Hello! This is Meghan McCarron, and you're reading my newsletter, Second Breakfast. It’s free and intermittent and (maybe?) fun. Thank you for subscribing. If you’re not sure why you’re getting this email, you can unsubscribe here.

When I was a kid growing up in the Philadelphia suburbs, the grocery stores would fill up with raisin and caraway-studded soda breads and boxes of Irish potato candies every March. Until I left home, I had assumed these St. Patrick’s Day foods were common everywhere.

Then, when I moved to LA after college, I walked into a grocery store to pick up my St. Patrick’s soda bread and was baffled to find none. And no one had ever heard of Irish potatoes.

Turns out that, like Wawa and throwing shit at Santa Claus, these treats were a Philly thing. They’re also more American than Irish. Sort of like how I went to Catholic school with six other Irish American Me(a)g(h)ans, who had all been given a name derived from Welsh.

I later learned that the soda bread I ate as a kid was known in Ireland in the 19th century as Spotted Dog, the fancier version of an everyday staple. Instead of slathering on good Irish butter, my family desecrated our slices with margarine, because it was the 90s.

Irish potatoes lack any connection to the motherland, and no one really knows where they came from (editors who want to solve this mystery once and for all: I’m available). They’re coconut cream candies rolled in cinnamon, manufactured regionally by companies with names like O’Ryan’s.

They’re also made in lots of home kitchens. The homemade version is my favorite, because it includes cream cheese, which cuts through the relentless sweetness. My mom made them, I think. I also remember making them with my elementary school best friend, Katie, and her mom, who is my mom’s best friend from their days at Catholic grammar school.

As I kid, I loved Irish potatoes. I also believed, for probably too long, that I might catch a leprechaun in the leprechaun traps my mom helped us make out of shoe boxes and sticks, which she “sprung” and dusted with glitter before we woke up on St. Patrick’s morning. (Moms! They do so much!) As an adult, the candies seemed like a silly thing to make.

So over the past few St. Patrick’s, I’ve busted out my Darina Allen and made a lovely soda bread from her Spotted Dog recipe, specifically the version with caraway seeds that she calls “American soda bread.” Darina Allen also describes soda bread making as a ritual passed from mother to daughter. If anyone in my matrilineal lineage regularly made soda bread, I never met them.

But this year, I made Irish potatoes, too. The Kitchn recipe called for the most cream cheese, so I loosely followed that. I did do something bougie and added chunky unsweetened coconut.

I need to emphasize that these are balls of thick cream cheese icing loaded up with coconut and rolled in astringent amounts of cinnamon. Eaten directly from the fridge, they’re cold and fudgey, like an energy ball with no redeeming qualities, which also makes them satisfying. For me, when I take a bite, the waves of nostalgia are incredible, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say they’re actually good.

I put three in my kid’s lunch today. Maybe someday out here, he’ll encounter the See’s Candies version, covered in chocolate and loaded with pine nuts, which is wrong. But for now, I’m raising him with tradition.

I haven’t written this email in awhile. I’ve been both busy with great assignments and feeling conflicted and confused about the (my) future of (in) freelance journalism. Every friend and peer who I talk to seems to feel the same.

But! The work continues, and it’s work I’m proud of. Fiction writers talk a lot about inspiration. I’ve noticed that something equally mysterious seems to kick up from time to time with the reporting process, when engrossing stories come in waves. It feels like opening the door to a building that’s a hive of activity, full of leads and characters, stuffed with possibility in every room.

My 2026 work so far:

• A Six-Figure Income Working From Home? The Sourdough Secret (NYT)

• Noma Faces Los Angeles Protest Over Allegations of Past Abuse by Its Founder (NYT)

• Dinner And No Drinks: Restaurants Are Struggling As Americans Drink Less (NYT)

• I also contributed blurbs about two of the best dishes in LA, Tsubaki’s Japanese Caesar and Hayato’s kamameshi, to this list (T Magazine)

I have a couple features coming up in a new publication that’s launching soon called LA Material. The team has been a dream to work with. Sign up!

This email is long! I’ll finish with shouting out two other new publications I’m really enjoying: the smart and punchy worker-owned Gourmet, and the stylish (and currently NYC-focused) Caper.

Anyway, happy St. Patrick’s.