I was given this heavy tome by the publishers to review and months later I’m finally getting my thoughts down. Whilst it is a fantastic collection of recipes and information that all Irish cooks should own, I fear that along with Darina’s Forgotten Skills of Cooking, we are looking at our past.

The author Colman Andrews is a very well known food-writer and co-founder of the famed Saveur magazine in the US. This may look like a coffee-table staple but it is genuinely jammed with lots of recipes that could easily have been lost forever.

It’s clear reading the book that Colman is not claiming to be an expert in Irish food since he defers to many of the Irish greats like Darina and profiles some of our Irish food heroes like Anthony down the road in Ummera. The only time this becomes a problem is when he refers to things being very common when I know that they are small-scale and highly-localised. The perfect example is fraughan gathering. This is presented as something many people do. The reality is that 95% of the population would have no idea what a fraughan is and most of those live in boggy country areas. Their parents or grandparents may have gathered them but they are now buying Chilean strawberries in SuperValu.

This leads to the biggest problem I ran into when reading it. Quite simply it does not reflect mainstream current Irish eating or food. It is a lens on our food history and it tells us what foodies, Slow Food people and gurus like Myrtle or Darina are interested in, but it has no relationship to where most people are now.

My mother was flicking through it recently and ran into a word I had never heard of: stir-about. It’s an old word for porridge. Neither she nor my father had heard it for decades. This is a perfect example of what we are losing as we “modernize”.

I don’t see this as a problem with the book, I see it as a problem with us. Is our future going to be 100% Tesco-ized? Everything pre-prepared, cooked and packaged? Or Tesco-Finest for those with money? Is U.S.-style obesity heading our way? Is the idea of cooking with incredibly small budgets using things like cheap cuts of meat gone and replaced with take-aways and extruded shapes?

Anyone who reads this blog know I love food and love seeing artisan produce do well but at the back of my mind I worry we have gone from “proper food” being something everyone ate, due to economic necessity, to something utterly middle-class and slightly sniffy.

The current recession should be an opportunity for this type of cooking to come back but the skills are gone. Is there any hope? What could be done in the education system to bring these skills back?

Having stupid men on the sides of buses telling us how easy it is to cook certainly isn’t the answer either. How about replacing compulsory Irish in schools with compulsory cooking? Imagine a government doing something audacious now to solve a future health epidemic whilst finally admitting failure in an 80 year language effort.

Apologies for such a negative post about such a great book but I think I’ve been depressed since watching Food Inc. Movies like that along with efforts like Jamie Oliver’s and Hugh F-W’s are mainly just preaching to the converted. How do we convert those who could benefit most from a return to the past?

Colman’s book is not the solution but at least it is helping to preserve the knowledge.

In case the review was lost in my brain-dump above, this is a superb book. If you want a broad sweep of traditional Irish cooking you should buy it.

With a single episode, the greatest TV show RTE have made about food in at least 25 years. Martin Shanahan jumps out of the screen, grabs you by the scruff of the neck and demands that you watch him and start loving fish.

After decades of dreary formulaic yawn inducing food programmes on Irish TV or worse, the “crayzzzzze kooky” shows, someone in RTE finally saw an episode of Jamie Oliver and realised what was missing – personality.

Where has Martin been hiding all this time? In the kitchens of the rightly legendary Fishy Fishy in Kinsale? He’s a force of nature. He is everything that made Darina a legend – knowledge,passion, humour. But he goes far beyond that, he’s an absolute TV natural. He belongs in front of the camera. Dammit he _owns_ the camera.

Honestly, I was rivetted for 30 minutes. It is perfect food TV. This show doesn’t just have potential, this could go global. With sub-titles of course. Joke joke!

And the fish, lord the fish. We’re not having our regular Friday Chicken Tikka Masala tonight, we are doing the mackerel dish that Martin showed instead. He had that much impact. And that’s the other thing, every bloody RTE food show tells you how to do dinner party food. Who the hell has dinner parties? Martin shows you how to cook gorgeous tasty healthy food quickly, for you!

If you missed the first episode, kick yourself hard and just be thankful RTE now has it on the RTE Player (even if it built on the proprietary dying Realplayer technology, but that’s a topic for another blogpost).

Hopefully this show will also be the kick up the arse Kinsale needs to start living up again to its long-undeserved 1970s “Gourmet Capital of Ireland” tag. Quick, name five places in Kinsale you would travel an hour to eat in. Exactly.

Top Chef is the only food TV show for years that I actively look forward to seeing each week. Martin Shanahan has created a second.

We recently discovered this shop as it seems to be the only one in a few hundred miles of Bandon that sells Sodastream gas refills. Catherine popped down a few weeks ago to get two refills and raved about the place. I drove down yesterday to have a look and get some of the Sodastream flavours.

They are just at the top of town on the main street, impossible to miss. I went in with 4 of our monsters so couldn’t spend as much time as I’d like. Suffice to say, if you like cookware or kitchenware, you’ll adore this shop. It is jammed with tons and tons of everything you could possibly need in a kitchen. In just a few minutes I got my Sodastream flavours (highly recommend that you start using this 1970s classic again to save yourself a fortune. Also less damaging to the environment!), spatula, pouring nozzles for oil, bun cases and oven thermometer. The owners were extremely friendly and helpful too.

The highlight for us all was this coffee maker. Slightly out of our budget but a wonderful design.

The Cookware Company is worth a drive no matter where you are in Cork.

I popped into the fish shop in Bantry today and spotted these. A fully sealed pack of live local mussels. I have long lamented the lack of fresh shellfish in shops in Cork and now they have no excuse. All you need is a cooler cabinet with no need for special shellfish expertise or having to deal with smells or things going off. These could literally be sold in every garage and convenience shop in the country.

Not only is it easier for shops but mussels are the ultimate fast food. All I did this evening was open the pack, rinse them, throw out the ones that were still open and cook them. Cooking consisted of chopping some garlic and onion, cooking that for a sec, lobbing in a ton of wine, one more minute, lob in the mussels, 4 minutes, add some cream, serve. Probably less that 15 minutes from taking pack out of fridge to eating my dinner.

And wow were these fresh. I could still smell and taste that seaside ozone without a hint of fishiness.

Demand these from every shop you frequent that limits itself to selling fish fingers.

It’s time to put Masterchef out to pasture. I’m watching an average show in about 10 minutes using Sky+. The formula isn’t working any more. No tension, no excitement, the same stupid catchphrases. Cooking doesn’t get any harder than this. Yeah, it does.

Scallops. If I see one more bleedin scallop on that show, I’ll explode. Fabio Viviani, in the far superior US show Top Chef, described the same problem perfectly back in January 2009:

And to prove the point yesterday, whilst bent over double in pain from a tummy bug, I lashed this together in 5 minutes, and I’m not even a good cook!

So Greg and John. Time to re-invent Top Chef again or give it up. I don’t know what the viewing figures are like but the ways it’s going, the contestants will be shown working in a chipper in the next season.

I’ve always been a huge fan of Neven. Anyone who can run a successful restaurant in the middle of nowhere in rural Cavan gets my vote. His energy is always fantastic too. This new show is ok but nothing amazing.

I’m surprised to see cookery programmes still being made that refer to “dinner parties”. Does anyone still have those?

His three dishes in the opening episode were asparagus and smoked salmon tartlet, confit duck and a tiramsu variant.

Whilst I loved the look of the first dish, it seems a bit ridiculous to have an asparagus recipe in January. Or a salad with Nasturtium flowers whilst we’re on the subject. Have the producers of the programme missed every single Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall espisode ever made? Where did the idea of seasonal produce go?

The trip to the organic egg farm was enlightening and provided another one of those interesting tid-bits. The farmer supplies most of his eggs to Lidl and Aldi. Weird then that most of the organic eggs in those shops in Cork seem to have either UK or German markings on them.

The confit duck looked gorgeous but I’d love to know how much the average punter would have to pay for a few litres of duck fat. I think I’ll stick with the canned one like most French people do.

The show has great potential given the presenter involved but it doesn’t feel fully formed or thought out. The show that RTE needs to make, that would become legendary, is to have Darina do one based on her new book. Show people how to cook lovely food frugally. “Feed your family for a tenner a day” or something. Review of that book coming soon. Summary: One of the top ten cook books of all time.

Neven is on RTÉ One, Thursday, 8.30pm.