The Menu: in praise of Ballymaloe Relish and Neighbourhood Network 'tea at three'
Jaffa cake gin, just one of the new offerings from the The Blackwater Distillery Tasters’ Club Menu
Any occasion that affords the chance to sit down together over a communal meal must be celebrated — and a chance to do so in one of The Menu’s more favoured restaurants cannot be ignored.
Pigalle Bar & Kitchen join forces with Grand Cru Beers to host a five-course tasting menu, delivered by Sadhbh Kearney under the watchful aegis of PBK head chef, Mark Ahern.
Funky Belgian brews will be paired with Levantine-style dishes (vegetarian option available) in a spirit of epicurean exploration, all the while strictly adhering to HSE guidelines.
The Blackwater Tasters Club sees unique gins and other spirits delivered to your door every two months with The Menu especially intrigued by a ‘Jaffa Cake Gin’.
Method & Madness Irish Whiskey (Midleton Distillery)
Join O’Brien’s Wines in a special whiskey tasting promotion: the first 100 purchasers of a 700ml bottle from the M&M range will be entitled to an exclusive miniature sampling kit and participation in an expert online tasting class on October 8.
The Dublin-based EatYard who have done much in recent years to put the funk into feeding are following up on the success of their Wine & Cheese Festival of last year within the Iveagh Gardens which saw 15,000 people celebrating one of nature’s most elemental of all food and beverage pairings.
The festival itself may well have gone the way of so many others in this benighted year but at least the EatYard crew are doing their bit to make their absence a little less heartfelt, opening a new deli, The EatYard Wine & Cheese Shop, with a pronounced focus on wine (there is also an extensive range of fine craft beers and other beverages) and also offering a decent ‘cheeseboard’ of both old and new Irish favourites.
It will open as a takeaway (with nationwide online ordering soon to follow) and limited in-store seating will also become available. Customers of The Bernard Shaw and Eatyard will also be able to access the weekly changing menu.
The 11th annual outing for Street Feast — one of the great social and community initiatives to arise from the ashes of the recession — is yet another to fall victim to Covid-19. Its aim to bring together communities, often through the sharing of food, is more timely than ever.
However, it is now being replaced by a new online Neighbourhood Network Activity Guide providing activities for all age groups, several of them food-related, including a wonderfully simple, socially distanced, Street Feast Tea At Three, encouraging neighbours to share a friendly cuppa from their doorsteps, balconies, gardens or even over the phone or by video call.
The Menu is both justified and also extremely ancient, meaning he passed a substantial portion of his early years in a time before Ballymaloe Relish and, despite the ravages of age, he recalls that era with crystalline clarity because the condiment landscape was especially barren.
There were two ketchups, one native, one import; one mustard; crassly spiced ‘brown’ sauce, the purpose of which, eluded The Menu; and ‘salad cream’, a loose, runny ‘emulsion’ wielding a raw kick from cheap vinegar.
Most had never heard of mayonnaise, though bohemian types claimed to have ‘experienced’ it on trips to France. Certain ‘gourmands’ even claimed it could be made with raw eggs but when the chips — literal and metaphorical — were down, singularly failed to come up with the goods.
Then The Menu stumbled across Ballymaloe Relish in a local shop in Cork city and nothing was ever quite the same again, starting with his toasted cheese sandwiches.
You can hardly get into food stores nowadays such is the proliferation of relishes, but when The Menu first popped a jar of BR, he was bowled over by the comparative complexity of flavour, at a time when pursuit of actual ‘flavour’ was the culinary equivalent of allowing a girl to sit on your lap without at least two telephone books being first placed thereupon.
Next was texture: in comparison to the singular pureed slurry of other condiments, BR had to be spooned out, the shape of its component parts still discernibly toothsome, even the tiny whole mustard seeds.
Then the coup de grace: sultanas! Yes, whole plump sweet sultanas, their use hitherto utterly prohibited except in the baking of cutty cakes and scones.
Back when tomato was still most definitely a ‘vegetable’, this employment of fruit in a savoury context was dangerously, thrillingly bold. Epicurean possibilities afforded by such a condiment were seemingly limitless and The Menu spent several years thereafter seeking them out.
Other relishes may have since taken up the gauntlet and pushed far beyond in their experimentations but Ballymaloe Relish remains the ‘Ur-relish’, a true Irish classic, an eternal keeper, and The Menu celebrated its 30th anniversary by adding it to one of his legendary sourdough toasties, along with Hegarty’s cheddar, fresh tomato, and some briefly salted red onion, washed down with crisp Kinnegar Rustbucket rye ale.
Happy 30th birthday, Ballymaloe Relish!
