It’s part of his assault on those who blindly assume that local-is-best when it comes to food (people whom he also suspects are the proud possessors of said iPhones); his attempt, as he puts it, to “kick ten tons of crap out of the local food movement.” His point? It’s not that locally produced food is suddenly off the shopping list – there will always be cases where it’s the best choice we can make, and not just for reasons of taste, but because it’s also about food security and supporting local economies – but that local doesn’t always equate to sustainable and that imported foods – and the large-scale agriculture that may produce them – aren’t necessarily bad.

Nothing like a bit of good old-fashioned hyperbole:
in addition to the bold subtitle, the back-of-book blurb asserts that this volume will do no less than
“…change the way we shop, cook and eat forever”
Or something like that anyway.

From biotechnology and biofuels to farmers’ markets and food miles, the book sets out the author’s considered position on many thorny issues relating to the complex beast that is our global food system. Shot through with humour, and alternating memoir with reportage, its style – whether you find it appealing or not – does a lot to make this volume more accessible than others which tackle similar topics (even if the remembrances do, at times, feel like they belong in a different book).

By the time you reach the last chapter, you are left in no doubt that, whatever aspect of the food system you’re discussing, it is, to use the author’s words, “ear-bleedingly, eyeball-gougingly complicated” and you should perhaps have studied economics after all. An approach to food in a world where we need to feed billions of people, says Rayner, needs to have sustainability and food security at its heart; supporting local producers and paying them properly is part of that, as is simply not wasting so much of what we produce to begin with. Imports – which aren’t going away anytime soon – also need to be considered in that context.

All of which, curiously, got me thinking about crisps.

Veronica Kenneally, a mum of three based in Cork, is the woman behind Veronica’s Snacks, a range of baked, organic, gluten-free crisps. With my well-known predilection for all things potato – and an unabashed fondness for the more-than-occasional packet o’ crisps – it was inevitable that Veronica’s version of same would attract my attention. Unlike your classic thinly sliced spuds, fried in oil, these are ridged crisps, baked from a mixture composed mostly of potato starch and potato flakes. The packaging tells you that they have 60% less fat than regular crisps and they were Veronica’s solution to the problem of providing a healthier style of snack that kids (and adults, for that matter) would still be happy to eat (having been sent samples of their range, the now-empty packets attest to the fact that I was very happy to do just that).

The Veronica’s Snacks range: Barbeque plus Roast Tomato & Spanish Paprika flavours

But – and you knew there was a but – here’s the thing: they’re not made in Ireland. In a recent Irish Times snippet on Veronica’s Snacks, there’s an almost audible “Tsk” after you read the sentence: “But they’re made in Slovakia.”

The reality? Lacking funds to set up a production facility herself, and unable to find a manufacturing partner in Ireland who could make gluten-free crisps to the standard required, economics dictated that Veronica look offshore. While agencies here are quick to remind her that this aspect of her business is unsustainable, looking for additional funding from said agencies which might enable her to do otherwise has, she says, been a slow and difficult process. Everything thus far has been privately funded and, as things stand, she will have to wait until she has money in the bank before she can look at setting up a facility here.

Meanwhile she is getting on with building brand awareness and working on distribution and sales. Her crisps are listed in Dunnes Stores, are available in 30 or so SuperValu stores around the country and are soon to be available in Tesco. I also spotted them at the excellent Honest To Goodness market in Glasnevin and they recently shipped their first order to the U.K., where they are being stocked in Harvey Nichols. The business was one of those shortlisted for Retail Start Up of the Year at the recent Vodafone Start Up Awards.

Completing the Veronica’s Snacks range:
Roast Garlic & Mixed Herbs flavour (my personal favourite) plus Sour Cream, Herb & Onion

The moral of the story is that, even when it comes to crisps, making a decision about whether to buy on the basis of being Irish-produced or not, is not as black and white as it may seem. In Veronica’s case, “But they’re made in Slovakia” might equally read: “But they can, and will with your support, be made in Ireland.” Like that Rayner fella said, it’s complicated.

If the economics of it all is hurting your head, and your preference, when it comes to making sense of food, is to get down and dirty in the kitchen, then a course at Michelin-starred Aniar Restaurant & Boutique Cookery School in Galway, with no less a title than Understanding Food, may be the thing for you. The course – which is running currently and will commence again on August 12th and October 7th – runs each Monday evening for six weeks, during which time students learn about the origin and traceability of bread, beef, pork, fish, poultry and vegetables, as well as how best to prepare them.

It’s one of a number of courses being given by JP McMahon, the dynamo behind the Eat Galway restaurant group: in addition to the six-week course, which costs €360, a number of one day cookery workshops, costing €150, will also run throughout the summer season. They will explore themes like The Whole Hen and The Whole Hog (though not, I note, The Whole Potato – an idea for the next round of courses, perhaps). Classes, in all cases, are small, with a maximum of 6 students.

See here for more details, email food@aniarrestaurant.ie or phone 091 535 947.

Spuds on the skyline: the view from Dublin’s new city centre rooftop potato patch

It makes for a very different kind of water cooler conversation.

Rows of former water cooler canisters, stacked in pairs, have been re-purposed as potato planters, the lower canisters acting as individual water reservoirs for the ones above, each of which houses a different variety of potato plant. There are 160 varieties in all – sourced from Dave Langford’s heritage potato collection – and which now peep, to varying degrees, above their funky plastic parapets. Stand around these water-vessels-turned-potato-pots for any length of time, especially with Andrew Douglas in the vicinity, and your conversation is likely to be punctuated with words like recycling, upcycling, community, education, employment and urban renewal.

Spuds to make you smile: Mona Lisa potatoes in their Dublin rooftop home

It’s all part of the Dublin Urban Farm, a project which has seen founders Andrew Douglas and Paddy O’Kearney – along with much volunteer help and support from local cafés and restaurants – turn the roof and uppermost floor of an old sweet factory into a productive and inspiring green space.

The site is the old Williams & Woods building on King’s Inns Street in Dublin’s north inner city, where, at one time and among other things, the distinctively triangular Toblerone was produced. The factory dates from the beginning of the 20th century, but had fallen into disrepair after production moved elsewhere around 1975. It’s more recently become a focus of urban rejuvenation: re-christened The Chocolate Factory, it’s home to a developing creative community of which the Urban Farm is a very visible part.

Andrew Douglas explains what’s what on the roof of the Chocolate Factory

Cast your gaze across the roof and you’ll see waste materials being put to productive use – wooden frames turned into chicken coops; tea chests as large planters; barrels which play host to an explosion of growing slots. Food waste from participating cafés and restaurants is composted here and these establishments will, in time, have roof-grown produce to put on their menus. The potatoes, which are being grown at the instigation of Pádraic Óg Gallagher, will eventually find a home in the kitchens of Gallagher’s Boxty House in Temple Bar.

Vertical growing:
recycled barrels enable growing on many levels

In a corner of the building’s top floor below, these urban farmers are also experimenting, among other things, with aquaponics, which refers to a system of growing which combines aquaculture (raising fish or aquatic animals in tanks) with hydroponics (cultivating plants in water) to the mutual benefit of both. Effluents from the fish are channelled to a hydroponic system, where they are broken down by nitrogen fixing bacteria, filtered out by plants as nutrients and the cleaned water is recirculated to the tanks.

Aquaponics in action at the Dublin Urban Farm

“Our plants and fish talk and tweet,” says Andrew Douglas,
pointing to the wires that link their aquaponics system to the online world.

It’s an inspiring project and has generated much interest, particularly since being featured on the RTÉ series, Local Heroes, at the end of May. Though they have yet to experience their first full growing season, and are undoubtedly learning much as they go, the OPW (Office of Public Works) have been in touch about the possibility of replicating the idea on other city rooftops. Pádraig Óg Gallagher, meanwhile, has replaced the hanging baskets in front of The Boxty House with some of the Urban Farm potato planters, bringing potatoes, and the Urban Farm concept, even closer to the heart of the city, where both should properly be.

Gallagher’s Boxty House in Temple bar:
hanging baskets have been replaced with Urban Farm potato planters

To say that Mr. Clarke (1889-1980) was a potato breeder of note is somewhat of a understatement. Though he left school at the age of 12 and had no formal scientific or horticultural training, he was responsible for the development of 33 certified varieties of potato, most of which bear the prefix Ulster, and some of which were subsequently cross-bred to produce varieties very familiar to us: Maris Piper, long the potato of choice for the chipper, is a second generation (or F2) descendant of a John Clarke variety, Ulster Knight, and most of you will have eaten Maris Pipers, even if, at the time, their name was a mite less important than their role as a welcome source of soakage.

John Clarke, Potato Wizard by Maurice McHenry

Though tremendously well regarded as a breeder by eminent botanists of the time – and his contributions were honoured by way of an OBE in 1969 – John Clarke was not especially well known, nor his works appreciated, in his native Antrim. A book written by fellow Antrim native, Maurice McHenry – who, as a boy, had met Clarke, and whom it was my pleasure to meet this week at Bloom – aims to address that fact.

Though I was aware of Clarke’s work, I have added to both my understanding and appreciation of it with Mr. McHenry’s slim but important volume, which describes Clarke’s family background and contributions to the potato world (which, in modern day terms, where the successful breeding and certification of a new commercial variety can take from 10 to 15 years and can run into a cost of hundreds of thousands, if not more, are substantial).

Rooster potato – the variety that, in Ireland, seems to rule them all

Variety – as far as potatoes were concerned – was, in fact, a bit of a theme at Bloom this year, where the potato.ie display, presided over by Lorcan Bourke of Bord Bia, aimed to both remind and re-educate visitors about the fact that there is more to the potato than the Rooster (which accounts for around 60% of the potatoes grown here now). Though I am probably responsible for the consumption of a good deal of that 60% myself – the Rooster’s strength is, after all, as a good all-rounder – it’s never any harm to recall that different potatoes are good for different things and those Maris Pipers and their mighty chips are the classic case in point.

Other varieties of potato grown in Ireland and worth more than a passing glance

And variety at Bloom wasn’t restricted to potatoes themselves. For those who enjoy their potatoes thinly sliced and crisply fried, there were several new flavours of same to try in the artisan food market. The event was the first outing for a new and pleasantly smoky hickory barbecue flavour from O’Donnells (and also for a second new variety which I managed to miss), while samples at the Keogh’s stand included their latest addition, crisps with a pinch of Irish Atlantic sea salt. Both are fine additions to the Irish crisp landscape and, though I have no idea how John Clarke felt about crisps (Mr. McHenry’s book being silent on that point), they have each resulted from farmers demonstrating a spirit of potato innovation of which, I imagine, Mr. Clarke would have approved.

O’Donnells Crisps, new Hickory Barbecue flavour

Keogh’s Crisps with Irish Atlantic Sea Salt

New was, without question, the operative word this week.

There was new beer, with Oxman, a chocolatey, treacly brown ale, brewed in England using Irish oats, by those nomadic brewers from the Brown Paper Bag Project and launched, in both bottle and cask forms, in L. Mulligan Grocer’s on Wednesday; there was the new and beautifully shot quarterly food magazine, Feast, launched by Donal Skehan, celebrating seasonal foods and sensational producers; there was the stylish new video recipe series, Forkful TV, launched by Aoife McElwain of I Can Has Cook; there was a new perspective on an old drink (not to mention an awful lot of bottles) at a gathering organised by wine writers John Wilson and Raymond Blake to celebrate World Sherry Day; there was the announcement of the first tour by new enterprise, Irish Food Tours – set up by chefs Zack Gallagher and Wendy White Kavanagh – which will give participants a real taste of Kilkenny on the weekend of July 5th (details here) with visits to local food producers and cultural sights, and bookable now at what I reckon is a very reasonable all-in cost for meets, eats and sleeps.

Phew.

A lot of newness to be going on with, then.

Most notably, from my point of view though, there were new potatoes.

Country Crest new season Irish potatoes

Specifically, I had new season Irish potatoes sent my way by Dublin-based produce suppliers, Country Crest. Given the god awful slowness of the growing season this year, I have to admit surprise at local new potatoes making an appearance in May at all, even with crops grown under glass, as these first-of-the-season spuds would have been.

Of course I was happy to get them, in their hip, supermarket-ready 1kg box – which, lovely though it was, made me nostalgic for the honesty and heft of a 10kg sack. But sacks that size are no longer the norm when it comes to purchasing potatoes in Ireland (as demonstrated by Country Crest’s new season offering – available until the end of August in Tesco stores – and which, I’m told, will come in not-very-hefty 1kg and 2kg boxes and 1kg and 2.5kg bags). Prices, starting at €1.99 for a 1kg box, seem hefty enough though, but it has been well reported that difficult growing conditions, both last year and this, have meant a significant rise in potato prices across the board.

And what of the spuds themselves? I can’t tell you for certain what variety they were, as the box, pretty and all as it was, did not provide this detail (which is unfortunate, as it’s something that I very much like to know). Upon making further enquiries, Country Crest said that, while they use new season Queens in July and August, they start with Home Guard and Premiere varieties in May and June (from this, I inferred, Poirot-like, that my potatoes were of the Premiere kind). They were mixed in size, though mostly very small, quite earthy in flavour and creamy in texture. I was quite happy to eat them – and you can see exactly what I did with them below – but I’d be lying if I said they came anywhere close to the experience of having your own new spuds straight out of the ground. That, to be fair, is always hard to beat.

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New Potato Salad with Mint, Lemon and Garlic

When presented with the first new spuds of the year, I find it hard to get past the idea of simply serving them boiled and dressed with salt, butter and possibly some freshly chopped mint. To be honest, what you’ll find below doesn’t really stray too far from that idea: boiled new potatoes are tossed with melted butter along with some garlic, thyme and lemon; when that has soaked in and you’re ready to serve, mint, parsley and chives are added, et voilà, you have yourself some newly minted spuds.

The Summary:

• Makes around 4 servings of salad & takes approx. 30 min to put together

You’ll need:

• 1kg small new potatoes
• salt for boiling the potatoes
• 4 tblsp butter
• 1 large clove garlic, minced
• 0.5 tsp fresh thyme leaves
• 4 tsp lemon juice
• 0.5 tsp lemon zest (or more to taste)
• coarse salt to taste
• freshly ground black pepper to taste
• 2 tblsp mint leaves, finely chopped
• 2 tblsp flat leaf parsley, finely chopped
• 2 tblsp chives, finely chopped

You’ll also need:

• A large saucepan for boiling the potatoes and a small frying pan for the dressing.

The Steps:

• Scrub the potatoes and leave the skins on. Bring about 1.5l water to the boil in a large saucepan over a medium-high heat. Add about 2 tsp fine salt and the potatoes. Bring back to the boil, cover, lower the heat and boil gently until the potatoes are just fork tender, around 15 minutes or longer, depending on size. Remove from the heat, drain and cover the saucepan with a tea towel to absorb the steam from the potatoes.
• Place a small frying pan over a medium-low heat and add the butter. When the butter has melted, add the minced garlic and the thyme leaves. Fry for about a minute or so, taking care not to let the garlic burn. Remove from the heat and add the lemon juice.
• Cut the still-warm potatoes into bite-size chunks and toss with the butter mixture, lemon zest and coarse salt and black pepper to taste. When ready to serve (either warm or at room temperature), toss with the chopped mint, parsley and chives and add more lemon zest if you think it needs it.

The Variations:

• Of course there are lots of things that you could add to this, like chopped spring onions or dried chilli flakes or whatever else takes your fancy.

R☆5☆1

Not because it didn’t look good – quite the reverse, in fact. A world of virtual pin boards, teeming with pretty pictures and inspiring visuals, covering almost any subject you care to mention, Pinterest had (and has) a lot going for it in the looks department. No, I figured, you see, that I couldn’t afford to become seduced by another social network, that I should be strong in the face of its visual charm, that I should, in a word, resist, but resistance – as any reader of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will know – is useless.

This is especially true of Pinterest, with its image-based format so supremely suited to the short attention span of the average netizen. Once I had succumbed – for succumb I did – blog posts became the stuff of potatoey pin boards, making years of spudly content visible at a single glance and demonstrating that it was the waiting that had, in fact, been useless.

Now, like any good convert, I have, of course, discovered that the world is full of pinners, like Hannah of Kitchen Alchemy – a self-described visually greedy magpie – and one of many participating in Pinterest’s UK launch (as am I, except that I’m not, technically, in the UK, but, eh, I won’t tell them if you don’t). Neither will I tell you to become a pinner yourself, though it might, as when offered the cookies below, be useless to resist.

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Choc Chip & Peanut Butter Cookies w/ Potato Crisps

On a great many occasions over the lifetime of this blog, my attention has been drawn to cookie recipes having, as an ingredient, potato crisps (or potato chips, for the U.S-inclined). It was last week’s encounter with Tayto cheese & onion chocolate, however, that finally moved me to give the combination a whirl. If nothing else, I hope that the results below prove that putting crisps and chocolate together is not all bad – far from it, in fact.

The ingredients used pay homage to that trifecta of childhood treats: the packet of crisps, the bag of peanuts and the bar of Dairy Milk; with crushed, salted crisps, crunchy peanut butter and little chunks of chocolate, this is the cookie that binds them all. (I will also state, for the record, that, try as I might to hold on to the Irish term ‘biscuits’ for describing such a treat, I will grant that anything containing chocolate chips demands to be called a cookie, no matter what side of the Atlantic you’re on).

The effect of the crisps is, of course, to add a bit of crunch and saltiness – no cheese & onion flavour here, thanks very much – and, with the amount I’ve added, it’s relatively subtle in effect (no doubt, in time, I will play around with amounts). As for the peanut butter, I used a brand with no added sugar – if yours has sugar added, you may like to reduce the amount of sugar in the recipe. For the chocolate, use dark or milk chocolate according to your preference – just make sure to use a chocolate that you like.

The Summary:

• Makes around 30 cookies & takes approx. 20 min to prep + 10 min to bake each batch

You’ll need:

• 100g unsalted butter
• 50g crunchy peanut butter
• 100g light muscovado sugar (or other light brown sugar)
• 50g granulated sugar
• 1 medium egg
• 2 tblsp milk
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 150g plain flour
• 0.5 tsp baking soda
• 0.25 tsp fine salt
• 30g dark or milk chocolate (either use chocolate chips or a piece of chocolate bar, finely chopped)
• 50g salted crisps, crushed (with some extra for sprinkling, if desired)

You’ll also need:

• One or more large baking trays (mine was around 30cm x 40cm).

The Steps:

• Preheat your oven to 180C and grease your baking tray or line with parchment paper.
• In a large bowl, cream together the butter, peanut butter, brown sugar and white sugar. Add the egg, milk and vanilla extract and beat well.
• Whisk together the flour, baking soda and salt, then fold the flour gently into the butter and sugar mixture and stir in the chocolate pieces and crushed crisps.
• Scoop tablespoons of the mixture onto your baking tray, leaving 4-5cm between scoops, as they will spread. Dot with a few additional crushed crisps if you like (or not, if you prefer to keep it stealthy). This amount is enough for at least 2 large trays-worth.
• Bake for around 5 minutes – ideally, one tray at a time in the middle of your oven – then turn the tray around (and swap shelves if baking 2 trays at the same time) and bake for another 3-5 minutes or until the cookies are starting to brown at the edges.
• Allow the cookies to cool for a couple of minutes, then remove to a wire rack to finish cooling. I’m guessing that you’ll know what to do with them after that.

The Variations:

• Of course you can make these bigger or smaller according to your taste and, by all means, leave out the crisps if it’s not your thing, or add more chocolate, if that’s how you roll.

R☆5☆1

Aloo Gobi à la Madhur Jaffrey

Last week, you see, I was all about the heady heights of the Ballymaloe Lit Fest.

There was me and there was Madhur Jaffrey and the world was a-glow with possibilities. First stop, aloo gobi, next stop, who knows where.

This week, there is cheese and onion chocolate. A place to which I didn’t particularly want to go.

Cheese and onion chocolate. Did it have to happen?

Yet here it is (or, at least, there it was in my local Centra), the union, in a single wrapper, of Tayto cheese & onion crisps and milk chocolate.

Now, the first thing to know is that, in Ireland, the combination of crisps and chocolate is, to use that most nondescript of descriptions, a thing. I have – and I know I am not alone in this – enjoyed meals of Tayto cheese & onion and Cadbury’s dairy milk, usually in that order and most memorably when my Da would bring both items home as a treat. Perhaps a chocolate bar with embedded Tayto was an inevitability but – guess what? – that sweet chocolatey ooze in your gob smacks mostly of onion and, with that, all desire to let it linger disappears.

Afterward, it tastes like you’ve downed a bag of Tayto, which seems unfair, given that you haven’t had the pleasure. The fundamental problem, I think, is that the crisp-chocolate balance is all wrong (well that, and the fact that the chocolate isn’t great to begin with). The real joy of crisps and chocolate is that you get to have the satisfying savoury crunch of the crisp followed by some silky chocolate sweetness. This bar manages, sadly, to rob you of both.

The obligatory spud shot:
potatoes getting their grow on under glass this weekend at the Ballymaloe Cookery School

The Ballymaloe Literary Festival of Food and Wine should come with a health warning: attending this event may leave you lost for words. This turns out to be a somewhat debilitating state of affairs when faced with the prospect of scraping together a few Spud Sunday syllables, which come to you here in a delayed Monday form (for which delay said LitFest can also be blamed). It is also testament to the world class calibre of this weekend’s line up which – with a Madhur Jaffrey here, a Jancis Robinson there and a Claudia Roden seemingly everywhere – gathered together the great and the good of food and wine writing and served a beguiling pick and mix of demos, tastings, walks and talks in the beautiful surroundings of Ballymaloe. With topics ranging from foraging to fermentation to food writing itself, there was no shortage of stimulation for both creative and digestive juices, and I expect I’ll be digesting what I’ve seen and heard for quite some time to come.

Darina Allen watches as Madhur Jaffrey seasons potatoes
for Aloo Gobi

And of course (before you ask) there were spuds. Whether it was learning from Madhur Jaffrey the secrets of Aloo Gobi (which she described as a most beloved North Indian dish) or applauding Matthew Fort as he decried the use of humble to describe what is, after all, the most noble of vegetables, there were spud references aplenty. For those, it seems, I am never at a loss.

There I go, week in, week out, presenting the potato as a force for good when, all the while, there is a dark side to consider. And no, I’m not talking about blighted blackstuff or the evils of french fried excess. No, though I do so grudgingly, I feel I must, in the grand historical scheme of things, include Spud the Usurper in the catalog of culinary villains.

They might look innocent enough, but don’t be fooled…

It was last weekend’s Slow Roots Symposium in Sandbrook House, Co. Carlow, that put my potato-pushing into perspective, specifically the presentation by culinary arts students from the Cork Institute of Technology of a paper entitled: A Study of Irish Food Culture before the Arrival of the Potato.

The title alone was (and is) provocative. It asserts (1) that we have (or had, at any rate) an Irish food culture that was something more, and something other, than mere potatoes (there are those – including some who might be expected to know better – who would dismiss that notion as fanciful) (2) there was life in Ireland before potatoes (I don’t doubt but that there are those who think that fanciful too). It is a matter of record that the potato arrived here less than 450 years ago, so we clearly must have had something to eat before then, it’s just that most of us pay scant attention to what that might have been.

the effects of the potato’s arrival in Ireland and its impact on the national diet are being felt to this day, when it is viewed around the world as pretty much the ‘be-all and end-all’ of any national Irish cuisine

from ‘A Study of Irish Food Culture before the Arrival of the Potato’

The point made by the presenters – including the doughty Swash Buachaill himself, Joe McNamee – was that not only did we have a long tradition of eating a variety of foods – among them milk and butter, hazelnuts and honey, oats, barley, wild berries, salted meats and seaweeds – but that the adoption of the potato lead to a demise in dietary diversity and the loss of know-how associated with older food ways. The country, in large part, became monospudmatic, and it is easy to see why: the potato formed the basis of a cheap and nutritious diet which was easy to prepare and required relatively little land on which to feed a family (a fact that is worthwhile remembering today). They likened the potato, in its effect, to a modern-day convenience food, supplanting previously traditional options, with, in the potato’s case, some disastrous historical consequences.

Moreover, the authors speculate that, had it not been for the dominant presence of the potato, our previously varied diet might, in time, have formed the basis of that which seems otherwise to elude us, a national cuisine. They suggest further that we might do well, as some already do, to revisit traditional foods and skills in attempting to shape a modern food culture that is both identifiably Irish and not potato-lead. “It leads to some potentially very exciting possibilities for the future of Irish food,” they say, but we must “put the potato back in its proper place.” Ouch.

In truth, though, the potato’s proper place in Irish cuisine is still on the plate and not off it. That does not mean that we cannot make room for other native foods – of course we should – nor yet that the potato should always appear in strictly traditional garb (the potato is nothing if not versatile). No, the potato is not the problem – there are new usurpers in town. You only have to look at what a typical visitor to Ireland is served to see that it is the proliferation of far less than Irish foods that needs to move over. Build a robust, inventive cuisine around our native bounty – spuds ‘n’ all – and perhaps they will.

Winter Buttermilk

The thing about winter buttermilk is that it is not, in fact, buttermilk at all.

What’s more is that, despite what its name might lead you to believe, winter buttermilk has a dairy content of precisely zero, containing neither butter nor milk nor moo nor cow, but flour and water and – perhaps somewhat inevitably, given my well-documented obsession – spuds. It also (and this is the important thing) makes for a damn fine loaf of soda bread.

I first heard mention of it in an RTE radio documentary on Maura Laverty, the Irish cookery writer, novelist and broadcaster, whose classic book Full & Plenty, published in 1960, graced many’s an Irish kitchen, including my mother’s and now mine. In the documentary, Darina Allen recalls the triumphant descriptions of soda bread – that elemental Irish union of flour, buttermilk and bread soda – from an earlier 1940′s volume, Maura Laverty’s Cookery Book:

…we have given a four-leaved shamrock to the world. One leaf is W. B. Yeats, another is boiled potatoes in their jackets, another Barry Fitzgerald. The fourth is soda bread. And the greatest of these is soda bread. Spongy white soda bread with a floury, brown crossed crust…

Maura Laverty goes on to describe a myriad variations on the soda bread theme, and how people would have made do when buttermilk was not easy to come by, as would have been the case in winter, when cows were not milking. Some people, she said, used the water in which potatoes had been boiled to make their soda bread, but far better was the so-called winter buttermilk which they used in Cork and Meath. Why this may have been peculiar to Cork and Meath is not explained, but what is described is the method of its making and the lovely light loaf that resulted. Having followed Mrs. Laverty’s instructions, and not for the first time, I cannot help but agree.

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White Soda Bread

This is the classic white soda bread recipe that Maura Laverty included in Maura Laverty’s Cookery Book and can be made with whatever kind of buttermilk you have. In truth, I had forgotten the loveliness of it, and the making of this loaf was a timely reminder.

With winter buttermilk, you may end up using a slightly larger volume to make this loaf than if you were using regular buttermilk, as the winter buttermilk may contain a certain amount of solid matter. In any case, as with any soda bread, don’t add all of the liquid at once and judge for yourself whether the mixture is too dry and needs a little more added.

The Summary:

• Makes 1 loaf & takes approx. 10 min to prep + 35 min to bake

You’ll need:

• 450g plain flour
• 1 tsp bread soda
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp sugar
• approx. 300-400ml buttermilk or winter buttermilk

You’ll also need:

• A baking tray to accommodate the loaf

The Steps:

• Preheat your oven to 220C.
• In a large bowl, sift together the flour, bread soda, salt and sugar.
• If using winter buttermilk, pour off the required amount of liquid from your jug. Make a well in the centre of the flour and add most of the liquid.
• Use one hand to mix the flour and buttermilk until it comes together as a soft dough. If it seems very dry, add more buttermilk.
• Turn out onto a floured surface, shape the dough into a round about 2-3 cm high and place onto a floured baking tray. Cut a deep cross into the dough, from right to left and top to bottom and bake for about 35 to 45 minutes, until risen and well browned. The base of the loaf should have a hollow sound when tapped.
• Allow to cool on a wire tray. If you don’t want a very hard crust, wrap the soda bread in a tea towel while it is cooling. This is best eaten fresh with some good Irish butter, plain and simple and very good.

The Variations:

• You can easily make individual scones by cutting the dough into around 8 even-sized pieces, and baking instead for about 15-20 minutes, until browned and risen.

R☆5☆1

It was a bit more Roald Dahl than Dr. Seuss but, as kids, we were clearly not averse to a spot of kitchen horror and loved having our Da recount the not-so-happily-ever-after yarn of Boney Bart. There were other stories too – usually relayed from Dad’s familiar armchair position and not always involving a bad end and a mincer – and though we eventually swapped fairy tales for something more grown up, we would always return to hear his stories and, in turn, regale him with our own (or at least to the extent, in later years, that his worsening deafness would allow).

Another year, another growing season and the seeds of my prospective new potato crop

It’s a year to the day since he slipped away and, though we still have lots of stories for him, it’s a bit harder for him to hear us now (yes, even harder than when we had to shout at him on the phone). He loved this time of year, with its lengthening days and promise of new growth and, among other stories, would have been pleased to hear that this week saw the planting of my hopeful little crop of potatoes for this year.

And so it is that potatoes go on, and life goes on, and Da’s story is our new favourite tale. Like the story of Boney Bart, it’s one that we will never tire of hearing.