Winter pleasures don’t get much simpler than a steaming pot of Irish stew: cheap, easy and gloriously warming, they’re the culinary equivalent of a big woolly scarf. Yet, with so many much-loved traditional dishes, the recipe itself is a bubbling cauldron of controversy: hardline purists maintain that it should contain nothing but meat, onions, potatoes and water, while others proffer treasured family recipes thickened with pearl barley, or sweetened with root vegetables.
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