Have you got a particular place you always think of when talking about food? A favourite restaurant, a particular kitchen, or a shop you went to as a child? For me, when talking about food shopping, I always think of St George’s Market in Belfast, which takes place in an old Victorian covered market on Fridays and Saturdays. I’ll give you the guided tour here, introducing you to a few local specialities on my way and leaving you with a glorious loaf of soda bread, fresh from the oven.
St George’s has an eclectic mix ranging from fresh fish to old records, via meat, bread, linen, pancakes, vegetables and lightbulbs, including what I think must be the widest selection of protective glow-in-the-dark vests. The market is always packed: grannies doing their weekly shopping, international students from nearby Queen’s university sourcing fresh produce, as well as the latte-sipping urban professionals, all are catered for.
The big draw on a Friday morning is always the fish: caught in the Irish Sea, if doesn’t need to travel far to get to St George’s, the closest port is literally a stone’s throw away. I honestly don’t think you can get fish much fresher than that – unless, obviously, you caught it yourself.
When we lived here, I often took my young son to the market to watch the crabs and lobsters. It was a relief to know that they wouldn’t pinch us with their pincers taped securely together, however hard they tried. 
As an English teacher, I am always happy to see that the grocer’s apostrophe is alive and well, even amongst fishmongers.
Here at St George’s I came across dulse for the first time. Dulse, or palmaria palmata, to give it its Latin name, is a local variety of seaweed that is often eaten raw, either fresh or dried. Here at St George’s it is sold in little paper bags, to be eaten as a chewy snack that tastes of seawater.
My friend Edie uses dulse for rice when preparing Chinese food: boiling a few finely chopped strands of dulse with the rice gives it a lovely salty aftertaste that works brilliantly with Asian food. Although there are numerous recipes, such as in this article in the Telegraph, I present you with two very simple ways to eat fresh dulse: sprinkle it on a buttered slice of soda bread, as my friend Peg suggested, or add it to a bowl of vegetable soup, for an extra kick.
Whatever your position on seaweed, soda bread is an absolute no-brainer: taking an hour to make and using only a handful of ingredients, it’s the quickest and easiest bread you’ll ever make. I’ve used the Ballymaloe recipe as my starting point, replacing some of the white flour with wholewheat and adding oats for extra texture. 
Irish Soda Bread (makes one loaf)
- 250g plain flour
- 250g wholewheat flour
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
- 450ml buttermilk
- a handful of oats
Preheat your oven to 220C. Mix the ingredients, adding the buttermilk and oats to create a soft dough. Form a loaf and score it.
Bake for 45-50 minutes. I reduced the hear after about 20 minutes to 200C to avoid it going too dark. Check by knocking on the bottom of your loaf – if it is hollow, it’s ready.
Leave it to cool out a little bit, but soda bread is best eaten still warm from the oven, with or without fresh dulse.
And don’t forget to visit the market if you’re ever in Belfast – it’s open on Fridays and Saturdays, but go on a Friday morning if you’re planning on buying fish. I know that in London you can get fresh fish, too, but never as fresh as here where the actual port is only a short walk away. I’ll be posting on Belfast’s most famous ship in the next days, so watch this space!
Ginger&Bread 
I’ve never heard of dulse before, had to google it. Seawood sort of right. a sea plant at least. Now I have to order some to try. I’m so curious as to how it tastes. That soda bread looks delicious. Saving the recipe.
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Thanks! I saw dried dulse on the web, which can be used similar to other seaweeds such as in Japanese food. The fresh stuff is special, but then I freeze it anyway as my supplies are depending on trips to Belfast! The soda bread is a real winner as it is so quick. I prefer the brown one to the white bread, which I find a tad dry (especially being used to sourdough …)
Thanks for your lovely comments!
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The market looks very French with all the fish and quite impressive. Thanks for the visit. Wish you could cut off a big chunk of that warm bread right about now! YUM!
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By the time I’ve cut it you could already bite into a slice of your own 😉 Funnily enough, the crêpe guy is French, from Marseille – he’s been there forever. I remember buying a crêpe off him ten years ago – his brother knew my favourite French writer, Jean Claude Izzo, personally, so I was very impressed at the time. The crêpes are still great, too (he even gave my little one a sweet when she got a tad restless in the queue)
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I’ve made the Ballymoe bread, whole wheat, but I love the idea of adding in the oats! So fun to see your photos – what a marvelous place it looks like.
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It is such a cool place – you’d never expect it in a place like Belfast!
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Another wonderful bread, Ginger 🙂 The market looks very attractive !
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It’s a great affair, very lively and ‘authentic’, if you don’t mind me using such a touristy term 😉
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Your bread looks fantastic, and so does that market! When I think about food, I’m afraid there’s no one place that leaps to mind, just a wild mix of all sorts of amazing memories, from making Christmas dinner with my mum in her amazing 1950’s kitchen to gnawing on a pile of fresh seafood on Zanzibar and eating homemade jam and cream in a yurt in Kyrgyzstan! There’s a proper jumble of images in my head. Mind you, there usually is 😉
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You’ve clearly travelled a lot more than I have … I suppose a lot of our memories have to do with the fact that we can’t travel back in time, or get to the places that easily. And fresh fish, I am afraid, is something I find very hard to come by …
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Haha. Damn that grocer’s apostrophe!
Fine looking soda bread right there 🙂
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Thanks – went back to school today after a week away and I have to say these apostrophes look not half as cute when they gang up on you in an exercise book. I forgot how much I detest that musty smell … it’s probably all those misplaced punctuation marks, slowly rotting away …
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Bahaha. Musty old misplaced punctuation! 🙂
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You should see their suffering. You’d cry, too.
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What a wonderful market guide! I do love to get lost in the delights of a market… I did a sort of meditation-exercise in a psychology class where we were asked to imagine our favourite places, and mine was definitely a market! I will have to look up St. George’s if I am ever in Belfast.
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Do that – it’s a great city!
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How’s life down there? I remember this soda bread from Ireland, they love it! It’s good with the salty Irish butter. Yours looks exactly like the one you can buy in Dublin!!
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Thanks! I only like it fresh from the oven, I wouldn’t really buy it as I find it is often very crumbly and dry. If you weren’t convinced first time round, try to make your own. It is absolutely delicious 🙂
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My dear late Irish mother used seaweed to put on her face right from the ocean. She had beautiful skin.
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I hadn’t heard of that before, but I am not surprised that it has such a positive impact.
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