Cooking up a great idea

OUT of the blue a few months ago, I got an email from an enthusiastic girl who had just started a new business called The Cookbook Club based in Dublin, but also online. She went on to give me some background in her inimitable breathless way.

“I’m from a small farm, in West Clare. I hated it. I hated weeding rows of potatoes, acres of cabbage, rhubarb and turnip, and hunting cattle, pulling sheep out of hedges, and digging/footing /stacking turf, and sitting up all night with a blinking torch waiting for cows to calve. But I loved the storytelling and gossip around the preparation of that — our homegrown food.

“My smoking-like-a-trooper, 12 kids raised, six-foot tall grandmother was a midwife who walked miles to everyone’s home in the village to bring children into the world and she used to lay out the dead too. We scoured domestic science books and Woman’s Way magazine and cookbooks to find different ways of cooking turnip and mutton, or you’d die of boredom. So I love cookbook narratives as I associate food with storytelling. Granny and Mum would be chopping food and gossiping and I’d sit on the top of the stairs in the kitchen eavesdropping on their dissection of both the community and the recipe.”