Celebrating the freshest ingredients C1
A new take on Irish food celebrates the land and its wonderful, fresh ingredients
“In Ireland, we’re good for Guinness and butter. I don’t know what that says about us, but it’s what people love,” James Kavanagh says.
To say Irish butter is special is an understatement. Golden in colour, rich and sweet, it makes others seem pallid and flavourless in comparison. Irish cows benefit from a mild year-round climate and spend their time grazing on the republic’s defining pastoral feature: lush, rolling, viridescent fields.
In their award-winning debut cookbook, The Currabinny Cookbook (Penguin Ireland, 2018), Kavanagh and his partner William Murray, a chef who trained at the acclaimed Ballymaloe Cookery School in County Cork, highlight their modern take on traditional ingredients. The pair — who host dining pop-ups and sell their fare at farmers’ markets — are part of a vibrant culinary scene redefining Irish food. With exceptional producers and chefs taking the spotlight, it’s time to let go of any lingering misconceptions you may have.
“Irish food gets a bad rap … What’s amazing about food in Ireland — what we have to recapture and why there’s such a renaissance happening now — is because of our climate. The ingredients we grow and produce here are so good,” says Murray. “It’s not even about looking back on how they cooked something a hundred years ago. It’s more about looking at the ingredients, the provenance and the land, and what it can produce.”
Butter is but one example. Throughout the book, Kavanagh and Murray put Irish ingredients squarely in the spotlight. Seaweed, abundant and versatile, appears in flavoured butters, pesto, hummus and bread. They reimagined the traditional Irish pairing of bacon and cabbage, offering a penne pasta with ham, cabbage, wild garlic pesto and pickled walnut, and a fried cabbage and ham sandwich.
“We used to absolutely boil to death all our vegetables,” says Murray. “Cabbage is such an Irish thing and we used to boil it, but if you shred it and fry it in a frying pan with loads of butter, it’s just the most wonderful thing.”