A clef, a chef, throw in food and hey, presto!
The second is a different kettle of fish. It is conducted at a much more leisurely pace with real care taken in selection and preparation of the produce and, ideally, it will be shared with good friends and loved ones. The cooking itself may be protracted but should also be immensely enjoyable, providing you do it right. And what’s right? Well, a glass from that nice bottle you’ve opened for dinner always helps but, crucially, you need the right music playing in the background.
Cooking Songs (Sony Music) is a new compilation album which comes accompanied by eight recipes from TV chef and I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here winner Gino D’Acampo. Lovely, says you, let’s give it a whirl. Let’s see, One Direction, JLS, Westlife, hmmm. Not my cup of tea but it’s a free world. Anything else? Dolly Parton’s 9-5? The Nolans? Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believing’? Amy Winehouse’s ‘Rehab’? ‘Big Ron’ Keating and ‘Life is a Rollercoaster’? Can you spot a theme? No, neither can we. Is there even a food or cooking-themed tune here at all? Annie Lennox’s ‘Walking on Broken Glass’? Kelly Clarkson’s ’Stronger’ (What Doesn’t Kill You)?
To be honest, this is such a bizarre and, ahem, ‘eclectic’ selection, it’s hard to imagine anyone other than the Sony bean counters sitting through it in its entirety, not to mind trying to cook to it. Now, let’s put it back in the case, never speak of it again and instead ask some expert cooks for their thoughts on food and music.
MIKE HANRAHAN
In 2007, when his close friend and long-time musical associate, Ronnie Drew, became ill with the cancer that would eventually kill him, Mike Hanrahan finally turned his back on a 30-year musical career that began in his teens and had spanned four decades. “I figured to myself at the time that I didn’t have enough time to jump up on another musical horse so I’d try something else,” says Hanrahan. So, he decided instead to become a chef.
Trainee chefs, in their late teens and early twenties are always stunned by just how gruelling a job it is. Many simply drop out. The older a chef gets, invariably, the more time he spends trying to devise an exit strategy. Hanrahan was 49. “I remember introducing myself in the mostly much younger class in Ballymaloe and announcing I was on my gap year.”
Hanrahan was the singer/songwriter and frontman with Irish band Stockton’s Wing for most of their glory years and penned ‘Beautiful Affair’, one of the most popular Irish songs of the last 30 years. The career in music continued after he left in 1994, including 10 years with Ronnie Drew as writer, performer, producer and musical director.
“It was when he got sick, that I decided to give up music. Ronnie was a dear, dear friend, one of my closest friends in life, I miss him very badly, we hung out a lot together, I was devastated. His last gig was in Ballymaloe House, ‘cause I’d been down doing the course. Ronnie and me had already played there a few times in the drawing room so he came down and spent a few days there and we did the gig in the back room.
“I got a good start in the Ballymaloe Cookery School. I’d been a fan of Darina and her food politics. Your skills get better and I met some amazing people. It was like a food bubble for three months and I got the bug. But then I didn’t know if I could cut it as an actual chef so I worked in a friend’s gastropub in Dun Laoghaire for 18 months, learning the trade. He taught me an awful lot I needed to learn about the cut and thrust of service and I’ll always appreciate that.”
After that, he returned to Ballymaloe Cookery School once more, this time as a trainee teacher, further honing skills and acquiring knowledge. Today, he is the head chef at comedian Pat Shortt’s gastropub in Castlemartyr, fast developing a national renown for the calibre of the food being dished up. But it was no late vocation: music and food have always been closely intertwined in Hanrahan’s life.
Stockton’s Wing have reformed recently for a number of sellout shows, including a St Patrick’s Day gig at the National Concert Hall that Hanrahan says was “absolutely incredible”.
“In the early days of the band, we had nothing so I used to cook our own food on the road. I’d robbed a pressure cooker from my mum and we had a frying pan and a gas ring. In whatever village or town we’d be playing in, we’d find the best butcher, the best shops. Ronnie was also a great man for the food and we always ate very well — the dinner during our touring days was very important and he was a good cook.”
“I hate the tinny little transistor radio in the kitchen at work but if there was a good sound system in there, I wouldn’t mind listening to it during service. At home, if I was cooking, I’d play something. My wife is a classically-trained pianist, I’d listen to her sometimes. I’d always have a belt of The Eels, I’ve seen them loads of times. I like all the new stuff, new bands, Of Monsters and Men are driving me crazy at the moment, their melodies are so hot but I always listen to a lot of trad, a lot of country, anything really.
“I always think that food and music go so well together, a dinner party could be followed by a few tunes or a session. My approach to food would be similar to how I approach music. You’re dealing with an audience, you need to show them a huge amount of respect. In Shortt’s, I book all the bands and play in the pub once a month. That’s how the music and food go together still for me, always with me, they’ll never leave me.”
Perfect Meal, Perfect Music, cooked at home: “Poached Monkfish with Rory O’Connell’s recipe for a red pepper and butter sauce. Some nice salad, a nice bottle of Albarino and definitely Anthony and the Johnsons. Afterwards, some of my own ice cream and a good lash of The Eels to get the party going.”
TRISH DESEINE
Belfast-born Trish Deseine is a food writer and cookbook author but despite doing several TV series, including three on RTÉ, she isn’t an Irish household name on a par with Darina or Rachel Allen. That’s because she’s a big fish in a much bigger pond, based in Paris, moving there after university with the man who would become her husband, and publishing primarily in French. When Deseine set up a mail-order company selling high-end culinary products including couverture chocolate, her publishers Marabout chanced upon her at a trade show. She has sold more than one million books, her second, the award-winning Je Veux du Chocolat, ratcheting up 500,000 sales alone. Her latest book is Grand Table, Petite Cuisine.
“I always cooked, both my parents cooked, very simple stuff. My father was in the meat business and used to give very specific instructions about cooking meat. And we were always talking about cooking. When I came to France, it wasn’t really cool to cook in those days. It was seen by my peers as being anti-feminist, that you should be more concerned about careers. I didn’t care and had lots of dinner parties. As a young couple we would do a lot more cooking than others.”
“I never anticipated this level of success, not in a million years! If you’re not Jamie or Nigella, sales of 10 or 15 thousand are really, really good so this changed everything for me hugely. It meant a whole new career. It was lovely, we were a brand new team, publisher and author and they were keen to take risks and do new things. In those days in France, cooking was seen as a bit ‘middle-aged’ by all my French friends, I was an ‘early adopter’, I suppose. It would have been so much harder these days. I remember one skinny ex-friend asking, ‘don’t you get sick of talking about food all day long?’
“I have music on all the time when cooking, verrrry, very loud, a bit of trance, house music, electronica, boom-booming away in the background. It’s the best music to cook to, especially when I’m cooking recipes in preparation for my books and you have to get through lots of dishes.
“I get quite trippy when I’m cooking, going off on one in my head. That’s what was so hard for me doing TV, when I cook, I go away into my own little world and it was really hard for me to talk while I was cooking.”
“I have teenage children so I do find myself listening to some of their stuff— not in that creepy ‘Tony-Blair-liking-Coldplay’ way, but I find myself liking a lot of their music, I don’t really have any boundaries except the offensively nasty rap they put on just to annoy me. Other than that, when not cooking, I love Fleetwood Mac, Carole King, Lianne la Havas, Warpaint, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Ting Tings — the common denominator is they all have to be played extremely loud. I listen to a lot of female vocalists, Aimee Mann, Cat Power, Martha Wainwright and I also listen to Bon Iver, Tom Waits, Nick Cave. I’m more into the bluesy kind of stuff, but not into rock ’n’ roll at all. I also get really obscure artists from my kids and will Spotify them. I’m not geeky about it, I’ll play something to death but might forget the name.”
Perfect Meal, Perfect Music at home: “My favourite ‘cooking album’, Mezzanine by Massive Attack and Daube de Boeuf from the Camargue and Apple and Caramel Tarte with Cream.”
MICHAEL QUINN
Waterford Castle’s Head Chef Michael Quinn of 17 years was, for a long time, one of culinary Ireland’s best-kept secrets, though very highly regarded by those in the know. But the country at large is finally cottoning on to his excellent cooking skills, allied with a very serious commitment to top quality local Irish produce, inspired by his original mentor, Myrtle Allen. He worked for Allen for nearly five years at Ballymaloe House and is another alumnus of Ballymaloe Cookery School. Tellingly, he was the first featured chef in Neven Maguire’s recent TV series, not remotely out of place alongside the seven other Michelin-starred chefs in subsequent episodes. He also teaches Culinary Arts at WIT.
“I’d always cooked at home from a very early age. One of my earliest memories is of making a sponge cake and being able to watch it rise. I spoke to Darina on the phone before going on the Ballymaloe course and she said go along to Waterford Castle and ask the chef there, a guy called McCluskey, if you could work for a day or two in the kitchen and see if it’s for you. He told me, the money is shit, the lifestyle is shit but I said, give us a go anyway. I walked into the kitchen and saw the flames, the madness, the speed at which people were moving and within 10 minutes, I knew it was what I wanted to do with my life.
“It was tough at first, returning to Waterford Castle as head chef, trying to build up the small suppliers for Waterford Castle. There weren’t many and it was slow at first but I eventually built up a network — without your suppliers, you’re not a chef.
“I listen to nothing during service, I used to when I was young and you could concentrate on both things and you’d have a pumped-up kitchen listening to the latest and greatest house music. We do still have it on before and after service. When I was at the Roscoff [Paul Rankin’s Belfast restaurant], we’d have absolutely hammering tunes and then switch them off for service. It’s a good way to get through very long 16-plus hour days.
“I can remember when I first started in the castle, people ringing down to reception asking what was going on in the kitchen and we’d have pumping music at 7am. Certain managers back then would come in and be giving out and as soon as they were gone, it was turned up even louder. After service, we have a cleanup and the music will go on. But I don’t play it anymore in service because you need to concentrate and when you come to a certain level, you have to concentrate on that and that alone but definitely when I’m at home, it’s still a very strong thing for me. Now, most of the music I play when cooking is at home.
“I’m still up-to-date but my taste has got considerably mellower, I’m listening to Sam Jackson, Daughter, Gem Club’s Breakers, James Vincent McMorrow, soulful music very easy to listen to, cooking at home to relax. You’d be off in your own little world, cooking away. I do nearly all the cooking at home, ok, it’s also my job but I love to come home, open up a bottle of wine, have a chat and cook and eat some really simple food. Music is very important and goes hand in hand with food.”
Perfect Music, Perfect Meal at home: “Bill Withers’ Greatest Hits playing, a glass of Ripasso in hand and roast loin of lamb with couscous, almonds, pomegranate, dates and mint and [partner] Jessie to share it all with.”
JESS MURPHY
Kai, the restaurant chef Jess Murphy owns and operates with her Irish husband David is to the very fore of Galway’s ongoing culinary evolution and a prime reason for the city’s burgeoning national and international reputation as a food destination. Raised in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand, Murphy first began cooking in restaurants at the local wineries. Jess may cite ‘entrapment’ by husband David as the reason for leaving behind the balmier climes of the Southern Hemisphere but her tongue is very firmly in cheek because she has gone native and become a true ‘Galway Girl’.
“I wanted to be a chef since I was seven. My granny came from a massive sheep station and they’d only go to town once every six months, so Gran used to preserve everything, baked beans, spaghetti, big old whiskey bottles filled with tomato ketchup, so that’s always been romantic and nostalgic to me.”
“Growing up, my mum was a potter, a bit of a hippy, a fake-fur-coat-wearing, Grace Jones-listening, Brown-Cortina-driving potter and I listened to pretty much what she listened to. Heaps of Pink Floyd, Grace Jones, Neil Young, the Rolling Stones and she’s a huge reggae fan so loads of Bob Marley. And a famous Kiwi reggae band, Herbs.
“We never listen to music during service, but always before and after, during prep time and cleanup. We have an iPod docking station, we take turns to choose the music. Music is a very important part of the whole thing for me. Prepping-wise, I listen to a lot of local Galway singers, Nicola Joyce, Noriana Kennedy. Toto’s ‘Africa’ on repeat quite a lot, it’s kind of been my theme tune for about five years. I’ve tried other Toto songs but nothing compares to ‘Africa’.
“Music played in the restaurant is really important for meals. It’s always very important to have a good playlist. The majority comes from the girls working front of house, they plug in their iPhones, depending on whose working. And you can trust them 100% — after all, no one could get as random as I can.
“At home of couuuurse, I listen to music when I’m cooking, a lot of Gogol Bordello, The Stays, I Draw Slow, The National. Over dinner, it might be Ray la Montagne, Cat Stevens, something mellow that’s not going to overide the whole thing. Music gives you good energy and that’s what you need for cooking, you need to put energy in, the love in. Food cooked under pressure is a completely different animal — I think it’s all to do with being positive.”
Perfect Meal, Perfect Music at home: “Lobster Thermidor, listening to [American singer-songwriter-multi-instrumentalist] Kishi Bashi and I’m thinking of a sunny day in Galway so I’m drinking a rosé, a Cerasuolo Colle Morino 2012 Barba.”
