Jess Murphy’s book is a wild thing.
Wildly creative. Wildly in love with Galway and the West Coast of Ireland. Wildly imaginative. Wildly individual and idiosyncratic.
It’s one of the great books by a working chef, as precise and special as the books by Denis Cotter or Judy Rodgers, and just as funny as Paul Flynn.
We’d go further. Jess Murphy’s book is a masterwork.
Where Jess Murphy goes further is in her anthropological exploration of the West of Ireland and its artisan tribe of producers. It’s here that the book brings to mind the work of the great excavators of culinary cultures – Claudia Roden; Paula Wolfert; Diana Henry. The book’s subtitle is “A love letter to the West of Ireland” and it is that, and much more.
Her admiration for the folk who rear, breed, grow and catch the foods that have made her reputation is infectious: you feel you know these guys, all of them, with their gnarled hands and mucky fingernails, and you feel that as you know them then you will love them and the way they do their thing, just as Jess does.
If you have eaten in Kai, the restaurant Jess runs with her husband, David, then you will know what to expect of the food: slam dunk delicious, down to the last morsel. The first time we ever wrote about Kai food, back in 2011, we described it as having a “naked earthiness.” Murphy’s cooking is astonishingly vivid and generous: she finds the best, then works out how to make it even better.
The key to understanding Kai – the restaurant, the room, the vibe, the thing that it is – lies in a sentence on page 78, in the Bealtaine section. The recipe for Lobster with Coronation Mayo tells the story of Martin and Pa, two young dudes who used to catch lobsters for Ard Bia when Jess worked there.
We learn of their lives and their wives, their children and how Pa “on occasion drops the odd lobster to our door. Neighborhood is everything in the West.”
Boom! There it is. Jess Murphy moves west to the City of the Tribes, and finds her tribe, because neighborhood is everything. So Kai is a neighborhood restaurant, not a city restaurant, and the food is prepared and collected by the people of the ‘hood, and that’s what makes the West awake.
“It’s people like these – the caretakers of the land – that make Kai special.” Jess writes. She is talking about the team at An Garrai Glas, who grow the carrots which she uses for her carrot cake. Just imagine being that carrot grower and being told that it is you – yes, you – who makes Kai special. My, you would be fit to burst, your pride as high as an elephant’s eye. You and your carrots, King of the West.
That’s what Jess and David do. They make everyone – everyone – feel special and their animist philosophy means that they make us all bit players in the day to day drama that is Kai – the carrot grower, and the Offaly parsnip, the couple on their first date in Kai, and Trish with her iconic strawberries. Neighborhood is everything, and The Kai Cookbook is the book with everything, a book for the ages.
The Kai Cookbook is published by NineBeanRows
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I saw the book in our local independent bookshop today. It looks great 👍