Larders & Filthy Queens
Orla McAndrew’s Larder is the Tardis of cookery books, and Christina Wade's ale tale is a beery flight.
Small as a tabernacle, Larder opens up to reveal a canyon of culinary ideas, which spill forth from every line of its 65 pages. Orla McAndrew’s book is a prodigious production, and Larder’s ergonomic design, by Jane Matthews, deserves to win every design award going.
But in addition to offering a welter of brilliant ideas, Larder digs deeper, setting the user up for a time-and-motion study which shows that you – the busy parent, the busy homemaker, the busy cook – can actually win the race against time, comfortably, with time to spare. Larder shows how time can be converted into action, and action can be converted into dinner, and it shows how to achieve this, comfortably. It’s a comfort blanket masquerading as a cookery manual.
Two centuries ago the radical activist, agitator and journalist William Cobbett wrote a tract entitled Cottage Economy. Cobbett’s aim was to equip the working household with skills so that they would not have to rely on sub-standard foods and drinks, able instead to make their own. He was particularly vexed that people should be able to bake bread and brew their own beer, mindful that the commercial varieties of both were dreadfully adulterated.
Larder, in its modern way, is an Irish Cottage Economy. Orla McAndrew wants you to be able to manage that most scarce and precious of resources - time - so that you are able to live well, and not be the unhappy person putting processed and over-priced – adulterated – food on the table at dinnertime. From Pesto all the way to Lemon Curd, Larder shows how everyone can be a liberated cook.
Larder, by Orla McAndrew, is published by Blasta Books.
“Beer is a way to view the past through a lens that we can quickly understand” writes Christina Wade and, through the 200-odd pages of Filthy Queens, Dr Wade proves that point with a witty vengeance.
Beer, it quickly becomes apparent, is not just a lens through which we can glimpse Ireland as an evolving society that was frequently in turmoil. Beer is also a barometer, both recording and reflecting social changes and economic changes, riding tides of improvement, and then collapsing into chasms as society ebbs, flows, and falls apart.
It’s a great tale of Irish history which has been too little told, and it is extraordinary that women should be so central to the history of brewing ale through the ages.
The slur that is the title of the book was bestowed by a disgruntled Englishman, Barnabe Rich, who deplored these “filthy and beastly alehousekeepers” who dominated the trade of brewing and selling ale in Dublin.
Rich admitted that the art of brewing “bellonges to good huswifery, that every wise womanne is to undertake,” though this did nothing to assuage his profound dislike and distrust of Dublin alehouses and the ale women whom he characterised as harlots and demons, very much the Andrew Tate of 1610. Funny how some things simply don’t change.
Christina’s book is funny and companionable, and you really should pour a good glass of Brigid’s Ale, made in County Kildare by Judith and Susan Boyle, before sitting down and setting out on this frequently astounding ale-rafted tale.
Filthy Queens by Dr Christina Wade is published by 9 Bean Rows
Thank you both for the kind words. I am mortified but really appreciate hearing such lovely feedback.