Darina Allen: New book from Trish Deseine offers unique perspective on Irish food culture

A REALLY posh new book celebrating Irish food and cooking has just arrived on my desk. HOME: Recipes from Ireland is Trish Deseine’s new book, and it feels like a love letter to her home country.

Trish was born and educated in Belfast and grew up on a beef farm in Co Antrim. In the 1980s she “escaped” to the University of Edinburgh to read modern languages, and from there to Paris in 1987 where she lived for almost three decades soaking up the ambience and the food culture.

This absence from Ireland has given her a unique understanding and perspective of what has shaped our Irish food culture, erasing “the last traces of that knee-jerk bigotry that a hard-line, almost Presbyterian, upbringing tried to drum into me”.