Irish cookery has been well served by Myrtle Allen, a farmer’s wife who opened a restaurant in her country house near Shangarry in Co Cork in the early Seventies, and her daughter-in-law Darina Allen, who founded the Ballymaloe Cookery School in 1983.

The timely release this week of a paperback version of Darina Allen’s award-winning Irish Traditional Cooking (Kyle Cathie, £14.99) makes it easy to choose something delicious with which to celebrate St Patrick’s Day.

It could be a Jerusalem artichoke soup, which comes with a pithy note about Irish country houses — big shooting estates often cultivate a patch of these stumpy little tubers, it seems, because they are so attractive to pheasants.

Or an Irishman’s omelette, of fried bacon crumbled into softly cooked onions, mixed with diced cooked potato (of course), chopped parsley and chives and good eggs, and cooked gently until set.

Or boxty pancakes, made from a batter of mashed cooked potatoes mixed with grated raw potatoes, flour, bicarbonate of soda and buttermilk, fried until crisp and eaten with crisp rashers of bacon or pure Irish honey.

Or Irish stew, described by Samuel Beckett in Molloy as “a nourishing and economical dish, if a little indigestible”. He obviously had not cooked the Ballymaloe version with mutton or lamb chops, baby onions, carrots, stock, potatoes, thyme, parsley and chives, all of which sounds extremely digestible. Or the wonderful Barmbrack (currant tea bread), or boiled fruit cake or fluffy lemon pudding. Did I say it was easy to choose? I was wrong.

In the end I went for Mollie Keane’s Potato and Bacon Cakes, in a tribute to the great women cooks of Ireland.

Ingredients
Serves 4

Prep: 20 min
Cook: 15 min

4 rashers of streaky bacon
450g cooked potatoes, mashed
30g plain white flour
Salt and pepper
Butter or dripping for frying

METHOD

Remove the rinds from the bacon and chop it finely. Fry the bacon without any additional fat until crisp. Remove and drain on a sheet of absorbent paper.

Stir the bacon into the mashed potatoes with the flour, salt and pepper. Form the mixture into four cakes.

Heat the butter or dripping in a frying pan, add the cakes and cook them gently for about five minutes on each side until golden and crisp.

Times Recommends

• How to season a wok
• Chicago Rib Shack hits back at its critics
• Gordon Ramsay: Indian barbecue