Britain and Ireland · Volume 36, The Grass, the Grain and the Border That Doesn’t Cut the Table

Colcannon

Name: Colcannon
Total time: 40 min
Yield: Serves 8
Cuisine: Ireland
Ingredients: 450 g old potatoes, such as Golden Wonder or Kerr's Pink; 450 g parsnips; 450 g curly kale; 250 to 300 ml creamy milk; 2 tbsp chopped scallions; 55 g butter; to taste salt and black pepper

The Republic

Colcannon, mashed potato with kale: a rustic bowl of pale creamy mashed potato flecked evenly with small dark green pieces of kale, a well pressed into the centre filled with a pool of melted golden butter.

An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.

Time: 40 minutes

Researched: 1 source cited
Reviewed: Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
Cooked: Not yet cooked and reported

Darina Allen of Ballymaloe distinguishes colcannon, potato mashed with a cooked green, kale, cabbage, or in the Dublin variant parsnip, from champ, potato beaten with scallions cooked in milk and no green vegetable at all, two dishes that share an ingredient list but not a method. She attributes the Dublin parsnip variant specifically to the late broadcaster Gay Byrne, "Uncle Gaybo," who "insisted that it was the Dublin way of making it and the way his mother always made it," and confirms the same Halloween tradition barmbrack carries below: "Threepenny or sixpenny bits were sometimes hidden in the colcannon at Hallowe'en for the children to find."

The Republic

The Famine of 1845 to 1852 deserves real weight here, not a passing mention. What actually happened to Irish food culture as a result was near-total demographic and dietary collapse built on a single crop's failure, and its long shadow is the reason the potato's later re-embrace, colcannon, champ, boxty, reads as something closer to reclamation than simple continuity. But the single national story of universal hunger is itself a simplification worth resisting. Regina Sexton, UCC's food historian and a contributor to the Atlas of the Great Irish Famine (Cork University Press, 2012), has researched an unpublished nineteenth-century recipe book alongside the letters of George Boole, UCC's first Professor of Mathematics, and found that food and dining culture at the end of the Famine "was far more complex than the stereotype of potatoes and little else," and that the Famine's impact in Cork specifically was "very mixed, where people starved while others had plenty." This chapter repeats her corrective deliberately: the Famine was not evenly experienced, and abundance persisted alongside starvation in the same counties, which is a harder and more honest story than a single national narrative can carry.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Serves 8. About 40 minutes.

Ingredients

450 g old potatoes, such as Golden Wonder or Kerr's Pink
450 g parsnips
450 g curly kale
250 to 300 ml creamy milk
2 tbsp chopped scallions
55 g butter
to taste salt and black pepper

Method

Boil the potato and parsnip together until tender, drain, steam-dry over low heat for a minute, and mash.
Separately boil the kale until just tender, drain very well, and chop finely.
Heat the milk with the scallions for 3 to 4 minutes.
Fold the kale through the warm mash, then beat in the hot milk and scallions to a fluffy purée.
Finish with the butter, season with salt and black pepper, and serve with a well of melted butter in the centre.

What a modern chef changes

The same mash, made silkier, with the green kept as its own distinct texture rather than lost inside it.

Kit note, not tied to a numbered rung

Method

Pass the potato and parsnip mash through a chinois after mashing, for a genuinely smooth, restaurant-grade purée the traditional method, mashed by hand or fork, never quite achieves.
Blitz half the kale to a fine, bright purée in a high-power blender, and keep the other half roughly chopped, folding both through separately, for a dish that reads as one colour but carries two distinct textures of the same vegetable.
Dehydrate a handful of kale leaves to a crisp, then crush them over the top at the table, restoring some genuine texture contrast to a dish that is otherwise entirely soft.

Open in the atlas: cook mode, scaling and tick off lists