General Vegetable Soup

While Irish cuisine has shaken off the shackles of  ridicule and abasement, there still remain some charming examples of its humble origins. General Vegetable Soup is one such recipe.

On our first grand tour of the Emerald Isle we made certain to visit the acclaimed Ballymaloe House, a restaurant, country inn and cooking school. Already fans of Myrtle Allen’s Ballymaloe Cookbook, we happily anticipated the splendors of Irish Revival Gastronomy (my term, not theirs). Our luncheon visit did not disappoint. And yet…

Included in the fair-faced and freckled server’s litany of specials was General Vegetable Soup.  This magnificently named dish set our imaginations whirling.
Was General Vegetable a venerated leader of an early campaign for Irish independence? Perhaps his legacy goes back even farther; could he have led one last stand in the Irish Confederate Wars before Cromwell’s tyrannical conquest?

After all, China’s Tso Tsung-t’ang fathered the renowned General Tso’s Chicken; shouldn’t the Irish have an equal claim to glory?

Making this myth even more delicious was the favorable comparison to Colonel Mustard, the great white hunter/British imperialist/sometime murderer in the board game Clue.

Hungry for information as well as lunch we pressed for details. Who is the soup named for?

A perplexed stare was the reply.

Then, carefully, slowly, as if speaking to slow-learning children, our server said, “General vegetable. You know, just general vegetables: lettuce, cabbages, turnips, old carrots — whatever they have back there. It changes all the time.  There’s no recipe. It’s just general vegetables.”

So clean out the vegetable bin this St. Patrick’s Day and simmer up a grand old pot of General Vegetable Soup. Click for the recipe.

Make it a meal with  Malinda Sullivan’s magnificent Irish Soda Bread.

Here are two other highlights of our trip: the ancient monastery and graveyard of Clonmacnoice and the drive through holy water dispenser at a lovely church in Cork.
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