Madame Benoît cooks an Irish dish for St. Patrick's Day, 1956
The chef arrived at CBC's Open House with props, potatoes and a poem, for a lesson in cooking champ
If you're looking for some good Irish fare on St. Patrick's Day, forget the green beer and green shakes, and recipes with exotic or lengthy lists of ingredients.
CBC Archives has a lesson with Madame Jehane Benoît, who showed CBC viewers in 1956 how mashing some milk, onions and lots of butter could make the humble potato into a champ.
She explained that it was "mashing the potatoes ... the real Irish way," rhyming off a poem about "an old woman who lived in a lamp."
"Now I'll be the old lady with my beetle and I'm going to show you how to do such a thing."
Step one was to start with the salt, and she demonstrated not measuring out a small amount, but "dip into the salt ... don't be afraid."
"You do not peel the potatoes," she continued, because they were peeled after cooking.
That is when the beetling began. "The beetle is just a wooden masher," she explained.
"Don't think of it as mashed potatoes as we do here ... they really are potatoes that are used for a meal."
Hers was no ordinary beetle, but one which had been brought from Ireland by her great-grandmother, who "had the wanderlust like me and she went to Ireland."
What followed turned the dish into champ, a quick addition of warm milk with onions, or a variety of other vegetables — "what I used today is spring onions, which perhaps is the favourite of all champ."
The final touch to the dish is butter.
'It may be a dash fattening'
"Make a hole in the potatoes, and you take a good-sized piece of butter and put it right in ...but don't mix it in."
Admittedly it's a little fattening, she allowed, "or a little more than a dash fattening when there's lots of butter, but it's so good. Don't miss to beetle your champ on St. Patrick's Day."
