It won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has been following Aishling Moore’s career, ever since she broke through into public prominence in 2018, that her debut book, Whole Catch, is a flat-out masterpiece.
What might surprise people, however, is the fact that the book is also a deeply considered thesis on environmentalism and sustainability, and a masterclass in the art of cooking seafood.
There’s eatin’, drinkin’ and thinkin’ in Whole Catch. Typical Aishling.
Aishling Moore’s Cork city restaurant, Goldie, opened late in 2019, when she was 25 years old, pretty precious in years for a head chef and co-owner. She had already fronted the kitchen at Elbow Lane with great distinction, but Goldie severed the link with any type of culinary convention.
Suddenly we were in a piscine world of plaice with chicken butter sauce, and crunchy fish spines, and mussels with creamed watercress. The cooking felt like Moore was making it up on the spot, which is exactly what she was doing. “I literally would not know what fish I’d be working with until the delivery came in. It was a rock ‘n’ roll time,” she writes in Whole Catch.
Actually, it was an edge-of-the-seat time, as Moore and her team, cooking only day-boat fish and working in the tiniest galley of a kitchen, riffed on seafood and its potential. So the hake that arrived at noon might be bathed in buttermilk and then fried, or it might appear as a Mexican-styled sope, with tomatillos and leaves from West Cork, and most likely as both. Never mind rock ‘n’ roll: Moore and her crew were improvising in the moment like the Jazz Messengers at The Village Vanguard.
The Goldie crew made fish head terrines and smoked fish collars, and built up their store of complementary pickles and ferments so they could offer beetroot and apple ketchup and chive oil. They worked hard, though Aishling would break off from the kitchen occasionally, to collect awards for being the best chef and running the best restaurant.
All the while, Moore was fermenting her personal philosophy of sustainable cooking. Consider this answer to the question of how to improve the Irish food culture, part of a Q&A with Image magazine from late 2023:
“One thing that I think would be amazing would be if our communities were smaller… if we were all able to source more food locally to our restaurants, and if we had smaller economies of food producers within that larger economy, that would be amazing. Having multiple local growers of certain ingredients to keep smaller communities more self-sufficient, that would be fantastic. From a restaurant perspective, the closer we get to the food, the better the experience is for the customer. Whether that’s service or the end product in food, and we have such a massive influence over that as chefs.”
That is a radical manifesto, because it sets its face against the relentlessly destructive drive for growth that has so disfigured our cultures over the last 45 years. In particular, it sets its face against the plundering of the marine world which threatens us with so many problems.
Small is beautiful. Less is better. Self-sufficiency is cool. Local is good. The customer wins.
What you have there is basically a Communist Manifesto for Cooking.
Unlike Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, however, the Goldie catechism of food and service is upbeat, soulful, and pure Cork in its search for pleasure. At a recent Friday evening dinner, the floor staff navigated the tiny, crowded room, appearing to have been born spring heeled and just as capable of carrying out their work in a shoebox space as the kitchen team are. Despite the size restrictions, everyone seemed to be having fun and getting a serious kick out of being on Team Goldie.
The cooking never misses a beat, perfectly in step with the seasons, the mood, the weather, the soundtrack, the wine list, and the vibe. Like millions before us, we snacked on the Ballycotton shrimp cocktail potato crisps with Cuinneog ranch dressing, then tore into some shime saba mackerel with dillisk, and the hake tail schnitzel with soy cured egg yolk. Main courses of hake with celeriac and roast butter sauce, and brill with café de Paris butter were flawlessly robust, and a side dish of carrot, parsnip and squash with crispy skins is a marquee production. A spiced Pom’o Port pannacotta with ginger crumble showed the team’s astute control all the way to the finish line.
It’s worth pointing out, however, that not everyone finds the Goldie style to their liking. Diners who expect seafood classics in the classical French mode will likely default to the East Ferry chicken with madeira jus, because the fish cookery is vividly avant garde.
Whole Catch lays out the philosophy and the techniques that drive Aishling Moore’s thinking, and her cooking in Goldie, with humour and wit, and boasts the gorgeous simpatico style we have come to expect from Blasta Books, where each title is composed around the work of the author. Whole Catch is genuinely radical, as radical a book as Goldie is a restaurant.
Whole Catch is Published today, 25th April 2024, by Blasta Books
.
Thank you both so very much 🙏🧡