut into 1/4 inch slices
1 tablespoon prepared mustard
1/2 cup catsup
1/2 cup butter, melted
1/2 cup water
Cut potatoes in half lengthwise. Place halves cut-side up in a baking dish (8 x 12 x 2). Cover each potato half with a slice of tomato and then a slice of corned beef. Combine mustard, catsup, butter and water. Pour over corned beef. Cover dish with aluminum foil and bake 20 to 25 minutes in a hot, over 400 degrees F. Spoon sauce in dish over meat before serving. Serve hot.
Of course, I came of age in the 1970s in Minnesota, where it just wasn't a casserole unless you dumped a can of cream of mushroom soup into it. As it happens, I have a recipe for just such a thing, this one offered up by Mrs. Myrtice Smith of Marietta, GA, and published in the Marietta Journal in 1972. It is as follows:
IRISH POTATO CASSEROLEJust reading the recipe I am reliving an entire decade.
6 medium potatoes, peeled and sliced thin
6 slices mild cheese, cut into small pieces
1 medium onion, sliced
1/2 bell pepper, sliced
1/2 tsp. pepper
1 can cream of mushroom soup
1/2 cup milk
Fill a casserole with a layer of potatoes, cheese, onions and pepper. Continue until all ingredients have been used. Add pepper and cover with mushroom soup and milk. Cover and bake in 350 degree over for 1 hour or until done.
This is probably a dish that can be done well, but such a revision would be less a foodie revival than a rescue, as these recipes are awful.
There was always something about home cooking in the 1950s that makes me think of when I was a broke bachelor in my 20s and would try to make a meal by squirting ketchup on a Ritz cracker, with recipes seeming like bizarre assemblages of prepackaged constituent ingredients and with the random addition of condiments, and by the 70s we had deteriorated further, dumping leftovers into bowls and covering them with soup and calling it a meal.
But there's nothing inherently wrong with the American casserole. It was apparently invented in 1866 by a French Canadian immigrant to New Hampshire named Elmire Jolicoeur and consisted of a mix of rice and savory meats cooked in deep earthenware dishes, and that sounds perfectly lovely.
More than that, casseroles are one of the most sociable of dishes, or, at least, that was true in my childhood, when people would inevitably bring a homemade hotdish to any group social event, which, as a result, means that for many Midwesterners casserole is the definitive comfort food.
Amy Thielen of "Heartland Table" -- and a fellow Minnesotan -- has tackled the casserole a few times, and it's worth looking at how she has approached the topic if you're looking to get away from processed cheese and cans of soup.
While she's still crushing up crackers to give the dish its crust, which is so Minnesotan I can hardly stand it, she prefers aged gouda or cheddar for the cheese and uses heavy cream for the sauce, as well as a larger selection of seasoning and vegetables, including thyme, nutmeg, leeks, celery, and bay leaf.
No ketchup, although if you're going to make your potato casserole with corned beef, you may want a more savory sauce. You might consider a mustard and brown sugar, or onion and lemon, or both. And consider okra, as an homage to Mrs. Miller.
