Because the English have ruled or tried to rule Ireland since Henry VIII declared himself King of Ireland in 1541, the names of numerous Irish foods have made their way into English. One of the earliest of these Irish adoptions was bonny-clabber, a dish of sour, clotted milk whose name derives from the Irish words for milk (bainne) and for mud (daba). It was also in the seventeenth century that the English adopted the word graddan, a name given by the Irish to grain that is parched in a hot pan before being used to make graddan cake; the source of graddan is gread-aim, a Gaelic phrase literally meaning I scorch. In the mid eighteenth century, the English also came to enjoy an Irish cake that they called barnbrack; this name, however, was actually a corruption of the original Irish name, bairghean breac, meaning speckled cake, so called because of the currants dotting its surface. In the mid nineteenth century, several other Irish dishes were also embraced by the English, including crubeen and stelk. In Irish, crubeen means little hoof, the dish being so named because it contains a pig’s foot. Stelk, on the other hand, is a vegetable dish made by mashing together potatoes, onions, and beans; its name derives from the Irish stailc, meaning sulky or stubborn, and may have been bestowed on the dish because the vegetables were not easily mashed (likewise, in English, butter-makers call cream sulky when churning fails to turn it into butter). An even more recent borrowing from Irish gastronomy is drisheen, a sausage made from sheep’s blood, milk, and seasoning; this dish derives its name from the Irish word for intestine, drisin.
In the scorching heat of summers, one can’t resist the temptation of indulging in a classic chilled dessert made by thickening and slightly souring milk, then setting it on ice for several hours. The addition of sugar and nutmeg enhances the overall taste of this treat. Interestingly, the closest contemporary counterpart to this delicacy is yogurt served in a similar fashion.