SALMON SMOKER WHO’S ALL FIRED UP

IF you want to know what the polar opposite of mass production is, just ask Sally Barnes about smoking fish. ‘It all depends on the fish and the atmospheric humidity,’ she says. ‘It varies with the day and the position of the fish in the kiln.’

She has been smoking fish in West Cork since 1979, initially using a tea chest with holes in the bottom. In 1981 her husband, Colin, a salmon fisherman, ended up with a bad debt and, in part exchange, a smoking kiln. Initially he wanted to sell it, but Sally decided to put it to good use.

‘One Christmas, we had very little money and that was always a problem with two small children,’ she recalls. ‘I discovered that I could produce something that people really wanted at that time of the year — smoked salmon.’

We in Ireland have some of the best smoked salmon in the world, and I’d suggest that Frank Hederman’s would be up there, along with Ummera and the Burren Smokehouse.

THEY are but there’s also sublime smoked salmon, the very best on the planet, and that’s Sally’s, from her Woodcock Smokery in Castletownshend. It’s very rare, reassuringly expensive and only ever wild fish.

Indeed, the wildness goes beyond smoked salmon. ‘All our fish is wild, with no colourants or artificial nonsense, using only salt and hardwood smoke,’ she says. ‘How it has always been preserved over the millennia before the mass industrialisation and commodification of nature’s precious and beautiful resources.’

Covid-19 arrived at an interesting time for Woodcock Smokery. ‘I had intended gradually moving out of production and into teaching smoking,’ she says, ‘but that’s not on just now. The restaurant trade has been a big loss but the online business is good. Wild smoked salmon is selling like hot cakes and, of course, you don’t have to have a whole side. You can have a little bit of complete luxury.’

The collapse of the Spanish domestic market earlier this year meant that Woodcock could get hold of plenty of haddock for smoking. ‘And now they can spawn again for the first time in decades,’ she says. ‘A lot of good is coming out of this pandemic, despite the terrible human losses. Nature is reasserting itself and we’re able to look at the planet from a different perspective. We can pause for thought and realise that life isn’t all about money.

‘Fish is possibly one of the most perishable of foods; what I have learned over the 40-plus years in this business, to conserve proteins in times of plenty, now becomes vitally important and useful,’ she says. ‘Just a shame that our courses to help people learn the skills to do this are on hold, until life resumes some sort of normality.’

Bartering has come back, too. ‘I sent some fish to Simon Jones who makes the great Lincolnshire Poacher cheese in England and he sent back of box of cheese, including Stitchelton and Yarg. And when I sent some to Elena Pantaleoni who has the La Stoppa wine estate near Piacenza, she got her Irish agent to send me some of her fabulous wines,’ she says.

While it was only natural to panic a little at the start of the lockdown, Sally Barnes has been able to find a silver lining throughout. ‘There’s much more interest in cooking from scratch, in buying local, she says. ‘And you know, food is the last thing that people give up.’