5 June 2007
How Irish Food Has Changed
Irish food has changed, to an incredible degree, over the last twenty years. This is a topic I’ll be returning to often, because it fascinates me. I was brought up with what seems to have been an unusually large range of food, probably because my mother had a respectable collection of cookery books, and collected more recipes from magazines, calendars, other people’s cookery books, and any other source that came to hand, including taking them down in shorthand from the radio.
Friends who came to visit, though, regarded some of the food with great suspicion. There was one dish, which we called a fish pie, which none of them would eat. It consisted of a white fish - probably cod - along with something smoked, which might might also have been cod, and halved boiled eggs, in a white sauce, with mashed potato on top. In memory, it was superb, and I mocked my friends mercilessly for not daring to eat it.
One of them, though, could be forgiven for his pedestrian food habits. I know eight-year-olds are not much given to variety in food at the best of times, but this family ate bacon, cabbage, and potato (lumpy mashed potato, at that), three hundred and sixty four days a year. On Christmas day, they added turkey, and for the birthdays of any of the children in the house, sausage rolls were available.
I first encountered pasta by that name when I was, I think, eleven, when it was served cold in a salad at a relative’s house. Previous to this, I had had “spaghetti”, which came in a can with a sort of runny tomato sauce. I assumed it had a lot to do with baked beans, which also came in a can with a sort of runny tomato sauce, and only a book on Fish of the World convinced me that sardines were not another variation on the theme.
The change started when I was in secondary school, when I became aware of curry. Curry was something that could be got, on good days, in the village chipper, and also something that my father didn’t like the smell of. I wasn’t a very rebellious teenager, but curry was something I took to, and ate when I could, including getting pre-packed version which could be heated in the newly acquired microwave. I was, I am pretty sure, foul stuff which bore no resemblance to any real curry, but it was both exotic and available.
And then there was a long slide into proper food, so that you can now get squid in provincial towns, and cook them in any of a dozen easily available Oriental and Middle Eastern sauces, or have Polish sausages on German bread, and on and on into a vast variety. I’m charmed and enchanted by the food we have now, but I’ll also be returning, in future articles, to the more prosaic food when I was a child, and to ways of recreating that food with a wider range of ingredients. That fish pie, for instance, would really benefit from the addition of scallops, and I can’t wait to try it.