At the Table: Food and Family around the World - Ken Albala (2016)

Ireland

Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

Ireland has transformed in the last 25 years from a relatively monocultural society with heavy emigration to one that is truly multicultural and even experienced waves of immigration particularly during the years of the so-called Celtic Tiger (1992-2007), when the Irish economy was riding the crest of a financial boom. Since 2008 the country has been in recession, with the first green shoots of growth appearing in the economy in 2014. Dining patterns changed during the boom years, with a noticeable rise in dining outside the home and the use of home replacement meals (ready-made meals from supermarkets and takeout meals) for the cash-rich time-poor citizens. Restaurants have managed to survive the recession that followed by reducing their prices and costs, substituting cheaper cuts of meat (pork belly, lamb shanks, brisket), and cooking slowly and creatively. More expensive prime cuts tended to disappear, and to casualize the dining experience, restaurants dispensed with linen tablecloths and other expensive paraphernalia. Patterns subsequently changed also at home during the austerity years, with citizens not forgetting the gastronomic learning of the boom years but choosing to dine on special meal deals from certain supermarkets, particularly on weekends, as a treat rather than dining out in restaurants. There has been a return to home cooking in Ireland since the recession and also a growth in home baking, influenced by cookery shows such as MasterChef Ireland and The Great Irish Bake Off. More time is spent cooking meals on weekends than during the week. Irish people have also reembraced Tupperware and are bringing home-cooked food to work and reheating it in microwaves rather than purchasing lunch. Batch cookery of stews and soups once or twice a week and freezing have become popular.

Albala

An Irish family enjoying a roast chicken dinner with herb stuffing, mashed potatoes, honey roasted vegetables, and peas. (Courtesy of Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire).

Certain foods such as potato, sausages, ham, bacon, roast chicken, and stuffing are still enormously popular despite the rise in ethnic food such as Thai green curry, lasagna, chicken tikka masala, fajitas, rice, and pasta. Annual research on culinary students’ best food memories by the author has shown slight changes in recent years toward ethnic foods, but family meals such as Christmas dinner and Sunday dinners containing roast meat and vegetables are still popular although not as pervasive as in the past. The dinner described in this essay is a roast meat dinner, with members of an extended family unit getting together to catch up on life in early September. The responsibility for cooking the meal is shared between the man and woman of the house. Irish men have become more active in the kitchen in the last two decades. Recent research of 4,300 women aged 25 to 44 found that 25 percent say both partners share the cooking responsibilities, with 8 percent indicating that the male partner was the main chef. As in other countries, there are a number of dietary restrictions among the family dining. Two of the children are dairy and gluten intolerant, one of the visiting cousins is a fussy eater, and one of the adults doesn’t eat red meat, milk, cream, or butter. All of this is negotiated and catered to in as low-key a fashion as possible to avoid drawing attention to any one individual.

The meal contains traditional Irish foods (chicken, potatoes, carrots, turnips, parsnips, honey, strawberries), but these ingredients are cooked drawing influence from some modern techniques and foreign influence. Some items are fully prepared from scratch, whereas some convenience products or preprepared foods are also utilized (cranberry sauce, gluten-free stock cubes, Birdseye frozen peas, dairy-free ice cream, and meringue shells). Some nontraditional vegetables (butternut squash) are also included among the roast vegetable medley. The meal is also accompanied by wine for the adults and water for the children. Wine consumption and connoisseurship has risen dramatically in Ireland in the last three decades. New world wines, particularly from Australia, New Zealand, and Chile, have captured a large market share due to their marketing by variety and clear labeling. Over 9 million cases of wine were sold in Ireland in 2011 (Murphy, 2014, 170). The white wine served at the meal is a Villa Maria sauvignon blanc from the Marlborough region in New Zealand, and the red wine is a rioja from Spain.

Menu

Leek and potato soup

Roast chicken with parsley and thyme stuffing, cranberry sauce, roast gravy, mashed potatoes, roast potatoes, honey-roasted root vegetables, and petit pois peas.

Fresh strawberries and cream with meringues

All the shopping is done in a large Tesco Supermarket, although there has been a dramatic growth in German supermarket chains such as Aldi (which owns Trader Joe’s in the United States) and Lidl in recent years as Irish citizens seek to get better value for their money. The chicken is bought fresh and is a standard three-pound bird that sells at nearly a third of the price of a similar organic free-range bird. The chickens are Irish, although there has been a dramatic growth in the use of cheaper imported chicken breasts from Holland and Thailand particularly in the Irish catering industry, which has resulted in the closure of a number of Irish poultry producers in recent years. Two chickens are bought, as it is a larger gathering than the usual family meal, and any leftovers will form part of another meal.

The house is cleaned and the shopping is done the day before the dinner. The husband does the shopping, while the wife vacuums the house and organizes the material culture for the dinner. Good cutlery and crockery are taken out of storage. The cutlery is an electroplated nickel silver set from Newbridge Cutlery that was a wedding present over a decade ago and is only used for Christmas and special occasions. Some of the crockery serving dishes were also wedding presents and are from Terrence Conran’s Habitat shop, which no longer has a branch in Ireland. There are not enough matching plates, so some larger white plates that were purchased a few years earlier in an Irish department store, Meadows & Byrnes, will be used. The sauce boat was picked up in a bric-a-brac store and sits on a matching plate to catch any drips. The salt and pepper grinders are from Cole and Mason and were purchased at TK Maxx, as was the roasting trays used for the chickens and the vegetables.

The chickens will be rubbed in olive oil, seasoned with salt and pepper, and placed on a roasting tray on a bed of roughly quartered onions, celery stalks, and carrots and some thyme and parsley stalks. The chickens will be laid on their sides and placed in a 350°F oven and will be turned every 20 minutes for an even roasting to produce nice crispy skin and keep the bird moist. The chickens will roast for about 80 minutes and then will be removed and kept warm while the roasting pan is used to make the gravy. Excess fat will be removed from the pan, and the pan will be reheated on the stove and deglazed with some white wine and then some gluten-free stock. The gravy will be thickened with a little diluted corn flour once the flavor is adjusted, thus making the gravy suitable for the celiac guests. For the stuffing, a large onion will be finely diced and sweated off in butter until soft; some finely chopped parsley and thyme will be added along with salt and pepper and then some fresh breadcrumbs purchased in the supermarket. This will be placed in the oven for about 20 minutes to cook out in the covered pot. The stuffing will be served separately for the non-celiac disease diners.

The soup will be prepared early and can be reheated before service. For the soup, we sweat off two finely diced large onions and four celery stalks, finely sliced in a thick-bottomed pan, until soft. We add in three leeks that have been halved, washed, and sliced thinly. To this we add some stock made from gluten-free stock cubes and four large potatoes that have been finely diced. When the potatoes are soft, we take half the mix and blend it with a soup gun (immersion blender) and mix back in the pot to produce a soup that is half smooth and half chunky. It is seasoned with freshly milled black pepper.

The potatoes used are of the rooster variety, which is a very versatile potato developed in Ireland about 30 years ago. Roosters account for about 80 percent of Irish potato consumption today, yet we still enjoy new potato varieties such as queens and pinks during the summer months, which are sold on the roadside by farmers, particularly along the east coast of Ireland. For the mashed potatoes, the potatoes will be peeled and chopped into equal-size pieces, boiled until soft, strained, and allowed to dry out a bit before mashing with some heated milk, butter, and salt and pepper. A few will be taken out for the dairy-free diners before mashing! Some potato chunks will be parboiled and then tossed in a hot pan and roasted in the oven along with some garlic cloves, rosemary, sea salt, and pepper. The root vegetables will be peeled, cut into large chunks, fried in a hot pan, transferred into a large roasting tray, and placed in a hot oven. When they are soft in the middle, they will be tossed in honey and roasted for a final 10 minutes to slightly caramelize. The peas will be cooked straight from the freezer just before service, as they only take 5 minutes to cook.

SERVICE

The table is laid with a nice tablecloth, although for everyday meals the oilcloth that covers the table suffices. There are nice colorful paper napkins on the table that were purchased at IKEA, and a knife, fork, and soup spoon are set out in front of each diner. Separate cutlery will be brought to the table for the dessert course. There is a lit thick candle in the center of the table, a jar of Coleman’s cranberry sauce, and a salt and pepper set. There are wineglasses for the adults and some normal glasses for the children’s water. The soup will be served in soup bowls topped with some finely chopped parsley. The fussy eater will have received a separate Erin Hot Cup oxtail soup discretely as the rest receive the leek and potato soup. As the hostess clears the soup plates and puts them in the dishwasher, the host begins to carve the chicken, which will be served on plates and handed to each guest, ladies first, followed by men and then children and finally the host and hostess. The vegetables, gravy, and stuffing are laid on the table so that the diners can take as much or as little as they wish and according to their dietary restrictions. This creates a bit of interaction as individuals offer to serve each other. Both red and white wines are offered, the white wine chilled and the red wine at room temperature. A jug of water is also placed on the table. The host serves wine to the guests and regularly tops off their glasses.

CONVERSATION

The conversation is mostly lighthearted, centering on the sporting success of the children’s various teams and the success or otherwise of the county teams in the Gaelic Athletic Association, Ireland’s national sporting organization. Recent books read over the holidays and films seen are also discussed, with children discussing the latest celebrity gossip or YouTube sensation. Few Irish dinners manage to escape the two taboo topics of religion and politics, and after some discussion (sometimes heated) over the discovery of mass graves of young children in a former mother and child home run by the religious orders and the fact that none of the bankers or corrupt politicians and developers who were responsible for the financial collapse in Ireland have yet or probably will ever see jail, the mood eases as some funny stories are shared and old yarns retold, to much amusement. The children asked to be excused when the political discussion started, and they are lured back later with the promise of dessert. Some of the younger children are coaxed to play a tune on their violins or to sing a song they learned in school. Two of the eldest children are tasked with preparing the strawberries while the dishes are cleared from the table and loaded into the dishwasher. The leftover elements of the meal are carefully segregated and refrigerated and will be reconstituted for the following day’s dinner. The chicken carcass will be picked clean and placed in a pot with some vegetables to make stock. The bulky dishes and the pots will be stacked neatly and washed by hand by the host after the guests leave as the hostess tidies up the rest of the house.

DESSERT AND COFFEE

The strawberries are washed, quartered, and sprinkled with caster sugar and then served with the prepared meringue nests and a combination of whipped cream or dairy-free ice cream and sometimes both for the children, who want the best of both worlds. There is discussion about the variety of dairy-free ice creams available and also the growing availability of gluten-free breads and cakes.

The hostess offers coffee to the adults from her Nespresso machine, which has pride of place in her kitchen. Some choose espressos, while two choose cappuccinos that are produced using the Nespresso milk-frothing machine. This leads to discussion on which is the diners’ favorite Nespresso capsule and that you can order them cheaper online in bulk. It also starts a discussion on the growing trend for specialty coffees in Dublin, with Colin Harmon’s 3FE café getting special attention, as he changes his beans every few weeks depending on seasonality and only supplies wholesale beans to establishments that have the apparatus to fully enhance the quality of the beans in the finished coffees. Ireland experienced a phenomenal growth in coffee culture during the boom. Sales of gourmet coffee machines for use in the home have increased since the recession, as Irish citizens who have grown accustomed to barista coffee have become home baristas. As Murphy (2014, 171) suggests, the Celtic Tiger cubs could not unlearn the art of the gastronome:

He/she has merely retreated to into the lavish kitchen of their negatively leveraged home. They can be found sitting at their “kitchen island” on a Friday night matching wines from a German discount store to Tesco’s “Dine-in” meal range while verbally admonishing the men and women who killed our Celtic Tiger.

Honey-Roasted Root Vegetables

1 pound of carrots

1 pound of parsnips

1 pound of turnips

1 pound of butternut squash (optional)

Vegetable oil

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

2 tablespoons of honey

1.Peel and roughly chop all vegetables into 1-inch chunks.

2.Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit and insert roasting pan to preheat.

3.Heat a thick-bottomed pan on the stove top until very hot.

4.Add a spoon of oil and then the turnips first and brown well on each side.

5.Add browned turnips to the pan in the oven and repeat the browning process with carrots and then parsnips.

6.Season the pan of browned vegetables well with salt and freshly ground pepper and return to the oven.

7.After 20 minutes, toss the vegetables in the pan and return to the oven.

8.After 35 minutes when vegetables are soft, add honey, toss in the pan, and return to oven for the final 5 minutes of cooking. Serve hot.