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A Common Fancy
Appears in
By David Bowers
Published 2014
Take the crumbs of a penny loaf grated and a pint of cream ten eggs half the whites, green it with the juice of spinage, and shred a little tansy grass in, then boil it to a hasty pudding, put in two spoonsfulls of orange flower water, sugar and nutmeg to your taste then fry it.
—from an 18th century Irish cookbook manuscript
Beyond all those cakes on the tea table, we do eat desserts in Ireland. Apples are a running theme, but we use them, like potatoes, in a lot of different ways—from the Potato-Apple Cake, a recipe that dates back several hundred years, to the soft fluffiness of the pudding called Apple Snow, to sharply sweet Irish Apple Tarts, not drowned with cinnamon but spiced only with cloves.