Jennifer Ward Barber
To try the recipes mentioned in this post, click here for Guinness risotto with shrimp and watercress, and here for the chocolate stout cake.
Because painting clovers on my cheeks got old when I was about 25, tonight I'll honor the patron saint of Ireland the way throngs of revelers will: by raising a Guinness or two. But this year, ever more gripped by foodie-ism and privy to genius inventions like Guinness floats, I decided I wanted to drink my Guinness and eat it, too.
The more I thought about it, the more an edible Guinness-fest seemed the only way to honor the blip in the week that would be my St. Patrick's Day. The 1920s posters proclaiming the black stuff as "good for you" rang in my mind. Sure, the phrase was eventually banned, but there had to be some truth in it. Beer baked beans, cheddar-beer soup, and fish in an ale-spiked breading had already succeeded—why not invite Guinness to dinner?
As all good cooks do, I settled on dessert first—an easy choice, given that I'd had a chocolate stout bundt cake recipe bookmarked since last year. There were a lot of chocolate stout cakes to choose from, but having recently visited Great Barrington, MA, I went with one adapted from the Barrington Brewery. Chocolate seemed like a no-brainer for rich, thick stout.

Jennifer Ward Barber
Then came the tough part: dinner itself. I began my search, which, in the age of food blogs and recipe sites, quickly made my brilliant idea to cook with Guinness seem like last year's fad. The recipes themselves were rather uninspiring: setting aside one for potted herring, beef was hands down the most common stout-friendly ingredient. Dozens of hits for Irish beef stews and steak-and-kidney pies rolled in. It made sense, given stout's big flavor, but I'm not much of a red meat eater, so I kept at it. What else could stand up to Guinness, if the beer's flavor even survived the cooking process?