St. Patrick’s Day

St. Patrick’s Day Celebrations

By Dawn Bradbury

Here’s your March 17 forecast: A fl urry of Irish stew and boiled dinners, with Guinness heavily fl owing at the area’s Irish-themed pubs.

Yes, there also will be green beer and fi sh and chips, Irish music and the wearing of the green … lots of it. This year could be the closest to normal St. Patrick’s Day in two years.

“It will be a really fun, festive atmosphere, with staff and customers, Irish music in the background … it’s going to be just what we need,” said Megan Page, general manager at

Patrick’s Pub & Eatery in Gilford.

The COVID-19 pandemic exploded on the scene right around St. Patrick’s Day in 2020, changing not only that holiday but daily life for the next two years. While cases are dropping, the pandemic is by no means over, but between vaccinations and. booster shots, this is the closest things have come to returning to normal.

Irish-themed pubs around the area will be rolling out live entertainment and Guinness will fl ow. Many local breweries are brewing up special beers for the holiday: Moat Mountain Smokehouse & Brewing Company in North Conway and Twin Barns Brewing Company in Meredith.

At Patrick’s, 18 Weirs Road in Gilford, owned by Jeff and Allan Beetle, the day will get started a little earlier than usual: The pub opens at noon instead of its usual 4 p.m. Dinner will be served until 8 p.m., while the bar will remain open a little later for revelers. Live entertainment starts at noon with The O’Brien Clan Trio, and Matt Langley takes the stage from 4-7 p.m.

“It’s very, very festive,” Page said. “Our staff really gets into it; they go all out with their outfi ts. We have some regulars who come in every St. Paddy’s, and they count down the days.” In addition to the music, there will of course be food: a traditional boiled dinner with housemade corned beef, bangers and mash featuring local Irish sausage from Claremont’s North Country Smokehouse, and soda bread made locally by Phyllis Shoemaker.

“We’ll also have our traditional Irish sticky toffee pudding,” Page said. “The recipe came directly from Ireland on a trip Allan and his wife, Jennifer, took.”

The regular menu includes some nontraditional Irish food as well — shepherd’s pie made with beef instead of lamb; a Reuben sandwich featuring the housemade corned beef and “Irish nachos,” as well as the popular Drunken Leprechaun fried chicken dish, served with housemade whiskey barbecue sauce.

Patrons won’t go thirsty: Representatives from Baileys will be on hand to promote the new Baileys Deliciously Light Irish cream. Patrick’s staff will pour green beer all day, along with an Irish red ale, Slainte, brewed by Moat Mountain Smokehouse & Brewing in North Conway. There’s an Irish twist on an old-fashioned (made with Irish whiskey) and Irish coffee. And of course, there will be Guinness.

“We pride ourselves on pouring the perfect pint,” Page said, adding that their bartenders have received training from Guinness on this very subject.

Page expects this year to be a far cry from March 2020, when the country shut down right before St. Patrick’s Day because of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We had already prepared everything for our boiled dinners and on our big day, we had quite the takeout crowd, it was awesome,” Page remembers. They were able to pivot immediately because they already had a thriving takeout business. Now, takeout has grown so much they have a dedicated takeout person daily, sometimes two.

Patrick’s, which opened in 1987, is named after the original owner’s (Walter Kelleher) father from Macroom, County Cork, Ireland. Patrick’s was purchased from Walter Kelleher in 1994 by Jeff and Allan Beetle.

No reservations will be taken; it will be fi rst-come, fi rst-served with a steady stream of customers expected. Prime time will be 5-6 p.m. as people are getting out of work, Page said.

In Wolfeboro, the celebration has already started at Morrisseys’ Porch & Pub, 286 S. Main

Street. The pub had “perfect pint training” from Guinness earlier this month so staff is ready to

• St. Patrick’s Day

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pour for the crowds. The eatery kicked off “our favorite month” on Feb. 17, said owner Aaron

Morrissey, with Irish fare on Thursday nights, and Irish dancers scheduled that weekend.

In the run-up to St. Patrick’s Day, Morrisseys’ hopes to offer a fourcourse Irish dinner and beer tasting on March 16.

Featured food items for St. Patrick’s week will be house cured corned beef and cabbage, homemade Irish bangers and mash, Guinness beef stew, beer battered fi sh and chips, shepherd’s pie made with lamb, and the popular Pub Pie, made with beef, corn and mashed potatoes. All Irish fare is served with soda muffi ns.

“Myself and the staff are really excited for festive March happenings,” Morrissey said. “We will be super busy on the 17th and reservations for tables with a 1.5-hour limit will be strongly recommended. Guinness and Tullamore Dew will be furnishing some great give-a-ways throughout the week and we hope to have some nice, personalized Guinness pints and Morrisseys’ shirts available for purchase.”

Morrissey’s regular menu also carries an Irish spice bag (fried shrimp and chicken fi ngers with hot peppers, steak fries, onions and 10 spice blend), which the restaurant points out on a Facebook post pairs well with that perfectly poured pint of Guinness.

At May Kelly’s Cottage, 3002 White Mountain Highway in North Conway, the Irish theme is year-round. Owners Marie and Patsy McArdle are from County Louth in Ireland. They opened the family-friendly Irish pub offering authentic Irish country cooking in 2004, naming it in honor of Patsy’s grandmother, May Kelly.

The pub features a Seisún, Gaelic for “session,” every Sunday afternoon. Seisiún are informal gatherings of Irish traditional musicians that happen mostly in pubs, the restaurant’s website says.

The regular menu includes twists on traditional dishes like Irish nachos and Gaelic pizza (topped with mashed potatoes, bacon and scallions), as well as traditional dishes like shepherd’s pie made with lamb, beef stew, Gaelic chicken, Irish mixed grill of Irish bacon, Irish sausage, black and white pudding, house steak tips, tomato, baked beans and french fries, and corned beef and cabbage. Guinness is on tap, as are other Irish beers and May Kelly’s Irish Red Ale, brewed by neighboring Moat Mountain brewery.

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By Kathi Caldwell-Hopper Photo courtesy Canterbury Shaker Village

“I sent a small box of maple sugar to a British nobleman. I hope to make this a very useful and profi table business.”

Lieutenant Governor John Wentworth, 1722

What was the business? Turns out it was a tiny box of maple sugar Wentworth sent to a British nobleman. It seems Governor Wentworth had the right idea when he predicted the sweet maple product would become highly desirable to many.

New Hampshire has a long history with making maple syrup, which was originally produced by Native Americans. Certainly, the Granite State was not the fi rst area maple sugar was made, because many other places also practiced sugaring in the late winter and early spring.

The early settlers in the state likely learned from Native Americans how to collect sap and boil it to make the sweet syrup from the sugar maple trees around them.

In the early days of the country, sugar was not easy to obtain; thus discovering there was a natural way to get sugar from trees must have seemed like manna from heaven to settlers. But they soon learned it was a time-consuming, diffi cult process to make maple sugar and syrup.

In New England, if you could make and store maple products, you had a valuable currency to eat and trade with others. It was just about the only sweetener in the United States in the 1700s and 1800s. By the late 1880s, around 300,000 gallons was produced for sale on a yearly basis.

The early colonists endured the harsh New Hampshire winters and once they knew the process of maple sugaring, they were eager for late winter and early spring. They knew this was when they could harvest sap for sugar, and they watched the weather with anticipation. (A successful maple year depends greatly on the weather and temperatures.)

The process starts usually in late February when harvesters went into the woods where they had sugar maple trees. At that time, they drilled tiny holes into the trees. The process took time, because the clear sap in liquid form dripped slowly from the taps into buckets placed on the trees.

Bringing the buckets from the woods to a camp or farm was also labor intensive. Over time, harvesters began to use oxen or horses to transport the sap to the sugarhouses.

Once at the sugarhouse, the next step in the long process began. During the time of Native Americans, hot stones were placed into logs they had hollowed out. They fi lled the log containers with the sap and boiled it over the fi re. The process was time consuming but the results worth the effort and long boiling time. When the boiling produced dry sugar, it was formed into a cake of sugar or “block sugar” or it was stirred to make grainy sugar. The Native peoples also made sugar on snow by pouring sugar onto snow to create a taffy-like, delicious product. Due to the danger of maple syrup spilling when transporting it, maple sugar in blocks was much easier to carry without losing any of the precious product.

Before the colonists, Native Americans used maple syrup and sugar to season breads and beverages. According to historical information from the UNH Cooperative Extension, maple sugar was an important part of the typical Native person’s diet.

Over the years, the process of maple sugaring has certainly improved. Kettles and later, evaporators were much more effi cient for use in sap houses.

The Shakers, with a village community in Canterbury, New Hampshire and elsewhere in the United States, were an ingenious group. They believed that doing any project correctly was important and godly. Hands to work, hearts to God was one of their sayings and they lived the belief daily.

Maple sugaring was done by the Shakers at their villages, among them at Canterbury. The maple products were later sold around New England and tourists eagerly purchased maple candies and syrup.

According to information from Canterbury Shaker Village, the Shakers once had a “thriving maple sugar camp. Throughout the 19th- and 20th-centuries, Shakers spent early spring days gathering sap and their nights boiling maple syrup and making candy. At the conclusion of the maple season, the Shakers would emerge from the camp and return to Shaker Village with their sweet harvest in hand.

“Records indicate that in 1864, at the height of American Civil War, the Shaker Village Church Family set out almost 1,200 wooden buckets for the gathering of sap and produced almost 700 barrels of maple syrup. The syrup was not only an important sweetener for the many mouths they fed daily, but an important cash crop for sale to the outside world.”

It was said the Shakers at Canterbury once had a maple tree orchard with over 1,000 trees about a mile or two northeast of their village. From there, they tapped the trees and eventually produced candy, sugar cakes, syrup and other products which could be sold to the public.

When a Shaker elder once visited Canterbury in the mid 1800s, he was shown the sugar camp and was impressed that they made around 2,000 pounds of sugar the year before. This was a very large amount of maple sugar and shows how important the sales of the product were to the Shaker economy.

Much as the Native Americans and early colonists had discovered, the Shakers learned it was hard work hauling the sap to their homes once it was collected from sugar maple trees. Thus, they found a more effi cient and less physically taxing way to harvest the sap and boil it down to make the syrup. The Shakers made an exodus from their living quarters in the main village and set up a temporary residence at a sugar camp a few miles away.

Located on Shaker property, the sugar camp was a great place to make maple products. The Shakers stayed at the camp for a month or more and had living quarters, a sugarhouse where they boiled the sap and other buildings.

The Shaker men took turns staying up at night to boil the sap, feed the fi re and watch over the sap house. It was hard work, but much easier than hauling the gathered sap to the main village to be boiled down.

Shaker Sisters kept the buildings clean and made meals for the group.

A Canterbury Shaker, Nicholas Briggs, recalled maple sugaring as a boy, “The maple sugar season began soon after school closed, and it was an interesting time for the boys. They always were in requisition to assist in distributing the buckets to the trees and driving the spiles in the holes bored by the brethren.”

While the popularity of maple syrup never really caught on in England, Governor Wentworth’s plan to harvest and sell maple products was a good one. Americans s loved and used a lot of maple syrup. To this day, they still do.

When the sap begins to run in the late winter, we eagerly anticipate, as did people many years ago, the sweet taste of maple syrup to come.

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