Sally Barnes: lessons from a trailblazer

Joe McNamee joins Sally Barnes, a legend in the world of food, for one of her renowned fish smoking masterclasses

Sally Barnes: One of the pathfinders for the modern Irish food movement.

On a glorious June morning, we are slugging mugs of hot, strong tea, assembled for a fish smoking masterclass in The Keep, a gorgeous rough-hewn wooden structure, attached to The Woodcock Smokery, between Castletownshend and Skibbereen.

The Keep’s removable shutters are easily opened for al fresco gatherings, a ‘classroom’ doubling as a hospitality space, and with views stretching across West Cork to The Paps, in Kerry, it is also one of the most delightful and exclusive dining experiences in Ireland.

This not just any class, however, for our teacher, Sally Ferns Barnes, is a legend in the Irish food world, mastering her craft for over 40 years and a key member of that select group of redoubtable and pioneering West Cork women who have served as the pathfinders for the modern Irish food movement since the 1970s.

In 2006, Sally was crowned Supreme Champion at the Great Taste Awards in London, recognised for the superlative quality of her smoked wild Irish salmon, the very first food producer from Ireland to receive the highly prestigious accolade. It is one of many awards and accolades from a storied career.

Sally Ferns grew up along the banks of the Clyde in West Scotland. “I was happiest in streams or up in trees, I was quiet and loved nature and where we lived was beautiful.” When she was just 13, her father moved the family down to Sussex, in England. It was a traumatic uprooting, the memory of which still draws a shudder from Sally to this day, and, as a painfully shy ‘outsider’, she found it very hard to be accepted.

After school, she began teacher training in London. One night, she met Colin Barnes, an English fisherman briefly visiting from Baltimore, in West Cork, where he had moved some years previously. The bonded over a shared passion for the natural world and when romance blossomed, Sally went to West Cork for the summer where Colin had saved enough to buy his own 20-foot wooden punt and nets.

“So I went out as his crew, very exciting. Compared to a hot summer’s days in London, no air, the stench of cars, and you’re sitting there, bobbing around behind The Stags [off Toe Head] thinking I’d died and gone to heaven.” The relationship continued long distance until her final year when Sally became pregnant, a dramatic alteration to her life’s script. She dropped out of college and moved to West Cork, living near Union Hall.

“I loved Union Hall, it was a lovely community, a working village with a working fishing industry, a burgeoning industry in those days, it wasn’t a holiday village, it was more real. Most everyone in the village was either a fisherman or a farmer so we had a lot in common, especially when things were bad and we all—sometimes literally—were in the same boat.

“I was childminder, bottlewasher, taxi driver, dropping fish here and there. It’s hard work being a fisherman’s wife, a single parent most of the time and money was always tight. I couldn’t even get sick because Colin was out at sea. I had chickenpox when I was 30, thought I was going to die but I had to get up and cook and get them out to school. At least we had fresh fish. You’d occasionally buy cheap meat, but I was probably in my 40s before I ever cooked steak, it was too expensive.” 

One day, Colin returned with four or five huge brown trout. “They were beautiful but I was livid. We had no freezer and only us in the house to eat them. I thought, what did people do in the past to preserve a glut of fish for lean times. I began to experiment, starting with a tea chest, a hole in the bottom big enough for a small pan to burn the wood shavings.” It worked after a fashion, improving with modifications but, unsurprisingly, eventually caught fire. Then, all experimentation was temporarily shelved when 1979 proved to be a bumper year for salmon fishing.

“The boat was fishing out of Dirk Bay [west of Clonakilty Bay] and I’d drive to the pier near Ardfield down an almost vertical hill—cars aren’t allowed there now—in my Renault 4 with its 845cc engine to deliver the crew’s vittles for the next 24 hours and then I’d haul a quarter ton of salmon back up the hill with Holly beside me in a car seat and Joleine in my belly and deliver it to Skibbereen at 10pm at night and do it all over again the next day.” They had arranged to sell to a fish smoker in Mizen, with payment due at the end of the season, when he had sold the smoked fish. He took the fish but never paid them a penny.

“It was devastating. Back then salmon fishing was our main income for the whole season. We paid the crew, we had to, and that really put it up to us with the bank. That’s when we started foraging for wild food to go with the fish to feed ourselves.” Then, in 1980, Colin’s boat sunk. It was uninsured. Their hardscrabble life became even more precarious.

“There was nobody lost, that kept me sane. One of two brothers from Union Hall, couldn’t swim. Can you imagine if his mother had lost him? That helped me keep my head on.” In 1981, as part of a court settlement, Sally was given the fish smoker’s kiln in lieu of monies owed and threw herself into mastering her craft. From the outset, she only ever smoked wild fish—never farmed—ideally from local boats and suppliers, developing her own processes for traditional filleting, salt-curing and smoking.

When the girls started secondary school, she commenced studying microbiology, food processing and oceanography through the Open University distance learning system.

“It gave me huge confidence in my own curing process, showing me what I had been doing all along was correct.” The business truly took flight and in the years that followed, awards and recognition began to pile up, but just six weeks after Sally had won the Great Taste award, in 2006, a ban on Irish commercial sea fishing for wild salmon was announced, set to commence the following year in 2007. Her business was no longer viable.

“There was no mention of the pollution in the rivers from agricultural fertilisers and pesticides and industrial wastewater. No mention of predation from the burgeoning seal population, of the damage to wild salmon caused by sea lice and waste materials from farmed salmon. No mention of the huge impact of climate change. They just blamed the commercial fishermen and banned it outright. I’d just won this fantastic award, I had a brilliant business and wasn’t going to surrender it.” She sourced from a Scottish fishery for nine years and now sources her wild salmon from Irish draft net fishermen. She greatly expanded her wild fish range and her biggest seller of all is smoked mackerel.

Sally’s masterclasses are a combination of hands-on practical skills and a passionately delivered exploration of sustainable fishing, oceanography and the importance of traditional preservation processes. Meanwhile, Max serves up one of the nicest lunches to be had in West Cork which naturally includes some of the finest smoked wild salmon to be found anywhere in the world.

“As I get old, my knowledge, what I’ve gleaned over a life’s work, has become my most valuable resource. Now I want to share the knowledge, pass on the skills of a very traditional process to another generation. The salmon, salmo salar, is a precious resource that we have relied on for thousands of years and there is no argument that it is in real danger of becoming extinct. But if we just forget about it, people will forget that it’s in trouble and allow those without any scruples at all to finish them off entirely.” Does Sally ever regret winding up in Ireland?

“The one time I thought about it was when the uninsured boat was lost. I thought what do I do now? I could have stayed in London, finished my degree, might have gone on to something else, had security, a big fat pension but then I look at what I have. I live in a most wonderful part of the world, drinking clean water from the ground, breathing clean air and we’ll never starve in West Cork as long as there’s bartering. The friends I have here are just extraordinary and every award I’ve ever been granted has been my tribute to this country. I consider myself an extremely fortunate human being.”