Chicken with colcannon, black pudding fricassee & whisky sauce.

A late twentieth century dish from Ulster. From, in fact, the Bushmills Inn adjacent to Bushmills itself, the oldest distillery on earth. The dish is significant in combining classic Irish ingredients in a creative but unfussy way, might as well be much older, and tastes extremely good. This is handy fare to disabuse the judgmental about the nonexistent nature of good Irish food: Not a single dish but rather a unitary dinner. Four servings.

  For the colcannon:

• 1½ lb potatoes, boiled and mashed
• 6 Tablespoons unsalted butter
• ½ Savoy cabbage
• a diced leek
• a bunch of diced scallions
• 2 oz heavy cream
• salt and white pepper

For the whiskey sauce:

• 1 Tablespoon unsalted butter
• 2 or 3 minced shallots
• about ½ teaspoon dried thyme
• 1 Tablespoon Irish whiskey
• 1 Tablespoon grain mustard
• 1 cup hard cider
• 10 oz heavy cream

For the fricassee:

• 2 Tablespoons unsalted butter
• a diced shallot
• about ½ teaspoon dried thyme
• generous cup peeled and roughly chopped apples
• about 9 oz diced black pudding
• about 2 Tablespoons hard cider

For the chicken:

• 1 Tablespoon unsalted butter
• 4 thighs or breasts ( see the Notes)

And:

• some minced scallion greens or chives

1. Make the colcannon and keep it warm: Melt the butter over low heat and braise the cabbage and leek until not quite tender; you will want the merest hint of crunch.
2. Add the scallions followed by the cream, then the mashed potatoes and season with salt and white pepper.

Preheat the oven to 350˚.

3. Make the whiskey sauce and keep it warm: Soften the shallots over medium low heat in the butter and stir the thyme into the pan.
4. Add the whiskey, let it flare, then add the mustard followed by the cider and reduce it by half.
5. Add the cream and reduce it by half in turn.
6. Make the fricassee and keep it warm: Soften the shallot in the butter over medium heat, stir in the thyme followed by the apple and marmalade.
7. Stir the pot for about a minute then add the black pudding to warm it through, then moisten the fricassee with a little cider.
8. Cook the chicken in an ovenproof dish or a sheetpan: Melt the butter over medium high heat and cook the chicken skinside down for about 2 minutes to brown it.
9. Flip the chicken and brown the other side.
10. Shove the chicken in the oven and cook until done, usually in no more than 10 minutes.
11. Assemble dinner:
12. Put the colcannon on each of four plates, top it with the chicken, surround them with the fricassee and surround the fricassee with some sauce.
13. Scatter the greens over the dish.

Notes:

-Chicken thighs are more forgiving than breasts, but if you leave the first joint of the wing on the breast the presentation is lovely.

-The original recipe describes the sauce as including the mustard but omits it from the instructions.

-It also specifies white wine rather than cider for the sauce, and water rather than cider for the fricassee.

-The original recipe uses fresh rather than dried thyme but its flavor is too insipid to stand up to the whiskey and mustard.

-The whiskey specified is, of course, Bushmills. Black Bush is good; the drier northern whiskey is far superior to anything but the more expensive stuff from the republic.

-The recipe along with a number of other good ones comes from an unlikely source, Irish Country House Cooking: The Blue Book Recipe Collection compiled by Georgina Campbell. The Book Book is but a catalog of luxury hotels in loose alliance, somewhat like Chateaux & Relais in the United States. Compilations of this sort usually are advertising vehicles that consist of an arbitrary accumulation of appalling recipes put together for a quick Euro. The Blue Book Collection , however, is a keeper.