Saint Patrick's day feast

guardian.co.uk

 

Preparing a Saint Patrick's day feast? Go back to our roots

 

 

When St Patrick's Day comes on to our radar each year, we dust down the things we consider traditional; things we might proudly show off to the outside world. In truth, this is mostly in response to curiosity from the media and, to a lesser extent, from tourists in search of a golden age of Ireland. I'm sure the same thing happens elsewhere – think Scotland around Rabbie Burns night or France on Bastille Day. The Irish, however, as well as being very comfortable in our modern skins, are spectacularly self-obsessed and believe that the rest of the world is fascinated with the country, its cultures and traditions.

As a chef and food writer, I might envy my country-folk who can trot out their writers, poets, musicians, theatre, dancers, singers while we scramble around for the few bits and bobs of scraps we can claim to be a traditional food culture. In a country that spent much of the last few hundred years in poverty, it's a bit rich expecting us to have concocted a food culture that would stand up as a coherent cuisine. As a vegetarian chef, there is even less for me to cling on to.

I wasn't always a vegetarian, and I grew up in a small town through the 1960s and 70s so remember the native traditional diet before the arrival of spaghetti, Chinese food and broccoli.

Dinner was almost always a meat – poultry, pig or mutton – simply cooked and served with the same vegetables year round: potatoes, cabbage, carrots, parsnips and turnips – aka swedes. These were boiled, there were no recipes. Yes, we did sometimes mash the cabbage into the spuds but we didn't call that colcannon, or any other name. Nor did we have a name for that most delicious dish whereby all the roots were mashed together. On the rare occasions when we ate out, the food was essentially the same as home cooking and the only advantage was not having to do it yourself. Hence my mother's best compliment for a meal – "Isn't it grand to put your feet up and have it served up to you?"

If you encounter food in Ireland that claims to be from a traditional culture, it is most often aimed at the tourist. That said, there are chefs, such as Danny Millar and Richard Corrigan who create wonderful dishes from the bones of the tradition, with the application of techniques and styles borrowed from the classic cuisines of France and Italy and, to some extent, from the "big country house" cooking, a sophisticated style which was essentially English anyway.

Far from seeing this as a disadvantage, however, I've always seen this absence of a strong food tradition as an opportunity to create a new, modern culture unburdened by the need to look over our shoulders or to feel the weight of past masters' eyes on how we work. I have long argued that, when it comes to food, Ireland is a New World country, with all the freedom that gives us to import ideas and make them our own.

There has been amassive food revolution in Ireland over the last 20 years or so. It may have started with a hunger for imported ingredients and dishes, but it gradually morphed into something rooted in the best aspects of a culture, place and people. Cheesemakers and vegetable growers, as well as artisans in other areas, began first to experiment and then to adapt, until they were making and growing foods that were specific to their locality.

The cooks who worked with these ingredients – and I'm thinking as much about home cooks as professional chefs – use them in dishes that might be seen as of other cultures. But that is to miss the essential point of a food culture. An example I often cite is this: is it more Irish to make colcannon with imported potatoes and cabbage or to make a personalised variation on a green curry with vegetables you buy from a farmer down the road? Irish stew with New Zealand lamb from the supermarket or homemade pasta with South Cork artichokes and sheep's cheese from County Clare?

Irish restaurants have absorbed the cuisines of other countries for a long time now and have recently taken ferociously to the idea of sourcing locally, creating a cuisine that is unique to each pocket of the country.

In my restaurant, Cafe Paradiso, we work with a local grower, who can produce anything we need, from artichokes, aubergines, squash and sweet peppers to turnips and cabbage, as well as roots we had forgotten about such as salsify and scorzonera. Our menus are littered with flavour combinations that might seem vaguely Moroccan, Thai, Italian, South American, Japanese… though none would be recognised as traditional in those places, so much have they been adapted to our place.

More importantly, this is happening in the wider food culture, too. This is how everyone cooks and increasingly it is how everyone shops. The key to a vibrant food culture and a relevant living tradition is an engagement by the consumers with the local producers. The longer this revolution goes on, the more the cuisine we create will become our own, and the more confident we will become in creating it.

An interesting aspect of this is the resurgence of traditional ingredients, as though being one step further away from the association with subsistence they might bring, the more we can find new ways to use them. Aubergines, tomatoes, artichokes, peppers and the like from Gortnanain Farm south of Cork city may have become our new staples, but increasingly I love to create surprising dishes from the turnips, potatoes and cabbage that I grew up on.

The new Irish food culture may not yet be an exportable thing but it is alive and vibrant and deeply rooted in its sense of place. I wonder, though, what visitors really want from Irish cuisine, how much of it is for the novelty value, as a one-off holiday food experience, or something to be cooked up on St Patrick's day. On a trip to Dublin, where you eat some boxty or colcannon, I wonder if you go home thinking you might add those to your repertoire of recipes?

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