It isn’t hard to fall in love with modern Irish food. The only trouble is, where do you start? The subject is so huge, with so many diversions and so much deliciousness I might easily get lost. The Irish Cook Book by chef JP McMahon (Phaidon, 2020) makes an essential introduction, and that spans about 10,000 years of history over a whopping 432 pages.
Understandably, McMahon is a great person to ask for a bit of context. Not only is he a Michelin-starred chef but as founder of Food on the Edge, he has done more than most to bring Irish food the global attention it deserves.
Food on the Edge is an annual festival bringing the leading lights of world gastronomy to Galway and most recently Dublin, to discuss and debate the future of food. When I first attended in 2019, it gave me the fast-track I needed. Among much else, I learnt that Irish food culture is integrated, honest, and politically engaged, but it’s also forward-looking, inventive, and almost incredibly modest.
McMahon says a tendency to downplay the quality of Irish food has been and is still, to a degree, commonplace. 'It’s a complex issue and it is a historical issue,' he says. 'I think it’s a legacy of colonisation and a legacy of the famine where we are not as confident as other cultures who possibly in the 19th Century were building their food cultures from scratch, and unfortunately that wasn’t what happened in Ireland…
'I suppose, we felt that we didn’t have our own food culture. And I think when people came to Ireland they would talk about the hospitality, the landscape, the pubs, but the food was never something they would talk about.'