The Menu: Ireland is one of the best countries in the world in which to produce food

A young girl eating oysters by Carlingford Lough, in Co Louth, in 1952, in an image from Irish Food History: A Companion.

My middle child turns 18 this summer and he will go to a restaurant with his teenage tribe to celebrate. He and his friends have been marking their birthdays in restaurants, flying solo without adult supervision, since they were 14 and it’s entirely of their own choosing.

My firstborn, now in his mid-30s, is similarly inclined. Though not averse to a party, he can nonetheless go for an age without the pub, more than happy to socialise in a restaurant or a coffee shop.

I began working in restaurants aged 15 and cooking in professional kitchens occupied the better part of my working life until my late 20s, yet I can’t remember darkening the door of a single restaurant I didn’t already work in during my teens. I was deep into my 20s before a restaurant became the number one location to blow out celebratory candles on yet another annual journey around the sun. Different times: We went to the pub early, stayed late; and if late-night hunger pangs had their way, spent the bus fare in the chipper and walked home.

It is a rite of passage for older folk to complain about the failings of new, younger generations but I can’t help saluting this marked improvement on the social consumption habits of my own youth. Nor do my children’s preferences have much to do with my own professional life or personal passions around food. Perhaps they have had more exposure to the world of food than some peers but, unlike me, they are not remotely obsessive about the topic.

They harbour none of the famine-related guilt around eating that still prevailed when I was growing up, a guilt doubled down on by an autocratic Catholic Church that viewed any form of sensual pleasure as sin. While voluntary fasting may now be hugely popular and even beneficial, fasting in the old Catholic sense was entirely about deprivation and self-flagellation. This new generation gets food, they like food, they appreciate food, they have fun with food. (My 14-year-old daughter takes pics of everything she consumes and right now we are living through the Great Bubble Tea Era.) 

They are also the first generations of Irish people to simply know that there are few greater pleasures than eating and sharing food together.

One caveat, however: They also reckon they invented food; and no more than ten or 15 years ago at that. Any sense of a prior Irish food history is almost non-existent and mostly irrelevant. Their epicurean big bang was and remains digital: The birth of the iPhone, in 2007; of Instagram, in 2010; and of TikTok, in 2016.

This old silverback may indignantly splutter about ‘Myrtle Allen back in ’64’ and so on ad infinitum but that too is an equally limited perspective on the history of Irish food.

We have long genuflected before the perceived ‘superior’ food cultures of other countries, France, Spain and Italy, for starters, but Ireland’s food history and culture is equally fascinating.

Thanks to our geographical location, this is one of the best countries in the world in which to produce food. Before the arrival of the potato and before the enormous impact of British colonialism, Irish peasants had the best diet in all of Europe, including cultivated and foraged vegetables, fruit and nuts, honey, dairy produce, fish, shellfish and seaweeds, and red meat, pasture-raised and hunted. Accordingly, they were taller, stronger, healthier and lived longer than their European peers.

To really learn about Irish food history, Irish Food History: A Companion (Royal Irish Academy) is essential reading. Its scope is wide ranging and expert, beginning with the Ice Age and a time when reindeer, brown bears and giant Irish deer still roamed, moving on to medieval honey, banqueting, bog butter, whiskey distilling, feasting, famines, and eventually the modernisation, industrialisation and globalisation of Irish food.

These days, historians accord equal status to social histories as to the ‘big battle’ stuff and, if ‘we are what we eat’, this book tells us as much about ourselves as any record of 1916, and, as with the famine, food can even be ‘big battle’ stuff. So put that in your bubble tea and snap it!

As part of Cork World Book Fest, I will be in conversation with Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Grace Neville in The Farmgate, April 25. corkworldbookfest.com/events

Everything’s going green

Early April’s glorious weather has been a godsend to the green-fingered, but if you’d like to up your growing game and produce your own food, then GIY founder Mick Kelly’s online version of How Food Grows is a 12-week course in how to turn an empty space into a thriving veg patch, featuring 12 delicious vegetables, and now is the ideal time to begin planting.

A separate GROWbox, also available, has all you need to get started.

shop.giy.ie/collections/online-courses

TODAY’S SPECIAL

Another recent Douglas Farmer’s Market discovery is Bia Beirut, owned and operated by Lebanese-born Rabih Farah and his Cork-born partner, Pamela Crowley-Farah.

Offering a superb range of sourdough breads and gorgeous pillowy focaccia-style Lebanese tata breads, there’s equally appealing fresh dips (baba ganoush, hummus, labneh etc) and divine sourdough crackers for dipping.

I’m especially taken with their fennel flavour with its becoming anise sweetness.