I remember my Irish grandmother. She was tall, broad, hard-handed, quick tempered, a marvelous singer and story-teller, an occasional cook, and a Victorian lady down to her corset, stockings, and laced shoes. This was in the 1950’s, before standards relaxed. She lived in New York City, but often came to visit us on the ramshackle hardscrabble farm of my childhood, her urban dresses and ways strangely out of place among the sheep, poultry, and potato fields.

I remember my grandmother patiently trying to teach me to cook Irish foods from County Leitrim, her home—colcannon, gur, barmbrack, and boxty. Boxty was a thick potato griddle-cake made with shredded raw potato and pan-fried in butter. Grandmother would have me shred white potato in the old box grater, catching the piles of slivers on a clean towel. Then she would wring the towel in her hard, strong hands, with the potato juice all dripping into the sink. She would mix the shreds with cooked mashed potatoes, flour, baking soda, egg and buttermilk, to make a thick batter that was carefully spooned into hot fat in the cast-iron skillet nearly everything got cooked in. The boxty cakes had to be watched as their bottoms turned crisp and brown, then they were carefully flipped to brown on the other face. Half the time I broke them in trying to turn them, but Grandmother only laughed. “Boxty on a griddle, boxty on a pan, if you can’t cook boxty, you’ll never catch a man”, Grandmother would recite.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to catch a man, at least not permanently, and not with boxty. Men, in my ten-year-old mind, were wild creatures that could indeed be lured by food from the wild—their natural habitat. I understood this. My brothers were easily baited in with cookies and pie. But boxty was different. Boxty was more than just man-bait. Boxty was something special between the two of us, Grandmother and I. Boxty was Grandmother’s tales and songs of Ireland, and me swathed in an apron and standing on an upturned milk crate so I could reach the top of the cook-stove. Boxty was fields of potato blossom, spring rains and hot summer days, and the dust smell of the potato harvest. Boxty was the taste of crisply hot potato cakes with butter and molasses on a winter morning. Boxty was magic.

Grandmother died when I was twelve. My family moved from the farm, and we gradually forgot about being Irish. My brothers ate pizza and fast food with their friends. We became American. My parents passed away also. In the fullness of time I caught a man, two, in fact, but both slipped the hook and returned to the wild. I did not make boxty for either of them. Food wasn’t magical for them, and they would not have understood that it could be.

It doesn’t matter. I still make boxty sometimes, just for myself, and for Grandmother. She understands.

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Recipes for Boxty—the dish is something between a pancake and a biscuit. There are many ways of making it. Boxty is from northwestern Ireland.

Sweet-milk Boxty

1 cup mashed potatoes

1 cup shredded raw white potato, with the shreds rolled in a tea towel and wrung dry

1 cup white flour sifted with

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp white sugar (optional)

½ tsp salt

1 large egg

1 cup +/- sweet milk

Buttermilk or sour-milk Boxty

1 cup mashed potatoes

1 cup shredded raw white potato, with the shreds rolled in a tea towel and wrung dry

1 cup white flour sifted with

1 ½ tsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

1 tsp white sugar (optional)

½ tsp salt

1 large egg

1 cup +/- buttermilk, or sour milk, or plain yogurt

Either case:

Mix all together, adding the milk ¼ cup at a time. The consistency should be like a thick cream, a bit less than for biscuit and more than for pancake. Different climate conditions will take more or less milk. Let stand for a few minutes.

Skillet version—good if the batter is on the thin side: Put 1-2 tsp butter or cooking fat in a large iron griddle or skillet and heat until a drop of water dances on the surface. Put the heat down a bit.

Drop soup-spoonsful of batter on the skillet. Cook 2 minute per side or until cooked through and crisp-brown.

Oven baked version—good if the batter is on the stiff side: Preheat the oven to 400*. Thickly grease a cookie pan. Drop soup-spoonsful of batter 2” apart on the cookie pan. Bake in the oven 15-20 minutes or until golden on top and crisp-brown underneath.