“Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona duit!” They say that everyone is Irish on St. Patrick’s Day, so you had best fortify yourself for the long, festive day ahead, starting early, with a full Irish breakfast. You will need to prepare yourself for the onslaught of green beer, corned beef and cabbage, chocolate Guinness cake and Irish coffee, not to mention marching for miles in the nearest St. Patrick’s Day parade. There will be lots to do and see, and you can’t let your energy flag.
Breakfast is too early in the day for a celebratory pint of Guinness, I must emphasize, without scolding. We are not in college. This is not Key West. There are rules. But otherwise you can revel in a hearty full Irish fry up: sausages and bacon, eggs, fried soda bread, good Irish butter, tomatoes, mushrooms, and maybe throw in some beans. With tea, lots of tea. To the unsuspecting, this looks very similar to a full English breakfast. Try to keep your countries and traditions straight.
Here is a guide Traditional Irish Breakfast
Epicurious also has options about a proper Irish fry up
I still recoil with horror at the notion of corned beef. The memory of cooked cabbage odor haunts me all these years since I last smelled it, wafting up the stairway from my mother’s kitchen to my lair at the back of the house. I will NEVER cook a cabbage. As always, we will celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with chocolate and Guinness, as God intended.
While other families are preparing corned beef and cabbage for St. Patrick’s Day, we will be digging through our cookbooks for another chocolate stout cake recipe. We will honor the blessed saint, the foe of snakes, in our own sweet way: with chocolate stout cupcakes. I love a good cupcake – perfectly proportioned with an ideal ratio of icing to cake. Food52’s Chocolate Stout Cupcakes I still have bottles of Guinness in the pantry from last year’s celebrations – I think I might have to buy some fresh, just to be sure that everything is perfect.
If you’d rather have cake, be my guest. Please, just save us a couple of slices. Chocolate Stout Cake
Recently I chatted with one of our neighbors when I was out for a morning walk with Luke the wonder dog. This fellow always carries a mug and I have assumed he was taking his coffee for his early morning strolls. (I cannot walk the dog, listen to Slate Gabfest podcasts AND carry a Diet Coke and a dog poop bag in the mornings. I have a limited skill set, I’m afraid.)
Luke wanted to get acquainted. While going through all of the usual dog rituals of sniffing and leash dancing, I found out that the neighbor’s dog is named “Guinness.” I asked if there was a good story about the dog’s name. Maybe he had a secret Lulu Guinness handbag collection, or was noted in the Book of World Records for some perilous feat? Sadly, no. His dog was named after the Irish stout. He is a very dark, very tiny, yapper of a dog. Perhaps he has his own fantasies of a more picturesque neighborhood, one where he is strolled along the cobbles down to the pub late on a golden summer afternoon, to lift a pint with his human. A nice little daydream that Guinness entertains, instead of resigning himself the prosaic suburban reality of the early morning stroll down our street, only to endure the indignity of Luke getting sniffy and overly familiar. And now I wonder what our neighbor is really drinking…
St. Patrick’s Day is Monday. “Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona duit!” Luke is looking forward to another sidewalk encounter with our neighbor’s dog. We can stage an exclusive St. Patrick’s Day parade through the neighborhood. We’ll even bring a mug of Guinness. Shhh.
“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy,
which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.”
—William Butler Yeats
Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.
