Chef inspired by purity of Irish products

Chef reconsiders old ideas to relish in abundance of the land and sea

Smooth and flat like a sand dollar, its flesh embodying an intensely mineral jolt, my first taste of a native Galway Bay oyster was unforgettable.

On Ireland’s wild west coast it’s hard to imagine a more fitting food. Oysters, along with mussels, scallops, seaweed and other wild foods, have provided sustenance since people first settled on the island.

“I love the purity of (working with local products). I also love the historical resonance. If you cook a wild duck or you have an oyster, I love the fact that these things have been here thousands of years. You’re connecting with a tradition,” says Jp Mcmahon, Galway-based chef, restaurateur and author.

Focusing on foods from the west of Ireland, Mcmahon, whose acclaimed restaurant is called Aniar, has been a driving force in the creation of a new Irish cuisine.

Now, in his first book, The Irish Cookbook (Phaidon, 2020), he tells a new story of Irish food. Looking back at 10,000 years of heritage, he reflects on the past and explores its ties to the present in 480 recipes.

In considering how best to relay such a vast tradition, as well as trends in contemporary Irish cooking — chief among them “the primacy of the product” and a resulting reverence for terroir — he began to question some of the principles that have guided his cooking for more than a decade.

“As I got into it, to try and tell more of the story, I realized that maybe I was wrong,” says Mcmahon.

Spices, for example, which Irish cooks have been using for more than 1,000 years, don’t fit Aniar’s ethos of using seasonal, local produce. Writing the book — seeing how entrenched certain external ingredients are, to the point where people scarcely contemplate their origins — changed his perspective. “If we take the potato, which has become normalized in Ireland but is really from Peru,” he adds, “why use the potato and not a cinnamon stick?” Mcmahon has since taken a more relaxed stance.

Wild foods, as essential to his work today as they were to the island’s early inhabitants, are also integral to the book. Mcmahon concludes The Irish Cookbook with an exhaustive appendix cataloguing plants (wild herbs and flowers; wild fruits, nuts and trees; sea herbs), seaweed and mushrooms.

“One of the most important aspects of the book was to try and communicate what we have done with wild food and seaweed (at Aniar). How that’s been historically, but then also how people can take that away and learn from it, and see it as representing an aspect of Irish food,” says Mcmahon. “I do hope it’s the beginning of a new investigation of seaweeds and wild herbs in relation to Irish food.”

He underscores the importance of reimagining the very concept of a national foodstuff. “The people who arrived in Ireland 10,000 years ago were not Irish; they were just people,” emphasizes Mcmahon.

As people progressively migrate, bringing their own culinary practices to the island, the definition of Irish food will continue to shift.

The strength of Ireland’s food culture has always lain in its products, he adds — in any tradition they’re prepared in. At the very heart of this new Irish cuisine, he sees the passion and energy of the farmers, fishers, cheesemakers and other producers as indispensable.

“(Confidence is) what we lacked, and you could probably say it’s down to colonialism. It’s down to hardship. It’s down to so many different things — it’s down to the famine. A lot of pieces are in play.

“At this moment in time we can say, ‘Well, look.’ We have beautiful rivers, we have beautiful fish. We have fantastic land — it’s probably why people came here in the first place. We have great beef and lamb, and we’ve got some amazing quality vegetables,” says Mcmahon.

“All of these things need to be celebrated as opposed to be dissected for, ‘Well, is it really Irish and is it really from here?’ I suppose I’ve been doing that for over 10 years in Aniar, but it might not be the right way of going about things. I wanted to give people the opportunity to (revisit) what they think Irish food is.”

Recipes adapted from The Irish Cookbook by Jp Mcmahon

(Phaidon, 2020).