The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Forget spuds and soda bread
A jolly, recipe-filled history of what the Irish really used to eat is filled with surprises, discovers Michael Kerr
FTHE IRISH COOKBOOK by JP McMahon 432pp, Phaidon, £35
or JP McMahon, “the central historic foodstuffs of Ireland” are oysters, seaweed and nettle. And the potato? That can’t be ignored, not least because over-reliance on it contributed to a famine that killed a million people. But McMahon would point out that it was a recent arrival, first planted, at the earliest, in the late 1500s. For most of the time there have been people on the island of Ireland, they haven’t been putting spuds on a plate.
McMahon, who is a chef, restaurateur, teacher, founder of the Galway Food Festival and newspaper columnist, is seen as one of the practitioners of “the new Irish cuisine”. I suspect he would be equally happy to be seen as a reviver of the old Irish cuisine. In The Irish Cookbook, which is magisterial in weight but jollier in tone, his aim is to sweep from mesolithic times to modern; from smoked eel, wild boar and hazel nuts – via the legacies of the Celts, the Vikings, the Normans and the English – to the hay-flavoured ice cream he serves in his Michelinstarred restaurant, Aniar.
The book is partly history, partly an argument for making the most of the local and the seasonal and the forgotten, but mainly, of course, recipes: lamb (“Irish”) stew, bacon and cabbage, and the full Irish breakfast of eggs, sausages, bacon, black pudding and (up north) a soda farl or potato bread. (In a café window in Enniskillen, I once saw a poster offering “The Green Breakfast” – all the above, but grilled.)
McMahon is anxious to remind us that the produce of the land is only part of the story, so 80 of his 400-plus pages are given over to recipes for shellfish, river fish and sea fish. Carbon-dating in 2016 of a butchered bear bone, found a century earlier in a cave in County Clare, has indicated there were humans on the island 12,500 years ago, in palaeolithic times, but the oldest settlement dates from around 10,000 years ago. It’s at Mount Sandel, in the far north, outside what is now Coleraine, and close to the River Bann and the sea.
The people who lived there hunted wild boar, but they also cracked open oysters and urchins and caught salmon in traps.
Eating river fish, McMahon says,
“is a great way of stepping back in time”, especially if you pair it with the wild food that grows on the bank, “such as nettles, garlic and watercress”. Then there’s seaweed. He uses it not just in a blancmange popularised in 20th-century cookbooks, with carrageen moss replacing gelatin, but at every opportunity, garnishing his lamb fillets with samphire, adding kelp to a classic broth of beef and barley, dressing fish and vegetables with nori and dillisk (dulse).
I grew up a few miles from Mount Sandel in Portstewart, in a seaside boarding house where, in the 1970s, one of the regular guests was an Englishman, working for a Lincolnshire-based company, selling seed potatoes to Irish farmers. The engine of the house was the coal-burning range, a great creamy slab with a black-leaded top. On a griddle over its hotplate my mother made scones, fadge (potato bread) and soda bread.
As with the potato, soda bread made with buttermilk is seen as an ancient staple of the Irish table, but McMahon points out that its tradition is recent: bicarbonate of soda (baking soda) wasn’t invented until the 19th century. I’d assumed that topping porridge with fresh fruit was a new-fangled thing (as a child I had a sprinkle of sugar and a splash of milk – or, if I got to the milk bottle first, the cream from the top), but he tells me that monks were adding apple or blackberries in medieval times.
Among the virtues of his book is that it’s a useful corrective to stereotype and supposition. I’d go along with his argument that “Wild rabbit [which his restaurant serves in a stew, as croquettes, or roasted whole] is a much more ethical and sustainable choice than caged chicken. Eating it also connects you with a long tradition of its consumption.”
There has also been a long tradition in Ireland of burning turf – peat – but we now know that the practice is more damaging in terms of global warming than burning coal. Given that, it’s hard to nod heartily at his declaration that “there is nothing more beautiful” than cooking game over an open turf fire, or to wholly endorse his recipe for turf-smoked butter (“works well with grilled salmon or mackerel”).
I did, though, cook his version of Dublin coddle, a pork dish that features in the work of Swift, Joyce and O’Casey, and it went down extremely well in the Kerr household. Next on the menu: something with seaweed.
Potatoes only arrived in the late 1500s and bicarbonate of soda in the 19th century
‘What I did to them was terrible but you have to understand the context. This was London 2016.” So begins Luke Brown’s second novel Theft, setting up the ever-so-slightly-facile conceit of man-in-crisis vs country-in-crisis. What follows is a frequentlyhilarious meditation on class, and loss, as well as a portrait of contemporary London, seen through the eyes of an outsider.
Our protagonist, Paul, is a cokesnorting, self-obsessed Dalstonite, who has the job every literary millennial covets above all: a part-time role at that sanctum sanctorum, the London Review of Books bookshop. He spends the rest of his time haunting Hackney, reviewing books and –
more lucratively – haircuts for the absurd fashion magazine White Jesus. Recent events have caused him to take stock of his life: the arrival of his mid-30s, the death of his mother and the breakdown of his relationship make him wonder whether he’d be more successful “if I had put to another use the ten thousand hours I had discussed the meaning of love with idiots who would not leave my sofa”.
Enter Emily Nardini, a reclusive novelist who “had not consented to an interview in 10 years”. In something of a coup, our narrator manages to score a tête-à-tête with Nardini – and, improbably, to catapult himself into her life, her relationship and her soon-tobe-stepdaughter’s knickers. The consequences are disastrous.
Brown is an exceptionally stylish writer. From the first page, it is clear we have the steadiest of hands on the tiller. He’s also supremely literary and, as an editor of fiction, and a contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and London Review of Books, he knows the scene he satirises. The dialogue is crisp and true-to-life, the description intuitive. Every joke lands.
My problem with this novel is Paul, our unreliable – and detestable – narrator. Of course, detestability is not a problem in and of itself; many of our most compelling protagonists are antiheroes: Patrick Bateman, John
Self, Tony Soprano. One need only read Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation for recent masterclasses in