[2] Colcannon is most commonly made with only four ingredients: potatoes, butter, milk and cabbage.

Irish historian Patrick Weston Joyce defined it as "potatoes mashed with butter and milk, with chopped up cabbage and pot herbs".

[3] Colcannon is similar to champ, a dish made with scallions, butter and milk that is traditionally offered to fairies in a spoon placed at the foot of a hawthorn tree.

In Welsh, the name for leek soup is cawl cennin, a phrase combining cawl meaning "soup", "broth" or "gruel", when it is not a reference to the typical Welsh meat and vegetable stew named in full "cawl Cymreig", with "cennin", the plural of "cenhinen", meaning "leeks".

Oh, wasn't it the happy days when troubles we had not, And our mothers made Colcannon in the little skillet pot.