In Ireland, whether you’re sipping a Guinness, slicing into an inky black blood sausage, or devouring any number of potato dishes (colcannon, boxty, chips, etc.), you’ll find plenty of clues to the richness of Ireland’s food heritage. 

Yet after reading Irish Food History: A Companion, published last September and edited by Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Dorothy Cashman, I found much more to savor beyond the pint and potato. Featuring 28 essays from renowned scholars, this 800-page volume traces Irish food history from the Neolithic period to the present. 

This St. Patrick’s Day, we’re raising a glass with a resounding “Sláinte!” and reflecting on these fascinating food facts from the Emerald Isle.

Bog butter was (maybe) all the rage.

As early as the Bronze Age, communities in Ireland began filling wood, clay, or bark containers with butter and burying them in peat soil. Researchers are still debating the raison d’être of bog butter (also known as “ancient” or “fossil” butter), but theories include attempts to deepen the butter’s flavor, to mark property boundaries, or to serve as an offering for fertility and community survival.

Medieval feasts were extremely hierarchical.

Medieval Ireland was ruled by a number of local kings, each governing a territory (known as a tuath) spanning approximately one-sixth of a county. Banquets were often hosted by over-kings (rúiri) who presided over entire counties, which was reflected in the seating arrangements. In the legendary feasting hall on the Hill of Tara, guests sat in literal tiers according to status. Servants, for instance, sat on the ground with their backs against the knees of noble guests. In the center of the hall ran a long spit for roasting meat, with each guest receiving a specific cut according to their rank.

The importance of beekeeping and honey can’t be overstated.

If there’s one beloved critter in medieval Irish culture and lore, it’s the bumblebee. Christian monasteries depended on smokeless beeswax to light their sacred rituals, which likely accelerated domesticated honey production. By the eighth century, pure raw honey (rather than honeycomb) was an essential accompaniment to bread and even appeared as flavoring for the king’s milk in the 11th-century satire Aislinge Meic Conglinne.

Ireland’s love affair with booze runs deep.

People have been drinking wine, mead, and beer in Ireland since the Bronze Age. The medieval Ulster Cycle of stories features copious accounts of drinking, with wine offered to princes, mead to nobles, bragget (a honeyed beer) to knights, and ale to the lower classes. Whiskey arrived later, first taken as medicine and eventually (by the 15th century) as a party drink. In 1608, the first license for whiskey production was issued from the British Crown to Thomas Phillips, who started Bushmills Distillery.

People feasted—and starved—in 18th-century Ireland.

According to recipes, menus, and newspaper ads, 18th-century Irish cuisine was defined by both abundance and scarcity. While the poor subsisted on buttermilk, oatmeal, bread, and potatoes (introduced in the early 17th century), the gentry and aristocracy benefited from a growing agricultural system and an expanded international trade, which translated into highfalutin foods such as roast mutton, stewed apples, and chocolate—all washed down with imported brandy, rum, and coffee.

Ireland’s great liberator was a big-time food lover.

Daniel O’Connell is best known for his fight to win Irish Catholic representation in British Parliament, but he was also an enthusiastic gourmand whose personal tastes shaped his politics. His rise to power paralleled his growing appreciation for fine food, and he often dined in elite households on turbot, madeira wine, and wild game. But O’Connell also fought passionately to feed others less fortunate. In the 1830s, he distributed his personal stores of beef, bread, and seeds to the poor, and lobbied to reform the British-controlled land management system that led to the Great Hunger.

Soda bread represented a major advance in baking technology.

In the 17th century, rural families baked their bread, which was often made from oats and barley, on flat stones in front of the hearth, resulting in loaves akin to griddle cakes. In the 1840s, once wheat flour became more affordable and commercial baking soda was widely available, soda bread baked in iron pots became a staple. The beloved loaf is still cut into four portions, or “farls,” a callback to those hardy pucks of yore. 

Irish immigrants to America and the United Kingdom often received care packages from home.

Following the Great Hunger (1845–1852), many Irish people emigrated to England and the United States. Around that time, the advent of telegraphs, railway networks, and steamships made it easier and more affordable to send food packages abroad. Particularly around Christmas, Ireland’s national postal service was often overrun with cards and packages; in one curious example, a Dublin grandmother was known to ship her Christmas puddings to family in Britain, who returned the favor by sending an oven-ready goose to her doorstep.

The Irish language is rich with ancient food vocabulary.

The study of place-names, also known as toponymy, reveals linguistic evidence of Irish diets incorporating everything from honey and game to wild garlic, watercress, hazelnuts, and seaweed. Many counties, towns, and streets are named for foodstuffs: There’s a Buttermilk Lane in Galway, for example, and the village of Carriganimmy (“Rock of the Butter”) in Cork. Potatoes have a particular lexicographic power, with 72 different words for the tubers at every stage of cultivation, storage, preparation, and consumption, all varying based on local dialects and traditions.

Many Irish novels put food first—as metaphors for pleasure and for punishment.

Irish storytellers are exceptionally good at making you hungry while spinning tales. The poet Seamus Heaney wrote of memories of home-churned butter from his childhood in Derry, describing the butter as “coagulated sunlight.” A memorable sequence of James Joyce’s Ulysses features the iconic Dublin pub Davy Byrnes, where Leopold Bloom orders an odorous Gorgonzola cheese sandwich. And in the 11th-century satire Aislinge Meic Conglinne, an exorcism requires teasing a demon with morsels of roasted meat dipped in honey.

Ireland’s cookery queen was also a women’s rights maven. 

A self-taught cook ahead of her time, Myrtle Allen bought the Ballymaloe Estate in Cork in 1948 and in 1964 converted its dining room into a now-iconic restaurant featuring the farm’s harvest. At the time, women in Ireland were constrained by a “marriage bar” requiring public sector (and many private sector) employees to give up their jobs once wedded. Yet Allen was a visible leader of the country’s gastronomic revolution, and when she received her Michelin star in 1975—just two years after the marriage bar was disbanded—it represented not only a victory for Irish cuisine, but for Irish women everywhere.

The post 11 Astonishing Food Facts From Irish Culinary History appeared first on Saveur.

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Like many stories of Ireland, this one begins in a bar. It was after closing time one quiet night during the mid 1960s in Connemara, and in the corner of the pub, a group of lads talked in low voices while nursing their pints. The publican went about his business, wiping up the bar top and rearranging stools. Soon, the men had empty glasses, but made no moves towards leaving. They were waiting for something. When the headlights of a pick-up truck shone through the window, they scattered out into the night. This is the first oyster poaching memory V (as he wishes to be referred to in this article) can recall. The men in the bar were waiting for a buyer who agreed to meet under the cover of darkness. The product was oysters, dredged from a neglected bed about two miles offshore. A typical poaching expedition took place under the glow of moonlight with three men setting out in a currach, a wooden Irish rowboat. For two to three hours at a time, the men—fishermen, farmers, and laborers by day—collected oysters from the sandy sea floor, filling mesh bags to the brim. Making as little noise as possible, they rowed back to the coastline. At the time the bed was discovered, oysters were plentiful, but buyers brave enough to enter the black market were scarce. “After the lads dredged the oysters, we’d do a pick up at 4 a.m.,” V says, remembering cold winter nights of backing up the trucks to the water’s edge. “We would fill the trucks to the top—as much as the lorry could take. Those trucks carry 7 or 8 tons! Thousands of oysters.” I imagined the trucks, filled to capacity, cruising along the winding roads of Connemara at the break of dawn, with the driver keeping one watchful eye on the rear view mirror. “We were getting more brazen every day,” he adds. “We thought we were untouchable.”

This is a story of risk and buried treasure. What would you do if you could see money beneath the surface of the sea, and had nothing to lose by plucking it out? In Connemara, work ethic is valued but economic opportunity can be limited— creativity that sometimes skirts the law puts money in pockets and food in bellies. To survive when Connemara’s tides change, it is important to be inventive. Families often have a hand in several businesses, from undertaking services to running a bed-and-breakfast to pouring pints. Whether that work was legal was never a top priority. Which is how it goes in Ireland, where the law is rarely black and white. Hazy uncertainty shrouds many areas of life, such as what time the pub closes.

Connemara, the largely Irish-speaking area of County Galway, is a rugged mix of stone, bogland, bays with white sand beaches, and narrow roads rolling through stark landscapes that at the right time of day, remind me of the moon. Everywhere you look there’s water—expansive lakes, a trickle of a stream crossing the road, a slice of the coastline, or rain on your windshield. And where there is seawater, there are oysters.

“There isn’t a courthouse in Connaught (one of Ireland’s four provinces) I haven’t been summoned to about oysters,” a publican once told me quietly, alluding to a colorful history of oyster poaching. “I could be a barrister!” In one swift monologue, V revealed details about playing innocent in front of inquisitive judges, being hunted by squad cars, of unexpected alliances with water bailiffs, and one cold night when an unexpected frost almost killed a couple tons of oysters.

So many questions popped into my mind, but the moment to ask them quickly passed and V went back to his business. A year later, I returned to Connemara and set out to track down that oyster poacher and find out more.

V had little interest in joining the men for their nighttime oyster escapades, but he had other ideas for the developing black market. He could offer an intimate knowledge of the landscape to establish under-the-radar sorting areas, trucks for moving ever greater numbers of oysters, and connections for distribution not just to Irish fish markets or restaurants, but also abroad (the French demand for oysters was high). And lastly, but perhaps most important for the mastermind behind an underground oyster network, he could be fearless about it all, legal consequences be damned. From the mid 1960s to the mid 1980s, V’s oyster poaching antics were big business. Restaurants could only buy a small amount; the real money was in fishmongers and exporters, and the absence of competition kept the money flowing. While some small scale oyster poaching was the talk of towns in the west of Ireland every now and again, a flourishing oyster bed with a neglectful owner was a unique situation. Add in a highly sophisticated transportation network that delivered the oysters alive and on time, and buyers were hooked. At first, oysters were sold by count; for each 100 oysters, V threw in an extra 20 for free. A good night of dredging would bring in 300 to 400 oysters. The price was 5—or sometimes 6 or 7—Irish pounds (the currency in Ireland until the euro launch) per 100 oysters. In prime conditions, the men could go out three or four times a week, leaving the oysters in mesh bags under water until a truckload or two accumulated and a buyer was confirmed. 400 oysters per night yielded 20 Irish pounds, and a handful of nights quickly added up to a hundred—approximately $1,000 in today’s currency. “In the 1970s, 20 pounds was an average week’s wages!” V says. “No other sources of income rivalled it.”

On my return to Connemara this August, I found V in the same spot where we’d met a year prior, tending his bar. When I mentioned oysters, there was an immediate glint in his eye. “During the spring tide, when the banks would dry out, we would walk out and pick oysters by hand,” he says, nostalgic for a time gone by. Over the course of a meal and couple pints, the details of the story began to unfold. “Nobody really knew who were the owners or what was the law,” he says. “So, we took our chances.” There was, in fact, an owner—but a faceless one. A government body was the rightful owner, but for decades it had ignored the oyster beds. In this neglect, a valuable resource was left untapped beneath the sea. The prime moment in an oyster’s life for consumption is at two to three years of age. This means that left under the water, the value of the oyster disintegrated. In V’s tales of moonlit poaching, he wasn’t taking money out of someone’s pocket—the wild oysters had been left to rot. “If you didn’t steal them, somebody else would,” he says. “So it might as well be you.” Ireland has a murky history of fishing rights. The island nation has 7,500 kilometers of coastline, plus lakes and rivers for fishing. For freshwater fishing, someone owns the fishing right (and can choose to make an area open to public fishing or charge a fee). Fishing rights can be bought and sold like land, owned by an individual, a group, or even the state itself. Over the years, fishing rights were passed down over generations, fought over in family feuds, or even abandoned as people emigrated. But the sea is different. There is a “public right to fish in the sea,” according to Fisheries Ireland. Yet, because there’s an exception to every rule in Ireland, some fishing rights for the sea do exist. Certain private areas date back to the English confiscation of the Irish lands; others even before the Magna Carta in 1215. But many fishermen in Ireland see fishing as a communal right, an entitlement to being an Irish citizen. Today, Ireland exports seafood to 80 destinations around the globe, including France, Spain, the U.K, Italy, and Nigeria. In 2014, Irish seafood exports totaled €540 million (significant growth from €315 million in 2009). Long after V’s oyster poaching heyday of the 1960s to the 1980s, seafood is still a lifeline.

A local greets V and asks what we’re talking about. “Oysters,” he says. “Sure, what would you know about oysters?” the woman asks with a wink. “Nothing!” V replies, a smirk on his face. After a few words exchanged with his neighbor in Irish, V’s first language, he leans down on the bar. “We had two main concerns,” he continues. “The water bailiffs and the guards (policemen).” It was the job of water bailiffs to keep watch along the coastline and investigate any suspicious behavior. They worked from huts alongside the water’s edge, still visible in Connemara today. It was these watchful eyes that required rowing out to the oyster beds; a motorized boat would draw attention. “The trucks were sometimes stopped,” he adds. “But if a guard pulled up, and you had 5 tons of oysters, what was he going to do with them? Oysters themselves weren’t illegal.” Yet V still found himself in trouble with the law from time to time. “Undersized was a big concern,” he tells me. “It was illegal to sell undersized oysters.” Over the years V faced charges of stealing oysters, possession of undersized oysters, and lack of license to deal or distribute them. After one case, he was charged a hefty fine of 300 pounds. But buyers were aware of this risk, and, reluctant to lose out on their product, volunteered to pay the fines, often to V in advance as insurance (with a tacked-on service fee for V of course). That meant checks as high as 700 pounds, “half a year’s wages in 1973!” he says.

With a bountiful supply and enthusiastic buyers, it seemed like the good times would go on indefinitely. But no treasure lasts forever. The faceless owner sold their fishing rights, and a co-op took over. The co-op charged subscriptions; fishermen who had been dredging the oysters illegally for decades could continue legally with the cost of a subscription. Any of the danger of the water bailiffs, the guards, and dredging by moonlight was eliminated.

Theft is one thing, but theft from rightful owners with faces and families to support was another. In this small rural community, no one wanted to steal from a neighbor who had paid a subscription for the legal right to dredge oysters. The changes were swift, and the poaching business dried up virtually overnight.

It also didn’t help that the market had changed over the years: fish farms were flourishing, and supplanted private fisherman as the main supply to restaurants. A modern era of Irish seafood was beginning, and the treasure beneath the surface sunk out of reach.

At the end of my visit, walking out the door of the pub, I asked V a final question: Did he have any oyster poaching competition?

He smiles while gathering empty pint glasses and says, “I was the main culprit.”

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A meal at Idas on the Dingle peninsula might involve dashi made with local seaweed, fresh oysters harvested from an ocean bed so close you can almost hear it, and some funky vegetables called scurvy grass and marsh samphires. The restaurant, which Kevin Murphy opened in June 2014 to little initial fanfare, has since become one of Ireland’s most ambitious and exciting restaurants, one more reason this town four and a half hours outside Dublin is becoming one of the country’s top food destinations. For Murphy, eating local isn’t just a buzz term; it’s essential to every dish on his menu.

An eclectic community of chefs, poets, publicans, artists, and ice cream makers have turned a once sleepy seaside village into an unlikely food destination

Murphy obtains many of these ingredients from nearby farmers, but some are too wild to be farmed, which means starting his day by heading out to the countryside’s meadows and cliffs to pick exotic plants like rock samphire, pennywort, and chickweed, just to name a few. Back in the kitchen, those plants find their way into broths, dried powders, and edible garnishes.

This is just a slice of the dedication that won Idas a recommendation in the Michelin guide just 10 months after opening. But Murphy, for his part, is more interested in the coastline than the critics. As he told our reporter Michael Ruhlman, “It’s just what one guy thinks. I care more about what I think.”

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There’s a type of person who travels to the Dingle peninsula to build a village from scratch, one with a schoolhouse and cobblestone streets.

There’s a type of person who, after leaving art school, after failing as a tailor and working with at-risk youths, moves to Dingle and, with virtually no kitchen experience, opens not just a restaurant but an ambitious restaurant with menus composed only of food grown or caught on the peninsula and in surrounding waters.

There is a type of person who gives up a successful career in the metropolis of Dublin and moves to Dingle to become a poet.

And there’s a type of person who abandons New York to bring his young family to Dingle, to make ice cream from what is arguably some of the best milk in the world.

This last type, Seán Murphy of Murphy’s Ice Cream, says, “There’s a type of person who wants to go to a place at the end of the world, where the weather’s not that good, but who appreciates the deep culture, the landscape. There’s a type of person who wants that, and appreciates food. There’s a sense of touching something alive and real here.”

Such is the strange, ineluctable allure of place.

I’d traveled to Dingle simply because a friend who loves food told me, “I’ve just been to the most amazing food town.” To which I said, “I thought you were in Ireland.” To which she replied, “Yup—and it’s so beautiful.”

Dingle’s not easy to get to—a four-and-a-half-hour drive from Dublin, or a Dublin-to-Kerry flight followed by an hour’s drive along narrow roads, slowing for hairpin turns through half a dozen one-pub towns. The roads are so narrow that the passenger-side mirror regularly brushes the hedgerows and the festive red, fuchsia, and orange montbretia wildflowers. Lambs, marked with spray paint to distinguish the farmer, bleat and graze all around. Beyond the emerald pastures, sparkling blue bays and mountains.

Ireland, of course, was the country so dependent on the potato for food that when the crop failed countrywide in the mid 1800s, millions left and millions starved to death. A country once so devoid of culinary ambition that aspiring chefs in the 1980s were told to leave. Martin Bealin, a Dingle chef, recalls his cooking-school instructors’ advice: “There’s no future here.”

Watch: The People You Meet in Dingle

But here is present-day Dingle, population 2,000, roughly four short blocks and, in the words of one traveler, “on the road to nowhere but itself.” Today it is home to three dozen restaurants, a score of pubs selling craft beers and whiskeys, a culinary school, and a distillery—a town that hosts one of the country’s best-known food festivals, which welcomes more than 10,000 people from across Ireland each fall.

How, in this culinarily impoverished country, did such a place come to be?

Because it drew a certain type of person. Many of them, actually. Starting with one Sir David Lean.

By all accounts, the story of Dingle’s rise to culinary distinction began when the Lawrence of Arabia director built a stone village on the side of a mountain to serve as the set for his movie Ryan’s Daughter. The film’s Academy Award-winning cinematography of blue waters crashing against sheer cliffs and green pastures and vast pure beaches was so improbably beautiful that a wave of tourists followed.

At the time, the early 1970s, it was said that Dingle contained 52 pubs and not a single place to eat. A few years after the movie’s release, Johnny and Stella Doyle opened Doyle’s, showcasing the pristine seafood caught off the Dingle coast.

Lean was not the last Hollywood titan to scout this remote peninsula: Ron Howard directed Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Far and Away here in 1992. And J.J. Abrams chose Skellig Michael, an island off the Dingle coast and site of a Christian monastery dating to the Dark Ages whose beehive-shaped, stone buildings remain intact, to convey that remotest of places, Luke Skywalker’s hidden retreat. The next Star Wars is being filmed here, too. Doyle’s and the wave of forward-thinking, tourist-pleasing restaurants that followed did away with the cabbage and boiled meats of the past and began looking instead to this fertile peninsula’s fabulous seafood, exquisite dairy products, and beautiful sheep that graze all over it.

Martin Bealin and his wife, Nuala Cassidy, opened their restaurant, Global Village, in 1997. It’s now the city’s primary anchor of extraordinary cooking.

“I was searching the world, searching for the perfect place, the perfect cuisine,” Bealin, who grew up outside Dublin, said, seated in his small restaurant before service. “I’d have been quite happy to move to Australia and live there. And I came back here and realized this was it—it was right here. Ireland was the perfect place to be a chef. What about that?”

By the time his restaurant was established, it had become clear to him that not only was the seafood excellent, the mackerel and John Dory and turbot and lobster and mussels—”the boxes of stunning fish I get in through that door every evening, it’s as good a quality as anywhere I’ve worked in the world”—but also the produce that could be grown in this temperate climate turned out to be far more diverse than cabbages and potatoes. “Lettuce and asparagus and onions,” he said. “It jumps out of the ground.”

Mussels with Coconut Sweet Chili Broth

All the cattle and lambs grazing on the hillsides are grass-fed, not because that’s the trend but because, well, why would a farmer feed them anything else? Look at the grass growing everywhere. It is self-evident. To claim that your meat is grass-fed, or that the butter came from grass-fed cows, simply sounds ridiculous here.

Because it has become an eating destination, you can travel 2,000 miles from New York City to sit in Curran’s, one of the most picturesque and pleasurable pubs in the town, only to listen to four young travelers discussing stops on the Port Washington line of the Long Island Railroad. Then again, you might also strike up a conversation with a woman named Dairena Ní Chinnéide, the aforementioned type of person who quit her job as a television producer in Dublin and moved to Dingle to write poetry, working in her native Irish tongue and translating the work into English. Nine volumes of it, plus short stories and radio plays.

When asked, “Why Dingle?” Chinnéide replied, “What can I say? It’s just magic.”

A few doors up from Curran’s, Kennedy’s sells County Kerry’s most limited local microbrew, made by Adrienne Heslin, the first female microbrewer in the country who is also a publican (and a sculptor). She crafts her beer with local waters and flavors it with local flora: elderflowers, rose hips, blackberries, black currants, and, occasionally, tree bark.

“The idea is to put the geography of here into the bottle,” she told me as I downed her fabulous porter, one of nine beers she makes, at her Brick’s Pub on the opposite side of the peninsula.

From here, it’s just a few minutes’ drive to Sophie Seel’s small organic farm and garden, exploding with vegetables. Seel created the garden exclusively to serve Bealin’s restaurant. And she grows beautiful lettuces, favas, peas, corn, and chiles for one of the town’s, if not the country’s, most unlikely chefs, Kevin Murphy.

“I had a two-week stage before I even knew what a stage was,” said Kevin Murphy (not to be confused with Seán or Kieran Murphy, the ice cream makers, or Mark Murphy, who runs the Dingle Cookery School). A distinction must be made, and it’s one that Murphy has tired of, as it’s been addressed often in Irish media: his lack of formal training. I’ve been writing about chefs for more than 20 years, and I’ve met scores who have had no formal training. What this has always meant, though, is that rather than going to culinary school, they worked their way up through a series of kitchens until they knew enough and had developed the skills and knowledge to open their own place.

Murphy didn’t even do this. Pretty much all he had learned was what he’d been able to pull from books and his two weeks as a stagiaire—and not at a Michelin-starred restaurant, but the restaurant of his uncle’s brother-in-law three hours away. That brief apprenticeship, plus years of cooking out of books at home and for his friends on beaches and in the mountains, was all he figured he needed to open an uncommonly ambitious restaurant, Idás, which aims, he says, “to put this peninsula on a plate.”

Murphy, now 40, opened Idás in June 2014. Word of mouth spread so quickly that within 10 months a Michelin critic paid a visit and included it in the influential guide of recommended restaurants. “I didn’t really know what that meant,” he said. “It’s just what one guy thinks. I care more about what I think.” Martin Bealin knew that this was cause for celebration—and he left his restaurant to find Kevin and congratulate him in person.

I can best describe Murphy’s approach through a single dish, the first of an eight-course tasting menu: A dashi-like broth made from local seaweed, mushrooms, scurvy grass, and marsh samphire is presented in a bowl made by a local artist using local clay. Beside it rests a plump, raw, local oyster. Our server instructed us to slide the oyster into the hot broth. The broth tastes freshly of the sea, its heat intensifying the sweet-savory flavor of the oyster; the mushrooms counter the sea with their earthiness; and the scurvy grass, foraged earlier in the day in the sandy undergrowth of a nearby beach, adds a subtle, wasabi-like spice.

On the menu, it’s simply “Foraged broth of land and sea, Glenbeigh oyster.” In your mouth it’s much, much more.

As is “Brill, whey, coastline”: Crispy-skinned turbot, with tender potato spheres dusted with a peppery dried seaweed, is served on a delightfully tart beurre blanc whose base is the whey left over from the kitchen’s cheesemaking. Sweet mussels and the salty rock samphire, which Kevin foraged himself, bending precariously over a 100-foot cliff, added sweetness and spice.

One of the most surprising dishes I ate in Dingle came from Bealin at his Global Village. When the server set the dish down and said, “Mackerel three ways,” my toes curled. I am not a fan of oily, fishy-tasting fish, and mackerel is the king of oily, fishy fish. Now I had to eat it in three ways—as a thick velouté sauce; as a pâté; and as a crispy-skinned fillet. I started with the fillet—and was astonished. It was a delight, rich but fresh and clean. I’d never tasted mackerel like it.

Bealin explained that mackerel must be prepared within 24 hours of being caught. But equally important was the month: We were there in summer when warmer waters mean the fish generate lower concentrations of oil. It was a revelation, and thanks to Bealin and Dingle I have now become a seasonal mackerel snob.

Of course there are many more terrific restaurants, such as Out of the Blue, Ashe’s, and the Chart House, all within a few minutes’ walk of one another. And if you see crab thumbs offered anywhere, don’t pass them up. Called órdógs in Irish, which translates as thumbs, these are plump crab claws that arrive shelled, with the small pincer still intact to serve as a kind of handle with which to eat these butter-soaked nuggets. Better than any stone crab I’ve had—better than any crab I’ve had, period. And Dingle is a lovely walking town, with a terrific bookstore and Dick Mack’s, a pub with an extensive selection of both whiskeys and rain boots, all across from St. Mary’s church and around the corner from another pub, Foxy John’s, that doubles as a hardware store. Have a sandwich or some cheese from the Little Cheese Shop, then stroll down the road to Murphy’s for some butterscotch or gin-and-tonic ice cream, made in Dingle from the raw milk of Kerry cows. It’s fabulous. But even the Texaco here has good food. Yet to drive the peninsula is to be reminded that this is an ancient place as well, with ruins and beehive huts dating to the sixth century a.d., and the hillsides are visibly ridged with the former potato rows, now referred to as famine fields.

On one of my final nights, I was invited to a party at the home of a woman who lives part-time in Dingle, Colleen Grace Herlihy. Her backyard looked out over the choppy Atlantic, and in the distance was Skellig island, where Star Wars was filmed. She served local fish and local cheeses, and someone had brought a couple of bottles of superb gin from the Dingle distillery a mile up the road and flavored with local botanicals, rowanberries, fuchsia, hawthorn, and heather. Herlihy, an American, is perhaps the purest expression of the type of person you’ll meet in Dingle.

In 1974, traveling with her friend after college, Eurail passes in hand, she planned on spending four weeks on the continent, and two in Ireland. After four weeks on the continent, she arrived in Dingle and stood on the broad expanse of Inch Beach, her breath taken. She called her parents from the town’s single phone booth to tell them she wasn’t coming home. Here she would stay. And so she did, working at a local pub for six pounds (and one bath) a week, free room and board, and all the Guinness she could drink.

I’m the type of person who travels to a town I’m curious about and then never feels the slightest inclination to go back. Too many places to see in one short life.

But Dingle changed that. I’m already planning to return next summer. Why do I feel this way? I’ve been wondering. Perhaps because, like filmmakers and chefs and poets before me have found, Dingle and this peninsula, with its deep history, awe-inspiring vistas of mountains and sea, its food and generosity and powerful spirit, has the power to transform.

Now Get in the Kitchen

Broiled oysters with Spinach and Brown Butter Hollandaise

Mussels with Coconut Sweet Chili Broth

Irish Brown Bread Ice Cream with Butterscotch Sauce

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Ireland’s Coast, Best Culinary Road Trip

Ireland has always been known more for its natural beauty and spirited people than for its food, but times are changing along the nation’s 1,600-mile western coastline stretching from County Donegal in the north to West Cork in the south (called the Wild Atlantic Way). It offers a crazy tangle of a drive, full of extraordinary views from atop towering cliffs and inviting villages tucked snugly into nearly every twist. Because of a mix of geography and grit, new food artisans are emerging to join beloved businesses that have been around for decades. A road trip in the area has always promised to clear the mind. These days, it’ll enliven the palate, too.

Haven Smokehouse

Locals have been smoking salmon in an age-old way, using peat—known in these parts as turf—for as long as the cliffs here have been softened by the raging ocean. In 2013, Sue Cruse and Declan McConnellogue traded in their urban life in London to open a traditional fish smokehouse on the northern cusp of County Donegal. McConnellogue hangs his salmon from the ceiling in his hand-built smokehouse and cold-smokes it for two days, a process that yields a sweet, earthy flavor and clean mouth-feel. “It’s best served unadulterated, without lemon, pepper, or bread,” he says. “It tastes of the sea and earth and nothing else.”
Claggan, Carrigart, Co. Donegal
tatuanseo.com

A Foraging Walk by the Sea

Seaweed once held an esteemed position in Irish culinary, medical, and agricultural traditions. Packed with healthful nutrients and minerals, it was appreciated for its texture and briny flavor in dishes, its rejuvenating properties in lotions and bath salts, and the fertilizing wonders it worked in the garden. The modern Irishman may have moved on from seaweed’s virtues, but Prannie Rhatigan, a doctor and author of the book The Irish Seaweed Kitchen, is on a one-woman mission to change that. Take a seaweed identification walk with her along the Streedagh Coast. It usually begins at Eithna’s by the Sea, a pioneering restaurant championing the culinary benefits of the algae. There, you can taste Prannie’s carrageenan panna cotta, which gets its firm texture and faint saline taste from—what else?—local seaweed.
irishseaweedkitchen.ie

Shells Cafe and Little Shop

Myles and Jane Lamberth searched the world for a restaurant location before settling on the surfing village of Strandhill. Shells Cafe has a breezy deck overlooking ocean waves that draw surfers from around the world. After a dip, you can tuck into the Lamberths’ hearty dishes, like a peppery pulled pork shoulder piled high on toasted brioche with candy-sweet grilled tomatoes and hollandaise. While you (undoubtedly) wait for a table, head to the adjacent Little Shop, where you can browse shelves stocked with local products such as Mill Lane honey and Richmount elderflower cordial, or have a nibble of house-made baked goods to tide you over. Choose from cherry scones, bakewell tarts, and apple pies.
Seafront, Strandhill, Co. Sligo
shellscafe.com

Calvey’s Achill Mountain Lamb

The sheep of Achill Island, which is connected by bridge to the mainland, roam over 20,000 acres of “commanage,” pasture shared by the island’s residents. They graze on samphire, seaweed, and calcium-rich grasses along the shore, and heather and wild herbs in the mountains. The result: meat that is “ocean-salty and heather-sweet,” says Martina Calvey, one of the ten children of Martin Calvey, who founded the business 50 years ago. The operation has grown to include Top Drawer and Pantry, a shop where you can take away dishes like honey-glazed, oven-roasted rack of lamb, or stock up on local products like sea-salted oil and homemade lamb sausage rolls.
Keel, Achill Island, Co. Mayo
calveysachillmountainlamb.ie

Marty’s Mussels

The tale of Marty’s Mussels, which opened in 2000, is one of love—and not just for the acclaimed bivalves, farmed in the open waters of Killary Harbor. Marty and Catherine Nee, two of the business’ founders, met as children when Catherine’s family summered in the area. She never forgot the local boy who charmed her, and years later, gave up a high-profile marketing job in Paris to join him back in the quaint town of Renvyle. Three children and tons of mussels later, the couple supplies to many restaurants throughout the region and has founded the popular Connemara Mussel Festival, which takes place in May. Pick up mussels at the farm if you have the means to cook them—it’s hard to find a fresher meal.
Lettergesh West, Renvyle, Connemara, Co. Galway
martysmussels.ie

Kelly Oysters

“It’s an old tradition in Ireland, but only recently have contemporary Irish begun to appreciate it,” says Diarmuid Kelly of eating the country’s oysters. Kelly Oysters was founded more than 60 years ago by his father, Michael, and now Diarmuid and his brother are part of the family business. Their coveted oysters are exported to places as far away as Dubai, and in raising and harvesting the shellfish, the family is keeping alive a tradition that goes back 1,000 years, to when the ancient kings of Connaught feasted on oysters harvested from Galway Bay. If you’re there in September, don’t miss the Galway Oyster & Seafood Festival, an event that welcomes more than 30,000 people each year.
Aisling, Tyrone, Kilcolgan, Co. Galway
kellyoysters.com

Hazel Mountain Chocolate

Owners Kasia and John Connolly, with help from chocolatier Ana Murphy, run the nation’s first “bean-to-bar” chocolate factory in the foothills of County Clare, and its confections speak to their varied heritage. Ana is from Texas, Kasia from Poland, John from Ireland: The factory’s café, where you can sample innovative dishes such as goat cheese and potato dumplings with sage cacao butter, is located next to the factory in his grandparents’ former house. After a tour, head to the shop, where you can buy innovative chocolates featuring Irish seaweed as well as pecan pie truffles.
Oughtmama, Bellharbour, Co. Clare
hazelmountainchocolate.com

Rigney’s Farm

There’s an enchanted ring of trees in the middle of Rigney’s Farm, a B&B and family farm that opened in 2007 and raises rare-breed animals. “The cows come here to give birth,” says co-owner Caroline Rigney. “I suppose it’s because it’s flat in the center, but I also like to think there’s some energy at work from the past that brings them to ‘the farm’s maternity wing.'” She serves arriving guests scones hot from the oven and sells sweet-cured rashers and other products made from the farm’s pigs. Guests can gather their own eggs for breakfast and feed the livestock with Caroline’s husband, Joe, before venturing out on a hike through Curraghchase Forest Park, a 700-acre wood that Alfred Lord Tennyson wandered for inspiration.
rigneysfarm.com

Gubbeen

Gubbeen Farm, near the village of Schull in West Cork, has stood on the edge of the ocean for six generations, each passing down the traditional practices of their ancestors to keep alive a thriving, self-sustaining farm. The current caretakers are Tom and Giana Ferguson and their children, Fingal and Clovisse. Between the four of them, there’s a cheese maker, charcuterie producer, gardener, and knife maker. Gubbeen’s products, such as Ireland’s first chorizo and a washed-rind cheese that has notes of bog, forest, and earthy mushrooms, are found in farmers’ markets and stores throughout Ireland. On a visit, you might sample a warming bowl of bean and sausage stew from the on-site smokehouse, featuring tender pork infused with the flavor of the Celtic Sea, which roars just beyond the farmhouse doors.
Gubbeen, Schull, Co. Cork
gubbeen.com

Get the recipe for Gubbeen Farm’s Bean and Sausage Stew

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From my window, the only road visible looks like a distant S that’s been stamped onto the hillside. To the left rises the great rocky Mweelrea, the highest mountain in my home province of Connacht in County Mayo, Ireland. The neighbors, all sheep farmers, refer to it as “the hill.” Rare is the day when the hill’s summit, 2,688 feet up, appears below the clouds. On the horizon, I can see the choppy, glittering blue water of the Atlantic reflecting the clouds that race toward land.

On this early afternoon in May, Charissa, my daughter, and I decide to take a walk along the headland, knowing from experience that we’ll see something sublime. We’ve brought along a picnic of sorts, a frittata I made yesterday. It retains a memory of warmth, dense with potato, spinach, red peppers, onion, and parmesan.

The sky at this time of day is like a watercolor paint box. So it will be no surprise if either a solitary shaft of sun picks out a spit of land, emerald green against the dull brown bog, or a black rainstorm funnels straight down from the clouds out at sea.

As we walk, we are reminded that this is an edge-of-the-world place. The islands we see from here—Cahir and Inishturk, Inishbofin and Clare—are marked by the last footprints humanity treads between us and the vast ocean. The crude physical landscape makes us feel slight. To reach the water, we cross a pasture where harebells and bog cotton grow, where in the midday dampness we find young puffball mushrooms, springy and white. We collect them in our pockets so we can take them home to slice up, dip in egg and bread crumbs, and fry in butter and garlic.

Everywhere there are sheep nibbling the grass right down to the earth. Boulders stand like petrified animals from a distant age.

Along the shore, as we follow black rocks stippled with sharp barnacles and mussels, seabirds wheel and toss like foam in the wind—gulls, cormorants, oyster-catchers, and a stray couple of herons with rapier beaks and their long Vs of wing. We see dolphins arcing in the bay, chasing mackerel. At the end of the jagged headland, we scramble up a rocky crest, and all is revealed.

The view of desolate Thallabawn, with its band of pure gold sand below stretching apparently to infinity, is the most beautiful I know. There is the beauty you see for the first time and are swept away by, and there is the known beauty that works its magic on you again and again—a beauty that takes your heart prisoner.

We strip down and jump into the breakers, then dry ourselves by running along the beach. Afterward, ravenous, we devour our lunch, holding the spongy wedges of frittata in our hands and savoring the interplay of sweet pepper and rich parmesan. We search the sand for tiny shells to stick onto shell boxes for Christmas. We ford the river that crosses the beach as it rushes out to sea. At high tide the water can come up to our shoulders, but right now we just roll our jeans to our thighs and stride across.

Three hours from now we will arrive back home. Lapsang Souchong tea and carrot cake with a shock of mascarpone icing and flecks of lime zest will fill the hungry gap. We will savor the walk and store it in our memories until it’s time to go back and nourish our souls again.

See the recipe for Potato, Spinach, and Red Pepper Frittata »

Tamasin Day-Lewis is the author of_The Art of the Tart: Savory and Sweet _(Random House 2001).

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I first came across Irish buttered eggs—eggs rubbed in softened butter—at a stand at a market in Cork, Ireland. Jerry Moynihan, the farmer selling them, explained that buttering was a means of preserving eggs. Because the shell is porous, it absorbs the butter to form a more protective seal. Curious, I took one home. Soft-boiled, it tasted fresh from the hen, the yolk the color of sunshine, the white carrying with it a whiff of cream. Today buttered eggs are a delicacy, largely vanished from Irish farmyards and pantries. “You can’t butter eggs by machine,” Moynihan told me. Every one needs to be done by hand. Farmers’ wives used to say it was a task most difficult to execute in winter, when the butter was harder and their hands were colder. So perhaps in addition to the egg and the butter, what I taste is the memory of an Irish woman whose palm coaxed butter lovingly all the way around a fragile shell, hoping to preserve it for as long as she could.

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_Part III of a five-part series
_Part I: Ireland from Farm to Fork
Part II: County Cork: Food Capital
Part IV: A Kid from the Country
Part V: The Chef and His Materials

“I was away at school when my mother told me she was opening a restaurant at our house,” recalls Tim Allen, Myrtle Allen’s son. “I was very excited. I thought I’d come home and have chips and mixed grills and all. I was so disappointed when I got back and discovered that she was serving the same food I’d eaten all my life.” Though he didn’t realize it at the time, the food Tim Allen had eaten all his life was something of an endangered species: fresh, honest Irish home cooking based on ingredients grown or raised around the house, or at least in the neighborhood. And his mother was to become the leading light of modern-day Irish cooking, a mentor and an inspiration, as important to her country’s cuisine as Alice Waters was to America’s.

In 1948, Myrtle and her husband, Ivan, a fruit grower (now deceased)—who were living on a farm in Shanagarry, not quite 20 miles southeast of Cobh—moved to a house nearby called Ballymaloe. (The name means place of sweet honey, says Tim, or possibly of milk and honey; Shanagarry is an English corruption of the Irish for old garden.) The house, originally part of a 15th-century Norman castle, sat on the edge of a large mixed-used farm. Ivan raised a wide variety of fruits and vegetables on the property, and Myrtle raised six children. “In 1943, in wartime,” she has written, “large quantities of tomatoes, mushrooms, cucumbers and apples were … exported from the farm to England and Wales. The surplus came into my kitchen along with cream, butter and eggs and slowly I learnt how to cook with them, guided by my gourmet husband.” She also took cooking classes at the School of Commerce in Cork City and started writing a recipe column for the Irish Farmers Journal.

In 1964—to her son Tim’s initial excitement—she opened a restaurant in the house, originally dubbed the Yeats Room. Three years later, she opened a portion of Ballymaloe as a guesthouse, at least partly because this made it easier for her to get a liquor license for the restaurant. Gradually, word of her homey, savory cooking spread, and Ballymaloe became a culinary destination.

Today the restaurant remains one of Ireland’s best. As you’d expect with what is essentially home cooking based largely on ingredients from the garden or from nearby farms—and on just-landed fish from nearby Ballycotton and shellfish from West Cork—the menu changes constantly. In general, soups (lettuce and mint, for instance) are simple and flawless; salads glisten with freshness. Main dishes are straightforward and taste of what they are—food like roast cod with champ or roast leg of free-range pork with herbs and garlic and Bramley apple sauce. The dining room shines the brightest, though, with its Friday-night seafood buffet, sometimes carried over through the weekend—in effect, a glorious Italian-style antipasto table with an Irish accent. On our most recent visit, we had tiny fresh mussels, rock oysters, cockles, crabmeat, Frank Hederman’s smoked mussels and mackerel and eel, and various nonpiscatorial items including pates of chicken liver and of pork with chicken and bacon, thin-sliced seared eggplant, pickled onions, pickled beets, and salads of cucumber and tomato.

Allen has long been much more than just a restaurateur, though. Convinced that Irish products and honest Irish cooking were as good as any in the world, she became an eloquently vocal and tireless exponent of Irish food, both in Ireland and abroad. She traveled, taught, appeared on radio and television, wrote books. She organized “Taste of Ireland” events in Amsterdam, Brussels, and New York. From 1981 through 1985, she helped run an Irish restaurant in Paris, La Ferme Irlandaise—named one of the city’s top ten “foreign” restaurants. She founded Euro-Toques Ireland and later was president of that international organization for three years. In her native Cork, she started a consumers’ group, Free Choice, to support and promote local artisanal producers.

Today Allen is formally retired, leaving her daughter-in-law Hazel to run the hotel and young (unrelated) Jason Fahey in charge of the kitchen, but she remains bright-eyed and vigorous and seems never to stop moving—welcoming visiting culinary dignitaries, driving off to Cork City to take part in a symposium or around the county countryside to drop in on artisanal cheese makers and organic farmers, whom she has championed for decades. Even when she agrees to go back into the Ballymaloe kitchen to show us how she makes her famous brown bread and a few of her restaurant specialties, she works crisply and efficiently—and can’t help teaching as she goes. (“Irish brown bread actually came from a book by the English food writer Doris Grant, who developed the recipe at the request of the British government as something nutritious and easy to make at home. We made it here, and it spread all over Ireland.”)

The accomplishments of Myrtle Allen herself form just the beginning of the Ballymaloe story. Allen is also the materfamilias of a large and widespread network of food-related businesses, run by several of her children, grandchildren, and in-laws: for example, the Ballymaloe Shop and Cafe at the End of the Shop, next to the house itself; Hyde Ltd., which produces packaged Ballymaloe food products; Feidhlim Harty Wetland Systems, an environmental consultancy service; a culinary employment agency called Jobs for Cooks; a ready-to-serve pub-food producer known as Cully & Sully; another restaurant, Crawford Gallery Cafe, in Cork’s Crawford Municipal Art Gallery; and, most significant, the world-renowned Ballymaloe Cookery School, back at Shanagarry, which was started by her daughter-in-law Darina (Tim’s wife).

The school, as large and well equipped as a small high school—but in a much prettier setting than the vast majority of such institutions, with organic kitchen gardens and beautiful unmanicured grounds—offers 12-week certificate courses of study for would-be culinary professionals (or working cooks who want to brush up on their skills), as well as individual classes or short courses in everything from barbecue cooking, mushroom hunting, and stress-free entertaining to beekeeping and “how to keep a few chickens in your garden.” Tall and wise looking, and as much the globe-trotter and natural teacher as her mother-in-law, Darina seems the perfect embodiment of the Ballymaloe tradition. “The coolest words in food as we slide into 2006,” she wrote in her year-end online newsletter, “are local, artisan, and slow.” Those three words could be the defining motto for the best of what Ireland has to offer to the world of food today.

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_Part II of a five-part series
_Part I: Ireland from Farm to Fork
Part III: Heart and Hearth
Part IV: A Kid from the Country
Part V: The Chef and His Materials

One could look at West Cork as the California of Ireland,” says Frank Krawczyk, “not in its climate, but in its openness and creativity.” He should know. A bearded, studious-looking Pole who has lived in western County Cork since 1981, Krawczyk (pronounced KRAF-chek) fashions smoky, almost gamy salamis and other hard sausages that are not quite like anything you’ve ever had before. “I tried to create something with a specific character of its own,” he says, “something that defines the nature of West Cork—which is rural but cosmopolitan, very diverse in many ways, and probably the most forward-thinking place in Ireland.”

It is also the country’s gastronomic capital—its Burgundy as much as its California (if unfortunately lacking the capacity for viticulture that is the pride of those two places). It was in West Cork—which stretches west of Cork City to the County Kerry line—that the modern-day Irish artisanal food movement was born. Today the region boasts artisanal salmon smokers and sausage makers, an artisanal miller, a host of Ireland’s best cheese producers, and a number of good restaurants, some wonderfully eccentric. The eastern part of the county, meanwhile, is home to the seminal Ballymaloe House, bailiwick of the legendary Myrtle Allen, and the Ballymaloe cooking school, one of the best in Europe—and of the jewel-like Midleton Saturday market. If you love food and are coming to Ireland, County Cork is an essential destination.

Farmhouse cheese making isn’t new to County Cork. In an essay on Irish cheeses published in 1937, the poet and politician Oliver St. John Gogarty mentions a number of cheese-producing dairies in the region, among them Ardagh and Mitchelstown (“greatest of all”). “The story goes,” he adds, “that when application was made to Denmark for an instructor to teach the Irish the art of butter and cheese production and preservation, the Danish authorities apologised for being unable to lend their best expert ‘because he had just gone back to Cork’!” The diversion of milk to make standardized cheddars and the like during World War II effectively wiped out the production of unique local cheeses. Then along came Norman Steele, an English-born professor of philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin, and his wife, Veronica, a native Dubliner. In 1976, the Steeles, who were living on a farm in Eyeries, a hamlet on West Cork’s rugged Beara Peninsula, found themselves with, as Norman puts it, “a one-horned cow named Brisket and too much milk.” The idea of making cheese occurred to them. “We got all the leaflets,” says Norman. “We also found a book called The Cheeses and Wines of England and France with Notes on Irish Whiskey by a man named John Ehle. The leaflets told you how to make cheese, but Ehle told you what cheese was.”

The Steeles began experimenting, finally creating a washed-rind cheese with a complex floral flavor and a creamy texture. “This was the cheese that wanted to be here,” says Veronica. They dubbed their creation Milleens, the name of their farm. As word of their success spread, the Steeles started giving cheese-making courses to anyone who was interested. “Almost everybody who came went on to make cheese of their own,” says Norman. Today the Steeles’ son, Quinlan, is in charge of production.

The second West Cork artisanal cheese maker was Jeffa Gill, with her Durrus—a semisoft raw-milk cows’ milk cheese, a little fruity and pleasantly pungent—made near the town of the same name. Like Norman Steele, Gill is from England originally, and like the Steeles she started producing cheese because she had plenty of milk. Echoing Veronica Steele, she says, “The milk makes its own cheese. I just let it happen.”

Giana and Tom Ferguson craft another of West Cork’s famous cheeses, Gubbeen, at their farm in Schull, while their son, Fingal, produces artisanal sausages and cured meats next door. Giana, too, is English, but grew up in Spain and France. “Then you marry a West Cork farmer,” she says, “and suddenly have all this beautiful milk … ” She proudly shows us her piglets, her small but immaculate cheese-making facility, and Fingal’s smokehouse, where he makes mostly Mediterranean-inspired charcuterie, including excellent salami and garlic sausage.

Then the Fergusons invite us into their handsome, cluttered farmhouse kitchen, warmed by an ancient Aga oven, for lunch. We eat a soup of just-picked nettles, simple and nicely tart; roast pork loin from one of their own pigs, with fat so soft and sweet that it’s impossible to think of it as villainous; and then a dessert of faintly iodine-scented carrageen seaweed cooked in milk with nutmeg and brown sugar. As we nibble on pieces of ripe Gubbeen, creamy and a little sour, with a nutty flavor not unlike that of reblochon, Giana talks about the obstacles facing artisanal cheese makers in Ireland—mostly having to do with governmental regulation and rigorous inspection. “In France, the man who’d be regulating the cheese would have known brie and vacherin all his life,” she points out. “Not so here. Our position is that cheese making can’t be seen as dangerous. We’re a part of our cheese, and we’re a part of our environment—part of the warmth and softness of West Cork.”

Salmon is revered in Ireland—in Irish folklore, the great warrior Fionn mac Cumhail (Finn MacCool) gains imbas (poetic intuition) by tasting the Salmon of Wisdom; bradan beatha (salmon of life) is an Irish idiom meaning life essence—and the idea of smoking it dates back thousands of years. Today there are two artisanal salmon smokers in West Cork, and they’re in the middle of a stew. A lobby of sportfishermen and conservationists wants to ban commercial drift-net salmon fishing, and Slow Food (which is taken very seriously in Irish artisanal circles) has at least temporarily suspended its support of smokers who use wild salmon.

At his Ummera smokehouse in Timoleague, Anthony Creswell (yet another English transplant) uses some wild salmon but speaks highly of organic farmed fish, which he uses increasingly to produce his elegant, medium-smoky product. “The salmon we buy are raised in cages out at sea,” he says, “so they’re actually able to swim. Their texture is much closer to that of wild fish than to most farmed salmon.” Sally Barnes of the Woodcock Smokery in Castletownshend, on the other hand, says, “I don’t process any farmed fish of any description.” Barnes, who came to Ireland from Scotland 30 years ago, started smoking fish (initially in an old tea chest with a hole in it) when she was married to a commercial salmon fisherman. Her salmon is a bit racy, saltier and smokier than Creswell’s; she also produces delicious smoked mackerel. “It isn’t drift-netting that’s harming the catch,” says Barnes. She points out that the president of the North Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organization has identified dozens of factors contributing to the decline in salmon stocks.

One night we’re invited to dinner by a young food writer and television personality named Clodagh McKenna, at her cottage near the picture-book fishing village of Courtmacsherry, not far from Timoleague. McKenna runs a small artisanal food production business of her own, turning out assorted terrines and a silky-smooth but vividly flavored chicken liver pate, among other things. She is a natural cook, with her head on straight and a confident hand. She has bought fish just out of the water from a local fisherman—mackerel and Ireland’s exquisite black sole—and has gathered little lettuces from her tiny damson-framed garden and wild herbs from a nearby wood. In a small kitchen brightened by jars filled with bluebells and geraniums on the ledge of a window looking out to the sea, she prepares a meal that begins with a salad of greens enhanced with tiny cubes of Gubbeen and lardons of Fingal Ferguson’s bacon. The mackerel is then fried with lemon juice and a minced red chile; the sole is sizzled in garlic butter and scattered with chopped wild garlic flowers. Pots of carrageen lemon pudding, airy and only faintly sweet, are dessert. The freshness and simplicity of the meal eloquently express what modern Irish food can be.

One of the best places to sample the artisanal bounty of County Cork, surprisingly, is a stylish tapas bar in Cork City called Boqueria. The context may be Spanish, but the food is often Irish. The cheese plate, for instance, might start with the expected manchego and continue with Gubbeen, Crozier Blue (a lovely sheep’s milk cheese from County Tipperary), and a couple more of Ireland’s finest. The charcuterie plate might combine serrano ham and Spanish chorizo with Gubbeen saucisson and Frank Krawczyk’s dry salami. And at Saturday brunch at Boqueria, a welcome variation on the traditional Irish breakfast—delicious but daunting—typically includes such specialties as salmon smoked by Frank Hederman in Cobh, sausages and bacon from Caherbeg Free Range Pork in Rosscarberry, former restaurateur Declan Ryan’s crusty Arbutus breads, and Donal Creedon’s Macroom oatmeal, from the town of that name west of Cork City. (Stone ground and very coarse, it’s different from anyone else’s in Ireland, full of flavor when simply cooked and immensely satisfying in its grainy texture.)

Most of these same products may also be bought at Cork’s English Market. All of Cork seems to come to this small but densely populated indoor market in the heart of the city, with its pretty ceiling of leaded glass and shaped wood suggesting an inverted ship’s keel, to shop at places like Gerry Moynihan Poultry, Bresnan’s Victuallers (“Traditional Family Butchers”), On the Pig’s Back, Mr. Bell’s Oriental Foods, K O’Connell’s seafood shop, and Frank Hederman’s smoked-fish stand.

Hederman, from the East Cork port town of Cobh, is the county’s third artisanal salmon smoker. “Sally Barnes and Anthony Creswell and I all started at about the same time, in the 1980s, unknown to each other,” says Hederman. “It’s funny how that happens. It was the same thing about a hundred years ago, when all the Cork vernacular bakers started up within a few years of each other.” Hederman smokes his salmon, both wild and organically farmed (he also makes a remarkably subtle, buttery smoked mackerel, among other products), with sea salt, over beech chips. “I’m interested in creating awareness of the distinctiveness of our product,” he says. “We have great raw materials in Ireland, but we have to add value to them. To be a success, we’ve got to make sexy food.”

Upstairs at the English Market, around the central atrium, is the Farmgate Cafe, which consists of an open cafe with photographs of local farmers and artisanal producers on the walls and an attractive self-service menu (shepherd’s pie, tripe and onions, assorted sandwiches and salads) and a small glassed-in restaurant where the excellent traditional fare might include lamb’s liver and bacon, tripe with drisheen (the Cork “blood pudding”), and a definitive corned beef with parsley sauce served with broccoli, mashed carrots and parsnips, and champ (potatoes mashed with scallions), representing the colors of the Irish flag.

The best restaurant in Cork, however, might very well be Cafe Paradiso—a modest, rather bohemian-looking place, serving food that is absolutely original and very good. Chef Denis Cotter, who owns the place with his wife, Bridget Healy, has been a vegetarian “forever,” he says, and for five years cooked “whole foods” dinners at Cork’s Quay Coop. A trip to Healy’s native New Zealand in 1992 turned his head around. “Fusion cooking was exploding in the Pacific, and I realized there was so much more I could do.”

Today, no longer limited by the restrictions of the whole-food diet but still resolutely vegetarian, Cotter uses first-rate products (he is a regular at the English Market), cooks skillfully, and has a well-developed sense of contrast and counterpoint in his food. The menu changes often, but among the dishes we’ve enjoyed are beet-filled mezzaluna pasta with hazelnuts; a tartlet of spinach and long-cooked red onions topped with melted Coolea cheese, garnished with parsley-walnut pesto and olive-crushed potatoes; couscous, pine nut, and feta cake with sweet and hot chile jam, yogurt sauce, and spicy chickpeas; galette of leeks, celeraic, and Cashel Blue (Crozier’s cows’ milk sibling) with mashed jerusalem artichokes and green beans flavored with caraway and orange; and sticky fig and ginger pudding with cinnamon ice cream and caramelized banana. It’s food that manages to express both sophistication and down-home goodness—two qualities to which County Cork is no stranger at all.

The post County Cork: Food Capital appeared first on Saveur.

It’s eleven in the morning, and Country Choice—a food shop and cafe on the main street of the Irish agricultural town of Nenagh, northeast of Limerick in County Tipperary—is abustle. Housewives in sensible frocks and rain boots and smartly dressed young women with canvas tote bags and weather-burnished men in peacoats and tweed caps crowd up to the glass display case just inside the door to buy hand-sliced local ham, house-roasted barnyard chickens, organic Irish feta cheese or Baylough cheddar, luminescent lettuces grown by Ned McQuaid in his walled home garden just across the street or by Sister Gertrude in the vegetable patch outside the Convent of Mercy a few blocks away …

Farther back in the shop, past a wall of mostly non-Irish products—cans of Spanish piquillo peppers and Italian tuna, American-style caesar salad dressing, Lebanese wine—more customers occupy a handful of mismatched tables, sipping Irish breakfast tea or espresso, munching sultana scones or orange-juice-flavored oatmeal bread served from behind a small L-shaped counter. In the kitchen to the left of the counter, chef Sophie O’Dowd, with the aid of all-purpose kitchen helper Elaine Hogan, is hard at work, forming multigrain bread dough into big, rough rounds, then cutting them into thirds for baking; checking on the beef and Guinness pie and other savory dishes starting to bubble in the multilevel oven; stirring a big pot of potato and spring onion soup.

And everywhere—behind the front counter weighing hunks of cheese, by the grocery shelves helping a tiny white-haired woman pick out dried fruit for her boiled pudding, working the espresso machine as deftly as a Milanese barista, darting in and out of the kitchen to check an order, taste a sauce, josh with O’Dowd—is Peter Ward, proprietor (with his wife, Mary) of this remarkable emporium. An amiable, energetic gentleman who has been called “the greatest grocer in Ireland,” Ward is the reason I’ve come to this Irish provincial municipality, population about 6,000—on the face of it an unlikely destination for a gastronomic pilgrimage.

I met Peter Ward in April 2002, when I was invited to participate in a specialty foods symposium sponsored by the Irish Food Board in the seaside town of Kinsale, near Cork. There was a certain predictability, the drone of officialdom, to the first few speakers in the program, and I was frankly about to repair to the bar when the tenor of the proceedings changed dramatically as the podium was taken by a man—introduced as a grocer—who, with something very much like evangelistic fire in his voice, immediately started going on about the glories of farmhouse butter and homemade brown bread and creamy Irish milk. I settled back to listen, and by the time he got to the point of saying (I paraphrase), “When people come here from another country and want to taste Irish food and we serve them something from a German-owned supermarket, that ought to be considered an act of treason!” I realized that he was somebody I should probably meet—one of those characters who espouse local specialties passionately enough to inspire food lovers far from their own locales. I introduced myself to him later in the day and asked whether I might come and visit him at his shop on my next trip to Ireland—which is how I’ve ended up nibbling scones in Nenagh (pronounced NEE-nah) and listening to Ward talk some more.

Ward was born, he tells me, in 1958 in the village of Dunderry, near the medieval town of Trim, west of Dublin. “My grandfather had a grocer’s shop,” he continues, “and I was reared on a very traditional family farm. My father was a cattle dealer who traveled all over Ireland buying stock to raise back home and to sell to other farmers, and every time he came back, he’d bring food. He had a favorite butcher shop in the west of Ireland, a favorite fish shop in the south, a cheese shop he liked somewhere. It was always a feast when he returned.”

As a high-school student, Ward took a summer job with an Irish supermarket chain, then stayed with the company when autumn came. In 1979, by then experienced in the grocery trade, Ward was sent to Nenagh by his employers. He liked what he saw there. “Every morning I’d go out and buy bread and ham carved by an old man with a carving knife,” he recalls. “I got to know and like the people and the town.” One of the people he got to know and like was Mary D’Arcy, who was to become his wife. First, though, the chain sent Ward on to work in Dublin—”but pretty soon,” he says, “I could see that the supermarket business wasn’t compatible with our family’s philosophy of food. I knew that there was a lot, lot better food in Ireland than was being sold in the supermarkets. I said to myself, ‘I’m going to sell food—the kind I enjoy,’ and I thought that Nenagh was the place to do it.”

In 1982, Ward moved back to Nenagh and wed Mary D’Arcy, and the couple opened Country Choice. They were bucking a trend. “Traditional small groceries were closing all over Ireland at the time,” Ward says. “They didn’t have the resilience to deal with the onslaught of the chains. Some years ago, for instance, there was a supemarket price war all over Ireland over the common sliced loaf. Now, the sliced loaf would have been the mainstay of many small town bakeries, and suddenly they could no longer compete on a core product. Maybe half the bakeries in any given town eventually closed. And because they made local specialties as well as the sliced loaf, those started to disappear, too.”

Nenagh was different, says Ward, because it had always been a very prosperous town, with many ties to the outside world. Nearby Lough (Lake) Derg and the Shannon River formed the main thoroughfare through the center of Ireland until the large highways were built, and Nenagh was a crossroads, a market town. Its name in Gaelic, Nenagh Urmhumhan, means “the fair of North Munster.” The big Anglo-Norman farms and the monasteries in the region brought further wealth, as did the nearby mountains, called the Silvermines, a source of tin and silver since Neolithic times. “There are still big shops here trading in luxury goods,” he adds, “and people have sophisticated tastes. When we opened Country Choice in 1982, the first customer who came in asked me for Earl Grey tea and camembert. You wouldn’t have found that in a lot of small towns in Ireland.”

After he shows me around the shop and the kitchen, Ward says, “There’s a cattle market every week in Nenagh, and it’s on today. Let’s walk down to see it.” We step out into the gray midday and turn back to look at the front of the shop. A sign in Gaelic reads Rogha na Tuaithe Tae agus Caife (Country Choice Tea and Coffee). Another boasts Bia Brea Blasta (Fine Tasting Food). Ward loves speaking Gaelic and helped found a local school to teach the language. A sign inside the shop offers Gno tri Ghaeilge? Bainimis triail as “Business in Gaelic? We’ll have a go.”

Turning right, we pause in front of the bright red façade of A. Ryan, once an all-purpose shop selling everything from cigarettes and candy to laundry soap and thread. Bridie Ryan, daughter of the shop’s founder, lives upstairs; she closed the shop in 2002 after the death of her sister (and partner) but keeps the interior intact, still stocked with whatever was there when she closed. “I never have to go out,” she jokes. “I can just walk downstairs and find anything I need.” Ward tells her we’re headed to the cattle market. “Oh,” says Ryan, “I remember when the farmers used to walk down the street with their cows, right past the stores, in the rain, hail, or sleet. When they’d sell, they’d go to the pubs and spend their money. They brought such business to the town!”

“You have to understand the importance of cattle in Ireland,” says Ward as we continue on. Then he adds with a grin, “The native Irish were like the Masai in relationship to their cows—a little more aggressive, maybe. Cattle raiding was a popular sport. Today, probably half our customers are farmers who make their living with their milk. It’s literally the fat of the land.”

The cattle market takes place in a big skylit shed, set up like a small arena. Bleachers curve partway around an approximately oval-shaped pen, into which assorted bovines, sometimes a single one, sometimes three or four, are herded, one lot after the other. Particulars of each beast—birth date, weight, inoculations, and so on—appear on a tote board. A rapid-fire auctioneer sells the animals, responding to cues from a crowd of 60 or 70 men—many sporting tweed hats or caps, some with walking sticks, most dressed in sober farmers’ colors—that are all but imperceptible to the outsider. The scene probably hasn’t changed much in centuries.

It seems fitting that our next stop is Hackett’s butcher shop. Michael Hackett, a solid-looking character in the traditional ventilated white butcher’s hat, buys milk-fed heifers as yearlings at the market every few months, fattens them for between three and six months on his farm outside town, then slaughters them for sale in his shop. “The oldest would be about 20 months old when killed,” he says. “That’s what suits me. I hang them for about two weeks, but they’re so tender at that age you could almost eat them the day after they’re slaughtered.” As we leave, Ward says, “But the livestock business is changing, becoming more corporate and international. The small markets have maybe five years to go. Pretty soon there’ll be about five big modern ones around the country instead.” He shakes his head.

Back at Country Choice, we sit down for lunch. “I think I like to educate people in my shop,” says Ward, as we dig into steaming bowls of Sophie O’Dowd’s wonderful potato and spring onion soup, with rough-torn pieces of warm bread gilded with dense Nenagh butter on the side. “Personal relationships are very strong when you’re doing business with people in the country. We have been very ethical. The mass market is not ethical. The mass market would not have the same considerations about the origins of food, or the same relationships with the people they buy from and sell to. We operate on a system of implicit trust. People ask us all the time to just select something for them, or give them an idea for a starter, or will ask what’s good at the moment. It’s that kind of place.”

Out come dishes of rich, herby, slightly sweet beef and Guinness pie and homey cabbage and bacon pie topped with buttery, lightly browned mashed potatoes, which Ward promptly anoints with more butter. (The “bacon” is actually ham; in Ireland, says Ward, the term is used for any cut of salted pork from the shoulder down to the leg.) “If you came in here and had just bread, butter, cheese, and a glass of milk, you’d have a wonderful meal, and very complete,” he says.

He gets a dreamy look in his eyes and goes on. “When I was a boy, we used to cut peat in the bog,” he says, “and we’d carry a gallon can of buttermilk with us. We’d dig a hole in the cold peat with our hands, and it would fill with black water, and we’d set the can into it. Cutting peat is hard, back-breaking work, and when we’d take a break we’d pass the buttermilk around, drinking it so fast we practically poured it on our heads. It was the best thing!”

As we try to find room for dessert—a nicely acidic rhubarb crumble given a lightly spicy flavor by a bit of fresh ginger—Ward tells me that he sees some hope for the future. “There’s been an incredible groundswell in the production of Irish artisanal foods,” he says. “Lots of young people are leaving corporate jobs to go into the food business. At least once a week people send us something new to try. I’m also always trying to get people to grow more food for us. We advertise in the newspaper, things like ‘Wanted: wild crab apples after the first frost’. When somebody brings in eggs or butter from their farm, they don’t come through the back door. We bring it in the front door. We celebrate it.”

Late in the afternoon, Ward drives me out to a small farm in Ballymassey, 10 miles or so north of Nenagh. Here, a friend of his, Barbara Harding, keeps a dozen cows and makes butter from their milk. We tramp through the mud, pay our respects to the cows in their shed, then follow Harding into her tiny, sterile butter room. She churns the rich, day-old cream—she makes what’s called ripened butter—in a small electric churn (it takes 10 liters of cream to make 12 pounds of butter). We watch as she squeezes the water out of a large, wavy lump by hand, then forms it into a brick with two wooden paddles. Tomorrow morning, the butter will be on sale at Country Choice.

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