2024 may have been a quiet year for commercial activity in the Irish restaurant world but, as these four books, by Niall McKenna, Graham Herterich, Neven Maguire and Jp McMahon prove, it has been a tumultuously busy one for inquisitive philosophical activity and social enquiry about Irish food and eating.
An Irish Food Story: 100 Foods That Made Us by Jp McMahon (Nine Bean Row)
McMahon’s book exemplifies what the four books share: an up-for-it bolshiness that sets the terms of the debate in its own favour. An Irish Food Story: 100 Foods That Made Us has eatin’ and drinkin’ all the way from Angel Delight to Yellowman, but McMahon doesn’t even wait until he gets into his century of foods to set out his stall: “We don’t get to choose our food culture, although we can change it for the better. Our food culture chooses us, and it is constantly changing.”
That sentence would have been unthinkable even twenty years ago, when Ireland still largely resided in the 19th century, and we clung hard to the belief that “Gaelic Ireland was the only Ireland.” McMahon quickly counter-punches that argument back onto itself: “Gaelic Ireland is deeply important, but it is not the only ‘Ireland’ ”.
100 Foods is partly personal, partly philosophical, but mainly it is a free-flowing romp through time and space, with a pan and a pen in its hands. McMahon likes the format of concise essays, both in his writing and in his Galway city restaurant, Aniar, where he serves a multi-course menu of small courses that weaves and bobs and gets up on its soapbox to declaim the tastes and flavours of the foods of the West Coast of Ireland. McMahon has a PhD in drama, and his work, and his cooking, exudes dramatic emphasis and delayed reveal, as if Eugene O’Neill was writing the menu.
Eat Out at Home by Neven Maguire (Gill)
Neven Maguire’s Eat Out At Home is actually his 20th cookbook, a phenomenal milestone when one considers that all during that time he has been running a restaurant – MacNean House, in Blacklion, County Cavan – in addition to maintaining a media profile and business schedule which has made him an Irish mononym: Neven.
Maguire is a popular figure, but he is also an unpredictable one. We can imagine lots of people buying EOAT and then cooking, for the first time, the following: caponata; stuffed conchiglioni; grilled courgettes with chimichurri sauce; char-grilled cabbage with kimchi dressing.
This is not the food of Middle Ireland, surely, that land of Garth Brooks and The 2 Johnnies? Except, of course, that it is the food of Middle Ireland, and Neven well knows that, and knows how to present it in a context where it seems both natural and effortless. Just imagine how many people have learnt to create dish after dish via those twenty books. Neven has cooked for his audience in his restaurant ever since he was – literally – a kid, and he knows what they like. He doesn’t need to upset the apple cart: he just picks the apples out one-by-one and makes you an apple tart.
Cook: Traditional Irish Cooking with Modern Twists by Graham Herterich (Nine Bean Row)
Graham Herterich is another of these quiet subversives, the guys who dress as soberly as David Cronenberg all the better to conceal phantasmagorical imaginations that would scare the divil out of you. Herterich’s first book, Bake, is one of the great Irish food titles. Cook, his second, is every bit its equal, a book that lulls you along and then delivers killer jabs to the consciousness.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s a bowl of coddle or a spice bag,” he writes, “Traditional Irish cooking isn’t defined by what it is but rather by what it does: it nurtures us, it warms us, and it makes us who we are.”
Well, write that above the entrance halls of the airports and ferryports, because that is a radical statement, and one gets the sense that Herterich knows just how radical it is. The personal, he is saying unequivocally, is both the political and the cultural.
The butcher’s son growing up in No. 4 Duke Street, Athy, County Kildare, who would go on to both enter and leave the religious life and then make himself into the pre-eminent baker in the country, has all the experience and intelligence one needs to define the zeitgeist: “In this book, I’m not just writing about Irish cooking; I’m writing about the Irish way of life, the Irish way of coping, the Irish way of being and the Irish way of surviving and the Irish way of protecting those we love with whatever we have available.”
And if what we have available is no more than a bowl of cereal and some hot milk, well, that is exactly what we need.
The recipes here do this time after time: they tell you what to do to make more from less, and to make food that’s good for your soul. Cook also needs to come with a Trigger Warning: some beautiful passages in the book will reduce you to tears.
What’s It All About? by Niall McKenna (Waterman)
It’s not unexpected that Niall McKenna should use a question, rather than a statement, as the title of his debut cookbook. What’s It All About? is just the sort of thought that you would half expect the Belfast restaurateur to ask, both of himself and everyone else.
Fortunately, McKenna answers the question, in bold. What it’s all about is the art of cooking sensational food, and serving it in handsome, welcoming rooms. In this regard, McKennas has no peer: he is the Belfast restaurateur par excellence, cycling through two decades, and five different restaurants, and winding up not just with this book, but with two of the great contemporary dining rooms: Waterman, and James St.
McKenna is a questing, quizzical bloke, and his hunger has served him well. He was cooking great food and running great enterprises two decades ago, but what we have observed in his work over twenty years is the surest, steadiest improvement, step by step. Every five years or so, McKenna steps up a gear: the rooms feel better, the staff are sharper, the cooking is both more personal and more classically confident. On our last visit to Waterman, everything clicked like clockwork, and the impact was operatic, a restaurant operating in that hallowed zone where everyone in the team is giving their best.
What’s It All About? Is the best cookery book ever to come out of Northern Ireland, and it fully exploits McKenna’s gifts as cook, teacher and conceptualist. Drawing on the foods he cooks and the dishes he teaches in the Waterman Cookery School, the book is a tour de force of great food and – you can relax, all you food lovers – it does include the recipe for Chilli Crab Linguini which has been a staple of the menu at James St for fully twelve years.
What’s it all about? asks Niall McKenna. He, and the authors of these four important books, know exactly what it’s all about.