In this weeks Every Monday Mary Mulvihill mentions en passant that a Waterford man invented the rasher.

Now as a part time adopted Waterfordman with a food obsession such a statement could not rest in parenthesis.
I remember my great joy when I discovered that the Jacob family of bakers from Bridge Street (just around the corner from my restaurant in Mary Street) had invented a form of dry biscuit suitable for victualling ships on long voyages and called it the Cream Cracker.

How much more central to Irish cuisine was the rasher ?

On the net, in a piece about Food Inventions in Ask About Ireland here they tell us :

The bacon rasher was reputedly invented in 1820 by a butcher in Waterford city, Henry Denny. Before then, bacon was cured in chunks, but often the salt solution could not penetrate to the core of the chunk and the meat would rot. Denny’s successful innovation was to cut the meat in thin slices, which could be cooked quickly or ‘rashed’.

This made me haul out out my ever reliable (shorter) OED to find if “Rashed” ever meant to cook quickly.
According to the OED I am afraid not, which puts in doubt the whole statement above.
The OED gives the meaning of rasher as A thin slice of Bacon or Ham (origin unknown)

But then, just above this they give an alternate meaning of the verb to rash as ; To cut or slash

As Bart Simpson would say “Doh !” Do the editors at the OED read their own dictionary?

This suddenly puts the ball back in the Waterford court, okay the origins of the word go back to the cutting rather than the cooking, but I’m happy enough to believe (until offered other evidence) that Henry Denny did it 1820.

If I was a true Waterford person I should at this moment interject;
“Up the Deise !”
But of course I am much to sophisticated for that.