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Boxty on the griddle,
Boxty in the pan,
If you can't make boxty,
You'll never get your man

I have fond childhood memories of boxty. There are variations on the recipe for boxty and you will find that the word can be used for very different things. In my experience it is a thin pancake made from potatoes and flour and fried on a pan.

I have also seen recipes where it is baked in an oven into a cake. I've never tried that myself. In some areas apparently the thin pancake is called Rasp. According to The Hiberno-English Dictionary a rasp was a tin can which was opened out and had holes punched into it and was then used to grate the potatoes. The name of the tool came to be applied to the pancake.

Some - in fact most - recipes that I have seen include mashed as well as grated raw potatoes in the ingredients. The minority recipe, and the one that I remember from growing up, is made from raw potatoes only:

Get:
1 part grated, raw potatoes
1 part plain flour

Then:
Mix the two together and add in an egg and milk until you get a nice liquid consistency and then fry it both sides.

It's a simple recipe although the grating takes some preparation. From reading about it on the web it seems to be associated with Halloween as a kind of celebratory food. But from what I remember it was simply just a way of using up the last of the old potatoes.

Boxty is believed to have originated during the Great Hunger as a way of making unedible potatoes edible by mixing them with whatever was available, hence the variety of recipes.

For all of its origins as a cheap type of peasant food I have happy memories of boxty nights. In hindsight those were probably the nights when there wasn't money for anything else but I didn't care; I just loved boxty.

Even better though was the next day and the day after when the left-over boxty pancakes that we couldn't finish off that night would be reheated and served as part of an Irish breakfast. While it tasted great on the first night it was even more lovely when reheated and accompanied by bacon and eggs.

The food we ate at home was plain and we didn't have any great culinary tradition. Except boxty! That's one recipe I look forward to passing on to my children!

Learn more about this author, Sean McGoldrick.
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