A one-pot Liberties tenement supper of sausages, bacon, onions and potatoes simmered slowly in a pale stock until the sausages bloat and the potatoes soak up the fat. The dish saved the household scraps the day before payday.
Where to eat it: 4 restaurants across 1 city.
Coddle emerged in the eighteenth-century Liberties tenements as a one-pot way to use up the week's leftover sausages and bacon rashers before they spoiled. The recipe held no roasted vegetables and was famously deglazed only with cooking water, never browned. Jonathan Swift and James Joyce both wrote about coddle; Joyce's Leopold Bloom passes a coddle pot in Ulysses. The dish is the working-class Dublin signature, served still at Spitalfields on The Coombe, The Brazen Head and Gallagher's Boxty House. The pale, broth-soaked colour is the dish's tell; properly cooked, the sausages should split.
Common allergens: Gluten, Sulphites
Tip from the editors. Do not let the pot boil hard; the sausages should never brown. The pale broth is the point and the soda bread is for the gravy.
This is the TableJourney editorial recipe, modelled on the canonical bistro / counter version. The first place to try the dish in its city of origin is below.
Spitalfields on The Coombe in Dublin's Liberties, a Michelin Bib Gourmand pub-set kitchen serving the city's most considered classical Irish menu.
Signature: Tom Crean's oyster stew, Slow-cooked beef cheek, Dublin coddle
Order: The seasonal stew with soda bread, and the coddle when it lands on the daily card.
Tip: Tuesday to Saturday dinner only, 17:00 to 21:00. Walk through the public bar and ask for the back dining room.
The Brazen Head on Bridge Street Lower in Dublin 8, established 1198 as Ireland's oldest pub, the present 1754 coaching inn serves Irish stew and trad sessions nightly.
Signature drink: Guinness with an Irish stew
Food: Full Irish pub kitchen, food to 21:00
Tip: Food served until 21:00 daily; nightly trad music sessions from 21:00. The back snug holds eight; the courtyard runs summer only.
Gallagher's Boxty House on Temple Bar in Dublin, Pádraic Óg Gallagher's three-room canon of boxty, coddle and smoked salmon, the boxty reference in town.
Signature: Boxty pancake, Dublin coddle, Smoked Irish salmon
Order: The boxty pancake stuffed with beef and Guinness, with a half pint of stout.
Tip: The middle dining room is the calm one; the front bar fills with traffic from Temple Bar Square after 19:00.
The Stag's Head on Dame Court in Dublin 2, a Victorian pub since 1860 with original mahogany and a stained-glass roof, the city's archetypal Dublin pub interior.
Signature drink: Guinness with an Irish stew
Food: Irish pub menu, full kitchen
Tip: Two bars; the downstairs is the trad pub, the upstairs Parliament Hotel is the late bar. Irish stew at lunch is the value play.
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