The Image of Irish Baking
The Image of Irish Baking
Photographers see differently.
Where most of us want the big picture – the panorama; the landscape; the vista – photographers seek out the detail, the telling scrap that somehow illuminates the whole.
Andrew Montgomery explains this perfectly in The Irish Bakery. It is the first day of the first photographic shoot for the book he has planned with the food writer and baker, Cherie Denham.
“When I arrived, I had noticed out of the corner of my eye some soda farls wrapped in muslin.” The pair work on a couple of photos and then Montgomery “lifted the farls gingerly from Cherie’s kitchen table to where I was working by the window, the beautiful muslin folds exactly as Cherie had wrapped them without thinking earlier that morning, and took the picture.”
He gets the shot he wants and, through two years work on the book, it remains his favourite image. There it is on page 77 of the book: humble soda farls, snuggled up together in their muslin mantilla.
The baking of the farls and the making of the image are two moments in time, and Montgomery finds as he works on The Irish Bakery that “the concept of time in Ireland has a slightly different meaning… The Irish currency of hospitality is something just baked that morning.”
As the recipes refract time through their journey between the traditional and the contemporary, so the book telescopes time in a powerful way that makes us aware that the job of the miller is just the end action of the process of growing wheat, or the beekeeper’s suit is the vestment that pays homage to the bee’s endless work, or the apple windfall scattered on the ground represents nature’s letting-go and the apple tree’s retraction.
Cherie Denham’s recipes and Kitty Corrigan’s pen portraits of artisans flesh out the book, and The Irish Bakery is a true passion project, splendiferous in every way an object can be splendiferous, whilst also being curiously different. Because photographers see differently.
Sean Monaghan is also a photographer who has published a book, but his style in Great Pizza at Home is brattish and colour-saturated compared to Andrew Montgomery’s “cool, low, crisp light of late winter.”
Monaghan runs Two Hats Pizza with his partner, Em, and specialises in pop-ups and parties, slinging his singular pizzas from a Gozzney Roccbox. Alongside his pizza recipes, he features photographs of Irish cheesemakers taken over the years, including an iconic image of Jeffa Gill, creator of Durrus Farmhouse Cheese.
The book is a treat in every way, a punky, fanzine-style homage to creative Irish artisans and to the various styles of Italian and American pizzas which Monaghan has morphed into his own culinary vernacular.
He knows the rules, and then has fun breaking them: who needs a quatro formaggi when you can have a Two Hats three-cheese? And we can all agree that life is made better with the signature two Hats Pizza, with buffalo mozzarella, n’duja, pepperoni and Ballinrostig Gouda from East Cork.
For the budding pizzaiola, Great Pizza at Home goes beyond deft ideas and sweet images, it’s also a factual look at flour, the science of pizza, tips and tricks and, after reading it, you will be able to make great pizza in your own kitchen with panache.
Great Pizza at Home is a book that reverences the cheesemakers, honey gatherers and foragers of Ireland, and the fact that it is such a personal vision of this corner of the culinary world – there is even a photograph of Sean’s Mum and Dad in their kitchen enjoying Brian’s Pizza, made with slices of cooked potatoes and mozzarella with Brie de Meaux – gives it a true charm.
The Irish Bakery is published by Montgomery Press.
Great Pizza at Home is published by Two Hats Pizza.
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