It’s recipe Friday again, hooray! I love finding interesting recipes to share with you and I hope that you enjoy reading about and/or making wonderful food from Ireland. Apparently, this recipe is particularly popular in Dublin, hence the name. This recipe comes from “A Little Irish Cookbook,” and serves 4.
Dublin Coddle
- 1 pound high quality pork sausage links
- 1/2 pound meaty bacon slices
- 1 cup light stock, either vegetable, chicken, or left over from boiling a ham bone.
- 6 medium potatoes
- 2 medium onions
- salt and pepper to taste
Cut the bacon into 1-inch pieces. Bring the stock to a boil in a medium saucepan with a tight-fitting lid (that you can find! That’s always my problem!) and add the bacon and the sausages and simmer for about 5 minutes. Remove the meat from the liquid and pour the broth into another small bowl. Cut each of the sausages in 4 or 5 pieces. Peel the potatoes and cut into thick slices. Peel and slice the onions. Assemble the coddle by stacking a layer of potatoes, a layer of onions, half the sausages and bacon, then more potatoes, onions, sausages and bacon, then finish with a layer of potatoes. Pour the reserved stock over the whole stack and season with salt and pepper. Cover with that tight-fitting lid and simmer gently for about an hour. Taste, making sure the potatoes and onions are cooked through, then adjust the seasoning and serve hot.
Susannah Sharp 
This recipe reminds me of dinner at my Grandmothers. She moved here from Ireland and we would eat her authentic meals every sunday after church. Great memories and food!!!!
Lynda
Oh, really? How marvelous! This does sound like something you could eat on a Sunday afternoon, doesn’t it? Obviously you have a lot of Irish in you, then. My husband is about half-Irish (through the Butlers of Kilkenny) and so we really celebrate a lot of that heritage at my house. My little blog will go totally Irish in March, so make sure to come back and visit. Thanks for reading and commenting!
Hi Susanna, is the bacon cooked before it is put in with sauage or is it cooked in the first five minutes? Thanks, Marian
The recipe doesn’t say anything about cooking it, so I am assuming that it cooks in the boiling water and then in the hour-long steaming/simmering. I suppose, if that creeps you out, you could cook it in a fry pan (and the sausages too for that matter) and then add them to the dish. I don’t think they’d get overdone in the cooking process. Remember that Irish bacon is more like ham, really, so it doesn’t have as much fat to be soggy when cooked. I know my hubby likes his bacon really crisp, so he would probably prefer it cooked beforehand. I can’t imagine it making much difference in the finished dish, other than the water not having all the flavor from the cooking meat. If you do it that way, you may want to use more flavorful stock to compensate. I know I couldn’t bring myself to pour the bacon grease into the stock even though I know logically there’s not much difference from boiling it, so I’d probably just use more concentrated stock (ie two bullion cubes rather than one or the concentrated stuff without diluting it). You could even, if you wanted to vary the recipe a bit more, use ham instead of the bacon, although it doesn’t sound as good with the sausages to me as the bacon does. Hope that helps.
This recipe sound wonderful. Susannah. I’m going to try it this week!