When thinking of ways to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, my partner, Maxwell, and I revisited some of our favorite dishes from our May 2025 trip to Ireland as well as influential local Irish recipes. As Maxwell is the chef of our household in Indianapolis, he set out to recreate the Irish beef stew once on the menu at The Pub, a beloved on Evansville’s East Side. From 1984 to 2021, Larry “Bubbles” Pollock owned The Pub, and he enthusiastically offered up his recipe when [Evansville Living] asked if he’d consider sharing it. Maxwell remembers his parents taking him to The Pub for meals when he was young, so this dish holds some personal nostalgia, and I was happy to be the taste-testing beneficiary of it!
We found all but one ingredient at our local Fresh Thyme Market. The recipe calls for sherry, but not the cooking sherry that includes added salt. We made a separate trip to a liquor store and came home with the drinkable, drier kind of sherry. One notable ingredient commonly found in Irish stews that was missing from Pollock’s recipe is Guinness or stout beer.
The stew’s preparation was very simple; Maxwell only needed to chop an onion and crush cloves of garlic, as the recipe’s other vegetables are canned. I admit that made me skeptical, as canned vegetables aren’t the norm in today’s home-cooking world, but in the end, you could hardly tell the difference. If you are partial to fresh vegetables, Maxwell recommends adding the carrots and potatoes into the stew much earlier than the recipe calls for so that they cook completely.
The salt content is a delicate balance in this stew recipe. Since both the beef broth and canned vegetables contain added salt, Maxwell only needed salt to taste. If you choose to make a version with fresh vegetables, it could likely handle more salt added. We made the stew in an eight-quart Dutch oven, which was ideal since it retained heat well and we could leave the stew to simmer for a while. And although Irish stew is traditionally served with soda bread, the baguette rolls we paired with it in a pinch did the trick…