Food & Drink
In an age of globalisation, reconnecting with the food of our forebears is more important than ever, writes chef and author Jp Mcmahon
Irish recipes from Jp Mcmahon, plus Rose Murray Brown on Austria’s best wines
In writing this book, I set out to investigate Irish food. I wanted to examine the history of food on the island to reclaim a food story that said much more than the one I was taught at school or heard as a young boy growing up in the 1980s. We should look back into history and bring forth the foodstuffs that brought people to this island, right back to the beginning, to the first settlers who migrated here with their rich diet of fish and wild food. This is where the answers reside. This is where, I believe, we will find the future of Irish food. Of course, I may be wrong, but in an age of unprecedented globalisation, to pick a wild herb growing outside your front door is an act of revolution. It is an act that takes you back a couple of millennia and reconnects you with your local landscape. As JP Mallory writes in his book The Origins of the Irish, ‘the earliest Irish were direct products of the land they occupied: no Irish geology = no Irish people’. This is not the answer to everything, but it is a good place to start. The land shaped us, and we in turn were shaped by it.
People lived on this island before written records. What do we know of their food culture? Only what we can glean from midden beds and archaeological finds from the north to the south of the island. But that is not to say that no food culture existed. Where there are people, there is food; and where there is food, there is a culture. ■
@mistereatgalway
Brown soda bread with stout and treacle
Bicarbonate of soda helped to feed bread to a generation of soldiers at war in Europe and afar. It is the bread we are most familiar with in Ireland. Many say this was because of the coarse flour in Ireland. Bicarbonate of soda suited it better than yeast. My own grandmother would make similar bread every second or third day. It is a tradition worth continuing. This is the brown bread we make every day at our restaurant Aniar.
Makes two loaves rapeseed oil, for greasing 800g/1¾lb strong brown bread flour 200g strong white bread flour
1 tbsp bicarbonate of soda
20g sea salt
3 handfuls of mixed seeds (such as pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds and linseeds/flaxseed)
200g treacle
2 eggs
850ml buttermilk
200ml stout
50g pinhead oats, for the topping
1 Preheat the oven to 130C/gas Mark ¾. Grease two 23 × 13 × 7cm loaf pans.
2 Stir all the dry ingredients together in a large mixing bowl. Add the treacle, eggs and buttermilk and combine, then add enough stout until you achieve a wet dough.
3 Pour the dough into the two prepared loaf pans, sprinkle the oats on top and bake in the preheated oven for 1 hour 30 to 1 hour 45 minutes, until the loaves sound hollow when the bottoms are tapped or the core temperature is greater than 85C/185F on a meat thermometer.
Coddle
Coddle, or Dublin coddle to be more precise, is a dish made up of leftover sausages and bacon. Traditionally, the sausages and bacon were cut up and combined with onions and potatoes and left to stew in a light broth. Though often unappetising to look at, the dish was made famous by several Irish writers, from Jonathan Swift to James Joyce and Seán O’casey. Modern versions include barley and carrots. It is essentially a dish that grew out of poverty and famine and then migrated into the working-class areas of Dublin at the beginning of the 20th century to become a dish of central importance to the people who lived there.
Serves eight 2 tbsp rapeseed oil, plus extra if needed
500g sausages, cut into pieces if preferred
500g streaky bacon, cut into pieces 500g onions, sliced
2 tbsp chopped thyme
2 bay leaves
1 litre chicken stock
1kg potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks 4 tbsp chopped parsley freshly ground black pepper
1 Warm the oil in a large pan over a medium heat. Add the sausages and bacon and fry for about 10 minutes until they have a nice colour. Remove the meat from the pan and set aside.
2 Add the sliced onions to the pan and a little more oil if necessary. Reduce the heat and fry for about 10 minutes so that the onions caramelise slowly.
3 When the onions have a nice colour, return the sausages and bacon to the pan and add the thyme and bay leaves. Cover with the chicken stock (broth) and return to the boil. Reduce the heat to a simmer and add the potatoes. Cook for about 30 minutes.
4 Add the chopped parsley and plenty of black pepper and serve.
Plum and cinnamon roly-poly
Although jam roly-poly is a traditional British pudding, it appeared in many menus of ‘big house’ cooking in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is a flat-rolled suet pudding, which is spread with jam and rolled up, then steamed or baked. Nowadays it is usually no longer made with suet. For a vegetarian version, replace the suet with vegetable fat (vegetable shortening).
Serves six 125g plum and cinnamon jam whipped cream or custard, to serve 250g self-raising flour (2 cups allpurpose flour mixed with 1 tbsp baking powder), plus extra for dusting a pinch of sea salt
50g/4 tbsp butter, plus a little extra for greasing
50g suet (available from butchers), chopped
150ml milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 Preheat the oven to 180C/gas Mark 4. Line a sheet of aluminium foil with greaseproof paper.
2 Put the flour, salt, butter and suet into a mixing bowl and rub together using your fingertips until the mixture is sandy. Add the milk and vanilla extract to form a dough.
3 Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and roll into a rectangle. Spread the jam over the dough, leaving a gap at the edges. Roll the dough and lift onto the greaseproof paper. Bring up the sides of the paper and foil to wrap the pastry and seal the edges.
4 Put an ovenproof dish on the bottom shelf of the preheated oven and then carefully fill it with boiling water.
5 Place the roly-poly on a wire rack directly over the steaming water and bake for 35 minutes.
6 Once done, remove from the oven, unwrap and transfer to a plate. Serve warm, with lightly whipped cream or custard.