The Menu: Why recipe kits are a great way to get back cooking

Many customers find cooking from scratch hugely beneficial for physical and mental wellbeing

The Salt Project’s Caomhán de Brí alongside DropChef Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer, Roman Grogan

The Yellow Bittern (TYB) is a nondescript 18-seater London restaurant that opened last October offering old school bistro-and-Irish menu. All bookings are by phone and only cash is accepted in payment. Yet, thanks to the online provocations of the chef/proprietor, Belfast-man Hugh Corcoran, it is already one of the most controversial and talked about restaurants in hospitality, garnering astonishing coverage, including a recent feature in The New York Times.

Corcoran is a staunch Republican and communist. His business/life partner is Lady Frances Armstrong-Jones (daughter of Princess Margaret’s former husband), a romantic juxtaposition of ‘blueblood’ and ‘Republican/communist’ further spicing the pot.

Though I suspect Corcoran isn’t blind to the bums-on-seats benefit of his online shenanigans, TYB appears an honest endeavour founded on integrity. But what intrigues me most and has inflamed so many critics is that TYB is only open on weekdays for just two sittings, 12pm and 2pm, serving dinner including dessert, none of your ‘brunch’ nonsense, and bonus points for guzzling back some very fine wines.

A veteran of Cork’s South Mall once wistfully recollected for me his office dinners in the old Oyster Tavern, when Friday was the only day you’d stretch to two G&Ts before a three-courser with wine. That’s definitely no longer the norm and while I enjoy the occasional midday splurge, I generally save my appetites for evening.

These days, the concept of ‘dinner in the middle of the day’ is rarely anything more than rural populism from Danny Healy Rae et al. The shifting of Irish society from a rural agrarian population to a predominantly urban one and the evolving necessity of becoming a two-income household that saw mothers having to go out to work as well, means most Irish households eat dinner in the evening.

I prefer it. The act of cooking from scratch each evening is my meditation, a boon for body and mind after a hard day, capped by sharing it around the table with family and friends, one of humanity’s greatest acts of social communion, across all creeds and cultures, no matter what time of the day you have your ‘dinner’.

But, for many, cooking has become another chore to be crossed off before flopping in front of the TV until bedtime. We increasingly rely on prepared and processed options, supplemented by Deliveroo or takeaways. Just three in 10 adults now cook from scratch in the evening. ‘Pleasure’ derived from cooking is reserved for weekends.

Especially alarming is how communal dining, even a quick meal of pasta with a jar of sauce (number one meal consumed by children; 14% of Irish evening dinners), is also gradually unravelling. Many meals are now consumed in separate parts of the house. Worst of all, seven in 10 are eaten in front of a digital device or TV. We are fast achieving peak ‘mindless eating’, growing further from the primal relationship we have had with the food since the first plate of hairy mammoth and two veg.

This disconnection, an ignorance around the provenance of our food, how it is prepared, and even its consumption is giving rise to grave diet-related consequences.

Non-communicable diseases (heart disease, stroke, cancer, chronic respiratory diseases, diabetes), are the leading cause of mortality in Ireland and the world — poor diet is a primary culprit. Only 40% of the Irish population is at a healthy weight and we are now the second most obese nation in Europe. As a nation, we have gone from famine to feast and right back again to a crisis of food-related fatality.

I recently met Roman Grogan of DropChef ( dropchef.com). Sign up and DropChef delivers to your door each week the precisely measured and well selected ingredients required to create tasty meals from scratch. There are more than 350 recipes to choose from and prices are reasonable. The notion of someone else shopping for my ingredients and weighing them out is anathema to me, the beginnings of disconnection from my food. But I only learned that connection when I left home and many DropChef customers value the service for enabling their own return to cooking from scratch, finding it hugely beneficial for physical and mental wellbeing.

So, even if you want to roast a chicken at 3am in the morning, knock yourself out. The important thing is to maintain or regain that vital connection to the essential act of eating.

A Rare Chestnut

Some collaborations are more about commercial opportunities than culinary creativity but I fancy an alliance of the sublime talents of Michelin-starred Rob Krawczyk of Restaurant Chestnut with Meeran Manzoor of Rare at Blue Haven, in Kinsale (April 13) has all the potential to give rise to some truly special cooking of finest, local seasonal produce.

Tickets €125. Accommodation packages also available. Book with rare1784.ie

TODAY’S SPECIAL

Yes, I know this section is all about Irish food and Mariam Mariatsvili is Georgian-born and Greek-raised but the food she cooks and serves up in her charming little deli-shop on Cork’s South Main St, using fine Irish produce supplemented by judicious imports (and some cracking Georgian wines!) is a) absolutely delicious and b) only adding to the ongoing evolution of contemporary Irish food.

Instagram @GeoFoodCork