Eunice Power’s Power Lifting
Eunice Power has done it all. And she has done it all brilliantly.
More than two decades ago, we made a little joke about her Superwoman qualities: “Psychologists and general practitioners spend a lot of time telling us that ‘You can’t do it all, you know.’ No one seems to have told Eunice Power.”
We first enjoyed her work when she ran a B&B in her house, Powersfield House, at Ballinamuck, just outside Dungarvan, County Waterford. She served porridge at breakfast, and it was the best porridge we had ever eaten. She made piadina with roasted peppers and Ardsallagh goat’s cheese for dinner and the piadina was stellar, nothing less.
Everything she made seemed to be achieved effortlessly, so it was no surprise to learn that in addition to running the B&B and opening for dinner guests at the weekend, that she was also running cookery classes and a catering company. Eunice could do it all.
Very soon, the success of the catering company would mean that it became Eunice’s focus, as the company grew to be one of the biggest wedding and corporate catering companies on the east coast.
Catering companies don’t make much of a splash in the media, but Eunice turned that on its head in 2018 when she catered for 2243 guests in the 3Arena, the biggest food bash Ireland had ever seen. The headlines were everywhere.
The numbers are impressive, but they pale beside this statistic: the team served those 2243 guests a 3-course meal in just one-and-a-half hours.
If you feel you need to lie down at this point, we understand.
And then, in April 2019, came Andchips…
For some people, life in Ireland can be described as BA – Before Andchips – and AA – After Andchips. Eunice called her Dungarvan chip shop a “gourmet takeaway” which sounds like an oxymoron, except she achieved exactly what she wanted to achieve: fresh fish and chips as fine dining, albeit from a cardboard box. The only parallel is Dingle’s legendary Reel Dingle Fish, another tiny space where freshly caught fish is shown proper respect, and paired with perfect chips.
Andchips won the sort of plaudits most restaurateurs dream of, for the simple reason that it did what it did as well as it could be done. And that is the Eunice Power signature: “The devil’s in the detail” she often says, but we might amend that to fit her work: “God is in the detail.”
In recent years she has become a regular on RTE’s Today Show, and now comes her very first cookery book, My Irish Kitchen Table. You would expect rigour from Eunice, and you get it in the book.
Look at her recipe for Quick Fish Pie where she writes: “I never understood the method where the fish is cooked first in milk, the milk is used to make a sauce and then the fish is added back in. This results in the fish part of the pie requiring a spoon to be consumed and the fish itself rendered unrecogniseable. This quick no-fuss recipe keeps the texture and the integrity of the fish intact.”
Full disclosure: we have always poached the fish in milk first. We will never do so again.
Clarity, intelligence, and precision are her trademarks, and they are all in fifth gear throughout the book. If you cook, it will make you a better cook. If you don’t cook, then there is no better place to start. The baking is expert and comforting – eg when making lemon and blueberry scones, freeze the blueberries first because then they “will stay intact when mixing and burst when baking, giving delicious pockets of blueberry in the scones.”
The savoury dishes all benefit from the experience of a cook who has done it all, so parboil your spuds and crank the oven up to 230c fan for perfect roasties; let your pork meatballs rest because then “the flavour improves immensely”; it’s okay to use dried tarragon in your buttered leek and chicken pie. Joleen Cronin’s photography captures all the energy of Eunice’s food with hungry tactility.
Every recipe has a modestly proposed morsel of advice, experience and wisdom. We all want to sit at Eunice’s Irish kitchen table.
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