Some people made it from regular bread dough, causing some confusion with stotties. Others made fadges from a dough without any leavener that was meant to provide some form of bread quickly when you’d run out of bread.
The Fadge made in Ireland is usually Potato Fadge, aka Tatie Fadge, or Potato Bread. It is more like potato patties or hash brown patties, as it has only a few tablespoons of flour in it.
Some people, especially with the distance of time, confuse fadges with stotties. See separate entry on stotties.
Cooking Tips
A quickbread fadge:
500 g flour (3 1/2 cups / 1 pound)
50 g fat such as butter or lard (1/4 cup / 2 oz)
1 teaspoon salt
250 ml milk, approximately (1 cup / 8 oz)
Stir flour and salt together; rub the butter in. Add enough milk to get it all to hold together as a dough. Don’t knead or mix beyond that. Divide into two parts, roll each out to 3 cm (1 inch) thick, and bake on greased cookie sheet in the middle of a 200 C / 400 F oven. They are cooked in the middle of the oven or on top a griddle.
Literature & Lore
Fadge is a Shakespearean word meaning to succeed, to turn out well and was used in Love’s Labours Lost (“We will have, if the fadge not, an antique”) and Twelfth Night (How will this fadge?”).
It is now also a slang word meaning “fanny” and a slang expression: “It won’t fadge” means “it won’t do”.
The word fadge is also the name for large bags attached to mechanical harvesters.