Doorley Tom

Cook who had an insatiable appetite

FLORENCE Irwin is best known for her 1949 book The Cookin’ Woman, from which I’ve selected three recipes this week. It’s a remarkably eclectic collection of recipes that go way beyond actual food and include a formula for killing cockroaches, instructions on how to extract beeswax, grow bulbs in pots, make your own furniture polish and how to make a stove that runs on sawdust!

The introduction to this remarkable book was written by St John Ervine, the now almost forgotten Irish dramatist, who describes the author’s crusade ‘to revive the custom, now nearly obsolete, of civilised eating’. We should remember that he was writing when rationing was still casting a pall of gloom over the UK, including Northern Ireland.

Florence Irwin trained in Edinburgh at the legendary Atholl Crescent cookery school (just like my mother-in-law after she was demobbed from the WAAF) and was sent straight afterwards to Co Down, where she taught cookery for the Department of Agriculture. It was here that she became known as The Cookin’ Woman.

(A very small boy once asked his mother ‘Who’s thon, Ma?’ and got the reply, ‘Whisht, she’s the cookin’ woman who teaches them to make buns’.)

She was, as she said herself, ‘an itinerant instructress’ between 1905 and 1913 and later became the cookery columnist with The Northern Whig newspaper, her first book, Irish Country Recipes, appearing in 1936.

The Cookin’ Woman, first published in 1949, is a remarkable read: part memoir, part food history, part practical instructions. Indeed it’s the only book we have in our large collection that includes instructions for cooking limpets. (‘Slowly bring to the boil. Drain. Eat as they are or dip in oatmeal and fry.’ I wonder.)

Her account of living in digs around Northern Ireland contains lots of anecdotes such as this one. ‘I remember one morning finding on my breakfast table everything but the egg I expected there, due to the presence of an egg cup. I went to the kitchen door to suggest it had been forgotten.

MY landlady said, “Of course, it is on the table, for I put it there myself. Did you not look in the teapot?” This was a new idea to me. She had put it there to keep hot.’

Florence was obviously someone with an insatiable interest in food and the lore of food, and she was the mistress of a fine prose style. Her writing contains some quaint elements.

Where today we would say ‘remove from the heat’ she writes ‘take away from the fire.’

Temperatures are notably absent. Instead, she uses phrases like ‘a quick oven’.

She was clearly a great teacher and, I suspect, good fun. Even if you never cook any of her recipes, The Cookin’ Woman is a great read about a vanished Ireland.

The book was republished in 1992 by Blackstaff Press but even first editions are available for next to nothing on AbeBooks.co.uk.