There are some iconic Irish dishes which you can picture immediately, like colcannon, soda bread, barmbrack. Boxty isn’t quite like that. Despite having a history of over two hundred years, popping up time and again in cookbooks, poems and children’s rhymes, boxty remains stubbornly hard to pin down. This is partly because it comes in so many different forms, and partly because until the 1980s, it was rarely eaten outside of Ireland. Or more specifically, outside of northwest Ireland. 'I was reared on boxty,' explains Pádraic Óg Gallagher, who comes from Co. Leitrim in the northwest, and founded Gallagher’s Boxty House in Dublin in 1988. 'In the research I’ve done, it doesn’t really exist anywhere else in the country. In fact, a lot of people have no idea what boxty is. We grew up with it.' In fact, boxty is so regional that there are plans to apply for PGI status. But despite its modern popularity, and firm place on lists of 'top 10 foods to try in Ireland', boxty would likely still be almost unknown outside the northwest if not for Pádraic Óg. His restaurant – Gallagher’s Boxty House – has taken boxty from near anonymity to a must-try food for visitors to Dublin.

While boxty has many different variations, there’s one thing that is essential: it starts with raw potato, not cooked. 'What makes boxty different to other potato breads is you grate the raw potato and extract the moisture out of it and add that back into it with some mash…if it’s all mash, it’s not boxty, definitely not.' Pádraic Óg explains. With most potato-based dishes, like gnocchi and potato farls, only cooked, mashed potato is used. Boxty’s foundation of raw potato makes it stand out but it also makes it tricky to get right. 'Boxty had been dying out, until we kind of revived it. It’s a very labour intensive labour-of-love to make it; it takes a long time to grate the potato and extract the moisture from it.' There are stories that the starch that settled at the bottom of the strained out potato water would be used when washing clothes, but as with most things boxty, there is little concrete evidence.

What is certain though, Pádraic Óg emphasises, is that there should be absolutely no egg. Adding egg to enrich traditionally austere Irish dishes is common in Irish-American food. Irish-American cookbooks and recipes tend to make gleeful use of ingredients that would have been a luxury back in Ireland in the nineteenth century, when scores of Irish people emigrated to America during the famine. While adding eggs to scones and soda bread may now be accepted in Ireland, albeit with a raised eyebrow, as an Irish-American quirk, for Pádraic Óg adding them to boxty is a bridge too far. 'There’s no egg in boxty. The simpler it is the better.'

Most versions of boxty fall into one of four categories: boxty-in-the-pan, boxty-on-the-griddle, boxty dumplings and boxty bread. Boxty-on-the-pan is a boxty pancake, made with puréed raw potato, while boxty-on-the-griddle (also rather confusingly known as boxty bread or boxty cakes) is more of a patty-shaped potato cake. Baked boxty bread is made by mixing mashed and raw potato with flour, and is then leavened with bread soda or baking powder, and baked into a loaf like soda bread. Boxty dumplings on the other hand are made with a dough very similar to the one used for baked boxty bread, but then rolled into large balls and boiled for around 45 minutes. However, the exact recipes for each of these variations are far from set in stone. Quite the opposite; within the fairly loose stipulation that the recipe should not include egg and should always include grated raw potato, boxty is a veritable potato playground. 'There are as many recipes as there are parishes, as there are houses.' Gallagher smiles. Although, that doesn’t mean there aren’t arguments. 'We’re a little bit like the Italians you know, and their pasta. ‘The people over the hills don’t know how to make boxty.’'

Pádraic Óg hasn’t been afraid to update and change traditional recipes as part of his efforts to revive interest in boxty. The team at Gallagher’s Boxty House serve boxty fries for example, made from strips of boxty pancakes. They also serve the typically tennis ball-sized boxty dumplings as small dumplings the size of gnocchi instead, and then pan fry them in butter. Boxty is served as a dessert with apple and cinnamon, as a main course with mushrooms and blue cheese and as a loaf with Irish goat cheese. Despite his fascination with the history of the dish, Pádraic Óg Gallagher has always been clear that boxty belongs in the present, and he doesn’t want it frozen in amber. 'What we try and do is take the old recipes and bring them into the twenty-first century.'

Despite its popularity in children’s rhymes and the abundance of folkore surrounding the dish, there is little concrete evidence of what boxty’s origins actually are. As part of his dissertation Pádraic Óg was able to trace the earliest written references back to William Carlton’s Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, published 1828, but it likely goes back much further than this. Although the book doesn’t offer insights into the dish’s early evolution, it does rule out one popular myth surrounding boxty: that it was invented during the Great Famine.

The catastrophic Irish potato famine started in the mid 1840s. Boxty’s presence in a book over fifteen years prior to the famine confirms it was very well-established by the 1820s, and can’t have come about as a result of the famine. But, more practically speaking, Pádraic Óg explains that no one could have made boxty, which requires very high quality potatoes, during a potato blight. 'It wasn’t a famine dish, it could never be a famine dish,' Pádraic Óg explained to me in some exasperation, 'because you cannot make boxty with bad potatoes, as a way of extending your potatoes to make bread.' In fact, according to Gallagher boxty is the very opposite of a famine dish. 'It was a celebratory dish more than anything else because it was labour intensive.' The need for a grater to grate the potatoes, a cloth or pillowcase to squeeze out any excess water and a deft hand to shape the pancakes makes boxty fairly fiddly, so it was historically brought out for special occasions like St. Brigid’s day, alongside colcannon and freshly churned butter.

The potato pancakes or dumplings were eaten to celebrate the patroness saint of Ireland and dairy, as well as the coming of spring. Pádraic Óg added that in his family they were also eaten as a weekly treat. 'You had a choice either fish or boxty on a Friday, and it was always boxty for me.'

Potatoes are, unfortunately, undeniably something of a punchline with Irish cuisine. But the work of Pádraic Óg Gállagher – and the deliciousness of boxty – underscores the fact that the nation’s ability to endlessly iterate on the humblest combination of ingredients – potatoes and flour – deserves as much respect and attention as Italy’s endless reinvention of semolina and water. And while Irish food has only received a fraction of the international attention of Italian food so far, with luck boxty will be just the beginning.