The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
SAVOR THE SPIRIT OF IRELAND
A St. Patrick’s Day menu, with flavors of the old country made new.
everal years ago, while researching her family tree, Judith Mcloughlin made a startling discovery. A hundred years before she and her husband, Gary, left Northern Ireland for Boston, her great-grandparents made the same journey.
In 1896, Etta Mcgarvey set sail from County Donegal at age 21 in search of a better life. Soon after, John Mcneill, the youngest child of 11 on a hardscrabble farm, took a similar gamble. They both wound up in New England and met in the elegant home where Etta worked as a maid and John was a carpenter. Eventually they married, settled in Boston and started a family.
But unlike other poor Irish who’d weathered so much hardship to reach their dream, the Mcneills returned to Ireland in 1900 thanks to an unexpected land inheritance. They passed down the spirit of refined hospitality they’d acquired overseas to their progeny.
Mcloughlin, a chef and cookbook author who now lives in Roswell, was among the recipients of that tradition. She tells how her grandparents’ story shaped her own in the newly published “A Return to Ireland: A Culinary Journey from America to Ireland” (Hatherleigh, $30).
Mcloughlin grew up on a farm in County Armagh and learned to cook in her grandmother’s bed-and-breakfast alongside her mother and two sisters. “My dad raised primarily sheep and some beef cattle,” she said in a phone interview. “Our neighbors grew all kinds of fresh vegetables: carrots and leeks and such. We
would have so many beautiful varieties of potatoes, each with unique flavors particular to the regions where they were grown.”
After college, Mcloughlin’s sisters founded a restaurant with outside catering in an old schoolhouse, and Mcloughlin pitched in. She married the son of a local baker in a small 18th century chapel nearby, and in 1996 the couple moved to Boston for career opportunities. They planted roots in metro Atlanta the following year.
To ease their homesickness through the transitions, Mcloughlin cooked the dishes they missed from Ireland, sometimes blending them with flavors they’d come to embrace in the modern American South and shared them with new friends and neighbors.
That passion eventually led her to start a catering business, The Shamrock and Peach, and offer cooking classes around the city and beyond. Gary, meanwhile, developed his photography skills, and in 2011 they produced a coffee table cookbook by the same name, with Gary’s sweeping Irish landscapes accompanying his wife’s traditional and cross-cultural creations such as Irish Stout Braised Short Ribs with Georgia Peanuts, Shallots, and Champ and Banoffee Pie with a Southern Pecan Crust.
Mcloughlin traveled the country promoting the book, sometimes cooking alongside top chefs, and now leads cultural tours through Ireland, such as the ones she has planned in May and June through the southern peninsula and along the entire coastline (visit shamrockandpeach. com for details.)
These experiences led her to delve deeper into her own roots and write a follow-up volume with more recipes and photos that paint a fuller picture of the immigrant experience and bring the flavors of the old country to the present. If she’s in town for St. Patrick’s Day, she’ll likely celebrate the holiday as she usually does, by having some neighbors over for storytelling and a feast that takes her back home.