Western Morning News (Saturday)
I don’t think we ate all the bears in Ireland...
Think you know Irish food? Chef Jp McMahon talks ELLA WALKER through some of Ireland’s more surprising historical dishes
WHAT did people eat for dinner 10,000 years ago? It’s a question Irish chef Jp McMahon considers a lot. “I’m always thinking about that period in time,” says the author and food writer.
He finds himself endlessly intrigued as to whether the food then was “any more
Irish than what we eat now”, and says he’s fascinated with how ‘terroir’ cooking
(using indigenous ingredients) now would compare.
You can see why the Galway-based restaurateur was tasked with compiling new recipe compendium, The Irish Cookbook. The weighty collection investigates the ‘peasant tradition’ presumption, explores historical and contemporary cooking (Jp went deep into Irish recipe archives), and champions the produce Ireland naturally offers up.
It turns out, 10,000 years ago, Ireland’s first settlements were busy with people eating stuff you’d still recognise today.
“The three pinnacle foods would’ve been: salmon, trout and eel,” explains Jp.
“You also had a lot of wild game, duck – particularly mallard – pigeon and woodcock, and then a whole host of indigenous plants, such as wild garlic, nettles.”
People would have also been cracking open oysters and scallops, mussels, cockles and clams, not to mention cooking up dishes of seal, puffin, squirrel and bear. The bears are of course all gone now though.
“I don’t think we ate them all...,” Jp notes wryly.
And no, he wasn’t allowed to include a bear recipe in the book – despite the fact they “still eat bear in Canada” and “puffin in Iceland”. Seal was even eaten “up until the 1950s” in a lot of the islands off Ireland itself.
When people think about Irish food though – your lamb and barley, beef and Guinness stews – Jp says “they’re really thinking about it in the last 200 years.
“A lot of these recipes only date to the 19th century, and once you go back beyond that point, it gets very, very messy,” he adds.
It all makes writing a cookbook about ‘Irish food’ quite difficult – it’s impossible to be definitive.
For Jp, “whatever was eaten in Ireland is part of Irish food” – but then that has to include the criss-cross of dishes between England and Ireland, the
Chinese takeaways on every Irish high street, and his own restaurants, from the Michelinstarred Aniar, to casual tapas joint, Cava Bodega.
“When we think about national cuisine, it doesn’t really exist, it is a figment of our imagination.”
Taste and flavour are very real though, even if some are taken for granted. Black pepper, spices, citrus – none are indigenous to Ireland, so Jp will incorporate woodruff and meadowsweet, rather than cinnamon and allspice, when making a carrot cake of Irish terroir.
Some indigenous ingredients deserve more respect. Jp would particularly like Ireland to be associated with “two very elemental foods” – seafood and seaweed. “They’ve been here a long, long time,” he explains, but the tradition of seaweed is very small.
When he’s not running his restaurants, or actually running (his Instagram feed is a mix of food and training updates), Jp pulls together Food On The Edge, an annual international symposium of chefs in Galway, that looks at the future of food.
“For a lot of people, food is just a vehicle for hunger and nutrition, and for me, food should be a cultural experience,” he says. “How do we reclaim that?” The Irish Cookbook is a good start.