How ordinary fare made the ‘woman with the mince’!
IT’S interesting how often you feel you know someone and then, when they die, you discover whole dimensions to them. So it was with Honor Moore who died, aged 90, in 2013. I had known her for years, often sat in her admirably old-fashioned kitchen in Rathmines; I even cooked with her on my RTÉ television series The Big Stew.
I had no idea that she had been widowed suddenly in 1965, leaving her with seven children to support and her late husband’s public relations business to run.
Honor was born Honor Getty in 1923 in Newtownards and trained to be a domestic science teacher at Cookstown Agricultural College. From 1944, she was writing a recipe column for the Belfast Newsletter under the pseudonymn ‘Housewife’. In 1947, she married journalist Sam Edgar and moved to Dublin with him when he got a job with The Irish Times.
She wrote for Woman’s Way from 1963 until 2004 and for the RTÉ Guide from 1973 to 2004. In 1990, she and Theodora FitzGibbon established the Irish Food Writers’ Guild, having first met on The Late Late Show in the mid-1960s.
This was a ‘food special’ and Theodora cooked a dinner party involving pheasant while Jimmy Flahive, the chef at Dublin Airport, produced three brilliant classical courses of haute cuisine.
‘I felt it would be pointless to try and compete with these and, as a contrast, I filled my table with a series of mince dishes all based on a pound of minced beef, from a simple shepherd’s pie and everyday meat balls to South African bobotie, Mexican chilli, Greek moussaka, Italian lasagne and spaghetti sauce,’ she recalled years later. ‘It worked! And incidentally, 25 years later they are still just as popular. In fact, at one stage I was known as “the woman with the mince” after the show.’
It underlined how she understood the audience and, while she could cook classical cuisine with the best of them, she understood what ordinary people wanted.
She remained true to her Ulster Presbyterian roots. Her father-inlaw had made a tall cast-iron griddle for her when she moved to Dublin. ‘It was attached to the gas cooker,’ she said, ‘and could be spun around to control the heat. It was large enough to bake batches of soda farls or drop scones, and these were very popular at the church or school “bring and buy” sales. To turn the split soda farls into pizzas, I spread them lightly with garlic flavoured oil, then with tomato purée or sauce. Top it simply with sliced tomatoes, olives and grated cheese or your preferred mixture, and cook under a hot grill for 5 to 8 minutes, until the cheese has melted and is bubbling.’
She was an immensely kind person and gave me great encouragement. We tended to agree on food and our only disagreement concerned the issue of browning sausages for coddle. The Dubliner said no, the Co Down woman said yes.