Think Irish Food Is Drab? This Chef Wants to Change That
Smashed Avocado and Knocklara Toasts. Photo: Tara Fisher
What do you think of when you think of Irish cuisine? Bread, butter, beer, beef— brown stuff, right? Irish chef, author, restaurateur, and TV personality Clodagh McKenna’s new cookbook challenges our perceptions of Irish food. Called Clodagh’s Irish Kitchen, it’s packed with fresh oysters, bright salads, fruit tarts, and it’s positively awash with green. According to the Irish Times review, “it looks and feels indelibly Irish.” (According to us, whatever it is looks delicious.) So where’s the disconnect?
“[The Irish] tend to think the grass is greener on the other side,” McKenna said when she stopped by the Yahoo Food offices earlier this week. “We’ve spent so much time searching for and being excited by other cuisines; the minute we got off the island, we were traveling, looking at the Italians and thinking their food was better, looking at the French and thinking their food was better… We thought of other countries as great food countries and not ourselves.”
McKenna said that while Ireland has always been home to great raw ingredients—“that’s never been a doubt”—she explained, “We haven’t been the best country at building a repertoire of recipes. We’ve looked after our island and our seas, but not much time was spent on creating that Irish cuisine and using all the different ingredients in different ways.” To build that food culture, she said, takes decades.
Seaweed and Vegetable Salad. Photo: Tara Fisher
The Irish have also historically exported a lot of their goods. McKenna said that 70 percent of Ireland’s scallops go to Spain. Upon returning to her homeland after living in Italy, she was reminded of “how superior the ingredients are here.”
McKenna, took those ingredients—the beef and lamb, the butter, the seaweeds, the smoked mackerel and salmon, and all the seasonal produce—and married them with old Irish recipes she dug up over the years. “What will surprise people is how many of these recipes are truly Irish and how good they are.”
Irish Lamb Stew. Photo: Tara Fisher
McKenna’s updates to those classic recipes include mixing fresh thyme into soda bread and topping colcannon soup with parsley pesto. She puts pearl barley into her stews and a couple ounces of chocolate in her beef pies. And the majority of the recipes serve a crowd.
“Life in Ireland revolves around the kitchen table,” McKenna said. “There’s always a simmering pot on.” McKenna believes that’s been lost for Irish Americans. “People talk a lot about the food when they visit [Ireland], but they always say, ‘My grandmother used to make an Irish stew,’ or ‘My mother told me she used to have baked apples.’ Very few people say ‘I make these Irish dishes at home.’”
Dillisk Ravioli of Irish Smoked Salmon and Goat Cheese with Watercress Pesto. Photo: Tara Fisher
“There is this question mark over Irish cuisine and I wanted to make sure it was answered,” McKenna said. For that reason, she tested the recipes thoroughly in two of her restaurants, called Clodagh’s Kitchen, over a course of four years, and she eschewed recipes that required serious kitchen equipment. You don’t need an ice cream machine to make her Bailey’s Irish Soda Bread Ice Cream, for example, and the Irish Lamb Stew basically cooks itself, bubbling away on the stove for a few hours.
Speaking of Irish lamb, it will make an appearance on McKenna’s St. Patrick’s Day table this year. “We’ll start with a whiskey cocktail as an aperitif, then have Colcannon soup with fresh parsley, then beautiful spring lamb with fennel and nectarines, and, for dessert, my raspberry and Bailey’s trifle.” The meal’s balance of meat and vegetables and buttery and citrusy flavors matter a great deal to McKenna.
“The French do that incredibly well,” she said. “It’s so important to balance a menu properly.”
What about the Irish?
“The Irish do that incredibly well,” McKenna smiled.
Clodagh McKenna on Killiney Beach in Dublin. Photo: Tara Fisher
Irish food for St. Patrick’s Day:
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