Eat, cook and dream with Lilly Higgins
I was chatting to someone, he came over, and everyone else wandered away as we talked deep into the night about making our own pesto. As romantic stories go I like how the inclusion of ‘pesto’ dates it. It’s the equivalent of my parents meeting over fondue.
You can tell it was in the early noughties when pesto was slathered over panini across the land. It was drizzled into soups, mixed into pasta, and was the not-so-secret ingredient in many a stuffed chicken breast.
After nights of chatting and swapping recipes and flirty glances we decided it was time to commit; We should really open a restaurant together. I had just gotten my degree in design and was flitting around like a typical restless graduate. Even though I loved to cook every day, I knew I needed more than experience, I needed an education in food. So in 2007 I enrolled in Ballymaloe Cookery School. On my first day listening to Darina Allen talk about compost, I just knew that it was where I was supposed to be. As I learned, cooked, and tasted, I began to fall even more in love with food.
Darina’s enthusiasm and passion is infectious. The gardens were bursting with herbs and edible flowers, the glasshouses full of fruit and vegetables, and the chicken houses producing freckled brown eggs with rich ochre yolks. Thick milk and cream from the Jersey cows adorned the dessert table at lunchtime. It was the ideal place for me to learn and kindle my love of food.
I soon realised that many people also have that starry eyed dream of opening their own little place. You love food and want to share it? Me too! I graduated from the school inspired and confident from my time there. I was sure that within a year, I would open up my dream restaurant and it would be a big hit!
Oh, how things have changed! Well, some things. The dream boy is still here and we have two baby boys of our own. Alas, the Celtic Tiger has long since left us, to stalk around new lands — probably enjoying gorgeous weather and impeccable restaurant service!
So I kept up the day job in an office and did a lot of highly necessary research. One of my favourite places in Cork is the Farmgate Cafe in the English Market.
I would sit on one of the high stools on the balcony overlooking the bustling market with a brown scone and rhubarb jam. All of their food is so real. Crusty bread rolls brimming with mixed leaves, home-cooked ham, and relish, or thick slices of tea brack and apple tarts with flakey buttery pastry. If you sit there long enough you can see the staff pop downstairs for more produce or various stallholders call up with crates of vegetables, cheeses wrapped in wax paper, and freshly baked loaves, fragrant and floury.
Another favourite of mine is the Cake Cafe in Dublin. The menu reads like a dream and the actual cafe itself is the utmost in pretty. The atmosphere is as sweet as the generously iced cakes that bedeck the counter top. Customers are relaxed and happy hugging pots of tea and chatting over incredible lemon squares.
It’s places like these that make me dream of my own cafe; seeing what an incredible effect good food has on the public. I love seeing people well fed.
I spent my evenings and weekends writing recipes and photographing food for my blog. I got so much pleasure from food blogging, I’d recommend it to anyone. Soon though, describing the aroma of cumin-dusted roast pumpkin or the texture of a duck egg sponge was not enough, I wanted to actually cook for lots of people, outside of my family. I longed to serve up some tasty grub and see people’s reactions there and then.
The dream of opening a restaurant had resurfaced — I had to act on it. So I put an invitation on the blog for readers to come to dinner, and called the evening ‘The Loaves and Fishes Supper Club’.
Coming from a family of 10, I’m used to cooking for large numbers and loved the idea of scaling right up — to a mammoth family-style chow down.
I bought lots of old chairs and pretty crockery from charity shops and rented three huge tables. I enlisted the help of my sisters and friends and we began to hold monthly suppers in a Dublin home.
I packed the car with ingredients from the English Market in Cork and my invaluable food processor. Once a month, for a year, my sister Rosie drove with me to Dublin and on the way, we’d talk through the menu and plan the evening ahead.
When would we fill the glasses with the elderflower & cucumber champagne? Which plates would we use to serve the chola tikki? Who would get the fun job of rolling the chocolate and chilli truffles and who’d be stuck ironing the napkins?
Figuring out each detail and task involved in feeding a crowd from a family home was hard work, too, but really exciting and fun.
My sisters were fantastic and we really enjoyed working on it together. I was sorry to finish up Loaves and Fishes, but I always knew that the suppers by their nature, had to pop down as well as pop up!
The supper club was the perfect way of dipping my toe in the restaurant scene in a really non-committal way. I’ve never stopped compiling recipes and dreaming of a place of my own to serve delicious food in a beautiful atmosphere to other food lovers. This place turns out to be my new book — a collection of recipes that would be on the menu of my Dream Delicatessen.
I’ve been imagining this place for so long, I’m thrilled to have finally brought it to life. I’ve also hosted a few pop-up events with the book that gave me a further taste of cafe culture.
For me, creating the pop-up restaurant, having my two little boys with Colm, photographing and writing about food for a living is even more than I dreamed about years ago.
For now I’m more than happy to take my seat back on the balcony at the Farmgate and order another pot of tea.
Lilly’s latest cookbook, Lilly Higgins’ Dream Deli is in shops now, priced at €22.99.
