I grew up around physics. My father was a physics lecturer at the university in Maynooth, and though I took a different path, the language of forces, energy, matter and transformation were always present, floating about my discombobulated life.

Physics attempts to explain the invisible structures governing the visible world. Cooking, in its own way, does something similar. Heat changes protein. Salt draws out moisture and amplifies taste. In lactic fermentation, bacteria transform sugars into lactic acid. Time alters texture and taste. A sauce thickens with butter, bread rises somewhat magically, and a vegetable collapses upon itself and turns into a dish. The kitchen is a practical laboratory of time and temperature, though chefs do not always describe it as such.

My own route into food was never singular, much to my own chagrin. We want our life to go in a striaght line, but life has other intentions.

Alongside cooking, I studied and worked through art history (in UCC), theatre (NUIG) and writing (Irish Times). Art history taught me how to look closer at things. It taught me to consider colour and composition, form and the materiality of things. Theatre taught me that experience is staged through light, sound, timing and atmosphere, and that the relationship between performer and audience is one of constant tension and flux. Writing taught me that the words surrounding an object can alter how we encounter it. Cooking brought all these disciplines together, though I did not realise this as I was passing through them all.

This is where gastrophysics becomes interesting for me and my own projects. In Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating (2017), the Oxford experimental psychologist Charles Spence examines the many “off-the-plate” elements that shape our perception of food. In his book, he talks about the weight of the cutlery, the colour of the plate, the music in the room, the name of the dish and the company in which we eat. Flavour does not exist solely in an ingredient. It is constructed by the brain from taste, smell, sight, sound, touch, expectation and memory. Food is about more than what goes into your mouth.

At Aniar, we do not use the word gastrophysics very often, if ever. Nevertheless, we practise a version of it every night. We do not simply compose dishes. We compose the conditions in which those dishes are tasted. We try and capture the time and place of the west of Ireland that we find ourselves inhabiting. We try and communicate that through our dining room.

2. The Aniar Dining Room

A restaurant is a type of theatre. The comparison is not merely metaphorical. There are many similar elements: a room, an audience, a cast, a quasi-script and a carefully managed duration of a nightly performance. People enter from the street and cross a threshold into a constructed and curated world. For several hours, ordinary time is suspended and you are held captive by us.

Aniar is an intimate restaurant. The proximity of the guests to the kitchen allows them to see and sense the work behind the meal. They witness the concentration, the movement and the rhythm of our service. A restaurant kitchen produces its own unconscious choreography. Plates move forward, dishes are finished, explanations are given and the table is cleared in preparation for the next course and the next wine pairing. The meal has a dramatic structure, even if the diner, or the chef, is not conscious of it.

Light matters. Sound matters. The distance between tables matters. The pace at which a dish arrives matters. A beautifully cooked piece of fish can be diminished by a noisy room, a rushed service or an uncomfortable and wobbly chair. Conversely, attention to atmosphere can make the diner more receptive. This is not about deception. It is about recognising that hospitality begins long before food reaches the mouths of our guests.

In theatre, silence is never empty. A pause can create anticipation, unease or reflection. The same is true of a tasting menu. We think about the pauses between courses, the alternation of intensity and restraint, and the point at which a guest needs surprise or familiarity. A meal without variation becomes monotonous, just as a play performed at one emotional pitch becomes exhausting.

The west of Ireland is also present in the room, though we do not attempt to reproduce the landscape literally. Aniar does not need artificial birdsong or recordings of Atlantic waves. The sea is already there in the seaweed, shellfish and salt. The bog, field and hedgerow enter through herbs, flowers, berries, smoke and preserved ingredients. The landscape is translated rather than replicated.

The design by Aidan Conway of MarMar Architects acts as an immersive counterpart to the rhythms of the food. From our earliest conversations, the central idea was that the food should remain the focus of the room. The restaurant is therefore held in low light, while careful illumination concentrates attention on the table and its contents, almost as if each table were a small stage. Dark-green stained oak is cut with curving openings that reveal fragments of Aniar’s world: the Twelve Bens, Inis Mor, shells, my copy of The Irish Cookbook (2020), seaweed and a piece of Connemara bog oak. The walls become a kind of cabinet of curiosities rather than a neutral backdrop. The cast-concrete tables build by Paddy O’Malley contain impressions and fragments of oyster shells and periwinkles, while soft Irish linen hangs overhead. MarMar did not simply decorate the restaurant. They helped us turn the physical space into part of the meal, allowing the guest to inhabit the same landscape that the food attempts to express.

In building Aniar 2.0, we wanted to bring the outside in.

3. The Object in the Hand

Before food is tasted, it is touched. The hand encounters the weight of a spoon, the roughness of a ceramic plate, the delicacy of a glass, the cool surface of metal, or the dried seaweed handle of a spoon. These sensations appear incidental, but they contribute to our judgement of what follows. These moments build upon each other in the mind of the guest.

At Aniar, the objects surrounding the food are not neutral containers. Handmade ceramics from Fermoyle pottery and elsewhere establish a connection between the hand of the maker and the hand of the cook. Our cast-iron cutlery has a particular weight and material presence. It asks the diner to notice the act of holding. It asks them to notice the act of cutting and eating, of placing the metal in their mouths. These objects slow down perception and draw the guest towards the actual objects that we use to consume food.

Spence’s work demonstrates that the weight, colour and form of tableware can influence how people assess a dish. He describes how heavier cutlery may make food appear more substantial, while the colour of a plate can alter the perceived sweetness of what is served on it. These findings might initially sound like tricks, but chefs and artists have always understood that framing changes perception. A painting looks different according to where it is hung and what type of frame is used to bracket it off from the rest of the wall. An actor appears different under changing lights. Dim lights force us to strain our perception, to concentrate it on a specific object, such as the actor’s face. Food changes when placed on different surfaces: wood, ceramic, tile or Sarah's willow baskets.

Temperature is equally important. A warm bowl prepares the hand for warmth before the soup or broth enters the mouth. A chilled stone or ceramic can extend the coolness of a dish of shellfish and nettles. The contrast between the crisp exterior and soft centre of a savoury macaron is partly heard and partly felt. The sound of crunching helps the brain judge freshness and crispness, contributing to the pleasure of eating. Texture is not secondary to flavour. It is one of the principal ways in which flavour becomes legible.

We therefore choose a vessel not simply because it looks attractive but because it participates in the role of the dish and how it will make sense to the guest. The object and the food should appear to belong to the same world.

4. Telling the Story

Writing has taught me that naming is never innocent. Words create expectations. If we describe something as smoked, wild, fermented, coastal or bitter, the diner begins tasting it before it has reached their mouth.

Words create anticipation.

At Aniar, we explain the principal ingredients and, where relevant to the guest, their origins or the processes through which they have passed. A short explanation can locate a dish in season and place. Seaweed gathered in Galway is not merely a source of salinity. A wild herb is not simply a green garnish, as some chefs might think. Fermentation is not only a technique for generating acidity or umami, or a way to preserve the season’s flavours. Each ingredient and technique carries a history of landscape, labour and preservation that is embedded in the west of Ireland.

However, there is a balance to be struck. Too much explanation can close down a dish. It tells the diner what must be experienced, leaving no room for personal memory or interpretation. Too little information, however, can strip an ingredient of its cultural and ecological context. The story should open a door rather than dictate what lies behind it. As my own daughter reminds me, sometimes people don’t want the story. They just want to eat.

We need to respect that.

Heston Blumenthal understood the relationship between expectation, environment and flavour earlier than most contemporary chefs. His work at The Fat Duck explored not only culinary transformation but memory, nostalgia, sound and theatrical presentation. This has influenced us in many ways. One of his best-known dishes, Sound of the Sea, presents seafood as a miniature shoreline while the diner listens to waves and seabirds. The sound does not merely accompany the course. It changes the psychological context in which the seafood is eaten. This contributed to the creation of our own oyster ice cream, a dish that plays upon the habits and memories of diners.

Blumenthal’s collaborations with Spence investigated how environmental sounds can affect the perception of food. Their experiments helped demonstrate that what we hear can influence what we believe we taste. Major food companies understand this and use it to great effect in how the “crunch” of something, such as fried chicken, contributes to our evaluation of it. The Fat Duck continues to describe the senses as fundamental to its cooking because they can intensify flavour while awakening emotion, memory and association.

At Aniar, our storytelling is generally quieter. Rather than transporting the guest to an imagined seashore, we try to reveal something about the shore that is already around us. We do, however, ask guests about their memories of Irish food when they book, and we often make specific dishes for a single guest based on those memories. These are usually simple things: a piece of shortbread, smoked mackerel, a chowder or a shepherd’s pie.

5. The Rhythm of a Meal

A tasting menu is not simply a collection of individually successful dishes. It is a temporal form that represents both the restaurant and its philosophy. Each course, whether edible or not, changes the diner’s understanding of the courses that came before it and establishes expectations for what might follow. It is an experience of food that brings the guest on a journey.

This is where my background in theatre and writing becomes particularly useful. A menu needs structure. It needs an opening that draws the guest into its world, a development of themes, moments of contrast and a sense of conclusion. An ingredient may appear early in a fresh state and return later fermented, dried, smoked or sweetened. Repetition creates recognition, but transformation prevents it from becoming predictable. This is something some chefs fail to understand.

To repeat an ingredient is not a failure. It is an acknowledgement of its importance in the music of the menu.

Intensity also needs to be controlled. Salt, fat, acidity, sweetness and bitterness cannot continue rising indefinitely. Some dishes need to speak loudly, while others should almost disappear. A small tomato broth or clear acidic flavour can act like a pause or a sharp note in music. It cleanses the palate, but it also resets attention. Pickled ramsons (wild garlic capers) act this way for me.

Anticipation is one of the strongest forces in dining. The arrival of an unfamiliar object, the scent released when a vessel is opened or the sound of something crisp being broken creates an expectation that becomes part of the flavour. Surprise is effective when it deepens the meaning of an ingredient.

Used without purpose, it becomes a gimmick.

The menu at Aniar gradually builds a picture of the west of Ireland. No single plate is expected to carry the entire story of our food. The understanding accumulates through everything, from seaweed, shellfish, dairy, grains, wild plants, preserved fruits, smoke and fermentation. Like a piece of theatre or a sequence of poems (we serve poems with some courses), the whole should communicate something that no isolated part could express alone.

6. Beyond the Laboratory

Gastrophysics gives us a useful language for thinking about how taste is constructed. It helps explain why the same wine tastes different in a vineyard, an airport or at home. It helps us understand why a crisp appears fresher when its crunch is louder, why the weight of a spoon matters, and why a story changes the way we receive a dish when it is presented to us.

Yet there are limits to what can be measured.

A laboratory can test whether one colour makes a dessert seem sweeter than another. It cannot fully explain why a particular berry reminds someone of childhood, why the smell of smoke evokes a real or imaginary Irish family hearth or why a piece of bread carries the memory of hospitality or home.

Culture enters the mouth alongside flavour, and it cannot simply be tested in a laboratory.

We are not rats.

This is particularly important when cooking from a specific place. The west of Ireland is not a sensory effect that can be assembled from the correct combination of salt, sound and colour. It is a lived landscape, shaped by weather, agriculture, language, migration, scarcity, history and the memory of those that have lived here. Ingredients carry those histories, whether the diner recognises them or not.

Gastrophysics can occasionally appear to position the guest as someone whose senses are to be manipulated. I prefer to think of the guest as a collaborator, as an immersive participant in the theatre of the restaurant. We establish certain conditions, but we cannot control the final experience. Every diner brings a different archive of tastes, prejudices, memories and desires. The same dish can produce pleasure in one person, indifference in another and an unexpected memory in someone else.

This is the difficulty in trying to curate a food menu and tell the story of one's food.

Perhaps this is where physics, cooking and art meet. Physics searches for forces that exist whether or not we can see them. Art gives shape to forces that cannot easily be measured. Cooking moves between both worlds. It relies on the precise transformation of matter, but it becomes meaningful only through time and perception.

At Aniar, flavour is never contained entirely within the food. It arises somewhere between the ingredient and the landscape, the plate and the hand, the cook, the waiter and the guest, the present moment, the music, and everything the diner remembers. That space between things is difficult to quantify.

It is also where the experience of a restaurant truly begins.

As the Gloaming play out over our small speakers, we serve, attempting, each night, to capture the essence of what food in the west of Ireland means, to us, and to you.

Yours in Irish food.

Jp.

24th August, 2026.

Bibliography

Blumenthal, Heston. The Big Fat Duck Cookbook (London: Bloomsbury, 2008).

Spence, Charles. Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating (London: Viking, 2017).

Spence, Charles, and Betina Piqueras-Fiszman. The Perfect Meal: The Multisensory Science of Food and Dining (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014).

Spence, Charles, Maya U. Shankar, and Heston Blumenthal. ‘Sound Bites’: Auditory Contributions to the Perception and Consumption of Food and Drink. In Art and the Senses, edited by Francesca Bacci and David Melcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011): 207-238.

Spence, Charles, and Maya U. Shankar. The Influence of Auditory Cues on the Perception of, and Responses to, Food and Drink. Journal of Sensory Studies 25, no. 3 (2010): 406-430.

McMahon, Jp. An Alphabet of Aniar: Notes for a New Irish Cuisine (Godot Press, 2023).

Zampini, Massimiliano, and Charles Spence. The Role of Auditory Cues in Modulating the Perceived Crispness and Staleness of Potato Chips. Journal of Sensory Studies 19, no. 5 (2004): 347-363.

This Is Galway. Aniar Restaurant in Galway Unveils Aniar 2.0. (18th April 2024).

We tend to think of rowan as a fruit of autumn, popping in from late August onwards, as tradition and the botanical books tell us, but the tree seems determined to contradict the calendar. They now appear in early July due to the changing weather circumstances of our world. In an era of climate disturbance, an early berry is not simply a curiosity. It is a small piece of evidence.

The rowan, Sorbus aucuparia (caorthann in Irish) is a member of the rose family. Its fruits are technically small pomes, relatives of the apple, although “rowanberry” better captures how we encounter them: vivid clusters of red fruit hanging over rocky ground, riverbanks and upland country as summer leans towards autumn.

In Kevin Danaher’s The Year in Ireland (1972) the year is a negotiation between work, weather, and belief. Rowan does not belong neatly to one date. Its flowers arrive around Bealtaine, which opened the summer half of the old Irish year. Its fruit ripens from Lúnasa towards Michaelmas and Samhain. The tree resides in both halves of the traditional calendar, first as protection, then as food.

May was an anxious time for food in old Ireland. New milk and butter could be threatened not only by poor grazing or animal illness, but by witchcraft or the interference of the fairies. Such beliefs appear picturesque only when detached from their material setting. Butter was nourishment, hospitality and money. To lose the “profit” of the milk was to lose part of the household’s future. The Dúchas Schools’ Collection (1937-39) brings that world close. A record from Derryham, County Cavan, states that:

A ring of rowan berries were tied on Churndash afraid the butter would be taken off the milk. People arose early on May morning to get water out of the well first because witches would come and take the good water. (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0981, Page 043).

Churndash is the collector’s rendering of churn-dash, which was the long wooden staff or plunger moved up and down inside a traditional upright butter churn. It usually had a cross-shaped or perforated wooden disc at its lower end, which agitated the cream until the butter separated (Nic Philibín, 2021: 51). The job of the rowan tree was to protect the vulnerable transformation of milk into butter. A Co. Donegal account makes the connection even more direct:

A staff of rowan (caorthann) is thought to be very lucky as a churn-staff (lanaidh)” (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 1075, Page 135).

The tree stood inside the technology of food production. It was not merely a symbol placed near the dairy. It became part of the instrument by which cream was transformed into butter. The practical and supernatural were churned together, the magic of the transformed butter a demonstration of a world unseen by the naked eye.

The folklorist A. T. Lucas complicates the description of rowan as an ancient “sacred tree”. It rarely appears among Ireland’s great named sacred trees or beside holy wells. Its importance lay instead in popular magic. Rowan was hung in houses, kept in byres and placed around churns as the “sovereign protector” of dairy produce. Lucas wondered whether this role had a material origin, from the use of rowan bark as winter cattle fodder in Scandinavia, linking the tree with the survival of cattle and the return of milk, and thus, butter. He also considered the theory that the bark of the tree may have been eaten and the possibility that “the ancient Irish used some part of the tree instead of rennet to curdle milk” (Lucas, 1963: 44-46.)

The early Irish legal evidence is firmer. Fergus Kelly shows that caerthann belonged to the aithig fedo, the “commoners of the wood,” in the eighth-century Bretha Comaithchesa. The category was economic. In the scheme of trees, rowan ranked below oak, hazel and apple, but damaging another person’s rowan tree still required compensation. Its wood made roasting spits, while its berries, as we know, possessed some minor value as food, when cooked with crab apples. Rowanberries were eaten in the past in Ireland, but they were not a major staple. The tree’s imaginative importance was greater than its documented economic value. (Kelly, 1999).

That imaginative importance is already visible in the early Irish tale Táin Bó Fraích. Ailill sends the warrior Fraích swimming across a dark river to retrieve a branch of rowan. Findabair watches him return, his pale body emerging from the water with “the branch with the red berries between his throat and his fair face.” (Byrne, 1937: 7). The rowan is not simply magical here. Its intense colour heightens the warrior’s beauty and helps produce the desire of Findabair for both the berries and Fraích. It becomes part of one of the most visual food images in early Irish literature: red fruit, white skin and black water.

Its mythological berries are sweeter than its real ones. In the story The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne, a magical rowan grows in the Wood of Dubhros, guarded by the giant Searbhán. Its fruit tastes of honey and offers the satisfaction of wine and old mead. It also restores youth and protects against illness. Gráinne’s hunger for it forces Diarmuid to confront the guardian. (Ní Shéaghdha, 1967). In another mythological text Buile Suibhne, the exiled Suibhne praises the “little berried” quicken tree among the foods and shelters of the wood. These texts tell us less about the ordinary diet of the Irish and more about the supposed magical meaning of the berry which could carry beauty, danger, desire and transformation within its skin (O’Keeffe, 1913). The mythology survived in altered form within oral tradition over the years. One Dúchas account reads:

A long time ago it was said there was a well in Ossory shaded by a rowan tree. When the berries became ripe they would drop into the waters and be eaten by salmon that lived in the well. Red spots would then appear on the fish and then they received the name of "Salmon of knowledge". It was not easy to catch this salmon at the sign of danger he would retreat into the cavern from which the waters flowed that supplied the well. Sometimes however a salmon was caught. Then the fisherman as soon as he had eaten it found himself gifted with the knowledge of all things even as Fionn, son of Cumhall, was gifted when he had tasted of it the boiled Salmon of the Boyne (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0206, Page 059).

The berry passes into the fish. The fish passes its knowledge into the mouth of the eater. It is a perfect food myth because wisdom is not learned but consumed though wild food connected to the land.

Rowan entered the learned traditions of the middle ages surrounding ogham and nature poetry. Later medieval glossators associated the letter luis with rowan and called it lí súla, meaning the “delight” or “lustre” of the eye” perhaps recalling the brilliance of its red berries (Calder, 1917). It still feels like that nowadays as I look around Galway at all the red berries blooming. We should, however, be cautious about describing ogham simply as a mystical tree alphabet. Ogham was originally a writing system, and only some of its letter names were certainly names of trees (McManus, 1988). The complete arboreal scheme was developed by medieval scholars, while its interpretation as an ancient tree calendar or divinatory system is largely modern. The later association between luis and rowan is therefore part of a genuine medieval learned tradition, but it may not reflect the letter’s original meaning (Stifter, 2022). Lionel Joseph and Brian Drayton show that medieval poets drew upon classifications inherited from law. Their trees belonged to a learned taxonomy as well as to the observed landscape. Rowan was simultaneously a real tree, a legal category and a poetic image (Joseph and Drayton, 2021: 54–73).

The actual fruit offers no sweetness to anyone. Raw rowanberries are bitter, sour and astringent. They contain pectin, tannins, organic acids and vitamin C. But they also contain parasorbic acid, which can irritate the stomach. Cooking makes them suitable for preserves. Freezing softens their harshness. Rowanberries become jelly, often with apple, butthey can also be sued to make syrup, wine or liqueur. The resulting jelly is not really a breakfast thing. Rather, it belongs with game, lamb or mutton, where its bitterness cuts through the fat and richness of the meat.

At Aniar, I am not only interested in using old ingredients merely to prove that they are Irish and part of some tradition. The more important task is to understand its older use and give it contemporary form to understand it anew. With rowan, that logic is bitterness, preservation and the approach of the darker days of later autumn. The berries are great to add to vinegar or fermented to make a dressing with the resulting liquid. They somehow encapsulate the approaching austerity of autumn: less is more.

Rowanberries are important autumn food for blackbirds and thrushes, which disperse the seed in return. Foraging carries an obligation of responsibly. It cannot mean simply stripping every brilliant cluster from a tree.

It is always important to gather lightly, taking only what one needs and leaving at least two thirds of the crop to the creatures for whom the rowan is not folklore, symbol or garnish, but just food.

The rowan tree and its stands at the meeting point of the new Irish food calendar: Danaher’s ritual year, the lived testimony preserved by Dúchas, the agricultural and liturgical movement from Bealtaine through harvest towards Samhain, and the contemporary kitchen of Aniar.

It protects butter in May and accompanies meat in autumn. It produces desire in one story and knowledge in another. Its real berries are bitter but its mythical berries taste of honey and wine. Between the two lies the work of the contemporary cook: gathering, preserving and paying attention to the world around us.

Enjoy it.

Yours in Irish food,

Jp.

Bibliography

Byrne, Mary E., and Myles Dillon. “Táin Bó Fraích”, Études Celtiques 2, no. 3 (1937): 1–27.)

Kelly, Fergus. “Trees in Early Ireland”, Irish Forestry 56, no. 1 (1999): 39–57.

Joseph, Lionel S., and Brian Drayton. “Trees and Tradition in Early Ireland”, Studia Celtica Fennica 17 (2021): 54–73.

Lucas, A. T. “The Sacred Trees of Ireland”, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society 68 (1963): 16–54.

McManus, Damian. “Irish Letter-Names and Their Kennings”, Ériu 39 (1988): 127–168.

Nic Philibín, Caoimhe. Exploring Food Traditions within the Four Quarter Days of the Irish Calendar (MA Thesis: TU Dublin, 2021).

Ní Shéaghdha, Nessa, ed. & trans. Tóruigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne: The Pursuit of Diarmaid and Gráinne (Dublin: Irish Texts Society, 1967).

Stifter, David. Ogham: Language, Writing, Epigraphy (Zaragoza: Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 2022.)

“Here is my choice of countries included in ths book: Syria, the Lebanon, Eqypt, Turkey, Greece, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the Yemen, the Sudan, Algeria, Tunsia, Morocco and Israel” (Claudia Roden, A Book of Middle Eastern Food, 1968).

Claudia Roden’s A Book of Middle Eastern Food remains one of the foundational works of modern food writing. First published in 1968 (reprinted in 2018), it introduced generations of English-speaking around the world readers to dishes, ingredients and culinary traditions that had previously been reduced in Britain and Ireland to the language of the exotic and what my Nana simply called “foreign”.

Roden was one of the first food writers to treat Middle Eastern food seriously. Recipes were not isolated instructions but fragments of social history, shaped by religion, migration, family and place. The book helped establish the idea that a cuisine could be approached as an archive, as a personal histrory, as a social document to tell the story of a people and their place.

Its emotional authority came from exile.

Roden began collecting recipes after the Suez Crisis of 1956, when Egypt’s Jewish population was subjected to expulsion, sequestration and political pressure. Her parents arrived in London as refugees, while relatives and friends passed through the family home exchanging recipes for foods they feared they might never eat again. Roden later recalled that these recipes were gathered with a kind of desperation: the community might never see Egypt, or one another, again. In her book, she writes eloqurently of how food became a means of recovering Cairo, a lost home reconstructed through taste.1

Exile on the tongue.

This history gives Roden’s work its poignancy, a “deep understanding of food”, a vision of food as memory, history and cultural exchange (16).

It also produces one of its most troubling contradictions.

Although Roden’s book recognises Israel and Israeli food, Palestine is not granted the same recognition. It is not simply that the book lacks a separate chapter devoted to Palestinian cuisine (the book is not arranged in this matter). It is that the word Palestine itself is absent from its culinary geography. Palestinian foods and traditions are instead dispersed among broader classifications: Arab, Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian, Jewish, or most bizarely, Israeli.

This is not to say the word “Palestinian” is absent from her book. For example, in her description of the dish “Makloub”, she writes of its “Palestinian flavours” (422). However, these mentions are few and merely accentuate the absence of a particular people of the region and the ongoing conglict that mirrored her books publication and subsequent reprints.2

A people whose displacement had occurred only twenty years before the publication of Roden’s book are present through their food but absent under their own name.

That absence matters because Roden understood better than most writers that exile transforms a recipe. A dish carried away from Cairo is not merely a combination of ingredients. It contains the memory of a house, a street, a language, a market and a community, the “glories and warmth” (13).

It acquires a kind of anachronic historical weight because the world from which it came has been lost or made inaccessible: “we were homesick” (13).

Yet this insight is not extended equally to Palestinians, whether in the original edition or the reprint in 1985.

Following the Nakba of 1948, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians lived in exile or as refugees, preserving memories of towns, villages, orchards and fields through domestic food. Recipes carried the names and textures of places to which their cooks could no longer return. Palestinian food was performing precisely the memorial function that Roden identifies so powerfully in Egyptian Jewish food in her 1968 introduction.

Nevertheless, one exile becomes visible in Roden’s book while the other is obscured.

The issue is not that Roden wrote from her own experience. Every important work begins from a particular position, and her attention to Egyptian Jewish displacement recovered a history that might otherwise have been neglected. The problem arises when that personal history becomes the moral centre of a book claiming to represent the food of an entire region, while the simultaneous and politically connected displacement of another people remains unnamed.

This creates an asymmetry of recognition between countries and peoples which are named in the book.

Egyptian Jewish exile is individualised, narrated and mourned. It is represented through named families, remembered meals and the intimate ache of losing Cairo. Palestinian exile, by contrast, is dissolved into regional categories. Its foods may be acknowledged, but they are detached from the political and historical circumstances that made them foods of exile.

The result might be described as an unconscious colonial bias.

This does not necessarily mean that Roden consciously intended to deny Palestinian identity. There appears to be no public statement in which she explains a deliberate decision to exclude the word Palestine. Nor should an interpretive criticism be transformed into an unsupported claim about personal motive.

That is not my point and this is not a personal criticsim of Roden as a writer. I love her writings on Spain and elsewhere and I value her contibution to expanding the supposed limits of food writing.

However, this does not discount the ways in which the naming of Israel and its food traditions obfuscates Palestinian food culture and its historical erasure.

Colonial bias often operates without any declared intention. It merely presents things as factual and avoids problematic conditions that might shoscase its own bias. Roden writes somewhat passively of “a cuisine shaped by a tumultous history” all the while ignoring the recent events that had occured in Palestine/Israel (30).

Colonial bias appears in systems of naming, classification and recognition.

One territory is treated as politically real (Israel), while another becomes merely cultural or geographical: a people without a land that can only be found in “flavours”. One population possesses a cuisine. Another supplies dishes to a region. One history is given narrative depth; another survives anonymously in the recipe.

Roden’s categories reproduce that imbalance.

Israel is legible as a modern nation capable of having a national food culture. Palestine is not. Palestinian cooking consequently appears as part of a generalised Arab or Levantine inheritance, while foods drawn from the same land can enter the more politically definite category of Israeli cuisine.3

Shared culinary traditions are, of course, real.

The food of the Middle East cannot be contained tidily within modern borders, as Roden well knows and acknowledges many times in her book.

Ottoman rule, trade, pilgrimage, migration, religion and intermarriage produced dishes that belong to several communities at once. Hummus, stuffed vegetables, flatbreads, grain dishes and grilled meats cannot always be assigned a single national origin.

From Greece to Sudan, food travels unconcerned with its own identity. It is people who lay claim to food, not the other way around.

But the language of shared food can conceal unequal relations.

To say that a dish belongs to everyone in a region may sound generous, yet it becomes politically fraught when one community possesses the institutional power to publish, market and nationalise that dish while another community is denied recognition.

Culinary fluidity should not require historical amnesia.

This is where Roden’s humanism reaches its limit. Her work often emphasises the ability of food to cross borders and connect communities. That generosity is one of its great strengths and has contibuted to the ways in which I think about Irish and British food.

But her universalism can become a means of avoiding difference when it does not acknowledge the unequal conditions under which different communities encounter one another.

The category of “Middle Eastern food” does not float above history. It is shaped by states, borders, expulsions and struggles over who may name a place and claim its traditions. Indeed, the name "Middle East" comes from a British Empire and 19th-century European viewpoint that divided the Orient into three zones: the Near East, the Middle East, and the Far East.

Even the title of the book positions itself firmly in a western mindset that acknowledges the statehood of Israel.4

The omission is especially striking because A Book of Middle Eastern Food appeared in 1968, shortly after the June 1967 war and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. Roden completed the manuscript around the time of that war. The political existence of Palestinians was not a remote or ancient question. Palestinian dispossession formed part of the immediate historical landscape in which the book was written.

Roden’s later work complicates the criticism. She has subsequently recognised Palestinian cuisine explicitly. In her endorsement of Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt’s The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey (2013), she describes its recipes as “distinctively Palestinian,” with some uniquely characteristic of Gaza. She praises the book for offering insight into the intimate lives of its cooks:

"These recipes are distinctively Palestinian and many also uniquely of Gaza—with more pronounced flavors, more herby, spicy, peppery, lemony, than those of their regional neighbours. We also get from this very special book a rare insight into the intimate everyday lives of engaging people.

This is important.

It demonstrates that Roden does not deny the existence or distinctiveness of Palestinian food. It also prevents the critique from hardening into a caricature of her as simply hostile to Palestinians.

Yet later recognition is not the same as confronting the original silence.

Roden does not appear to have publicly explained why Palestine was absent from her foundational book, why Israel was named while Palestine was not, or how that distinction shaped Western readers’ understanding and prejudice of the region. Her endorsement of The Gaza Kitchen (which has run to three editions, the lastest being an expanded one in 2021) acknowledges Palestinian cuisine without examining the structure that previously rendered it invisible.

This leaves the contradiction unresolved.

The purpose of identifying that contradiction should not be to remove Roden from the history of food writing. As I said, this is not my intention. Her contribution is too substantial for that, and the form of culinary history she helped create has allowed many later writers, including recent Palestinian writers, to present food as memory, identity and testimony.

The better response is to read her work critically. It is to recognise both what it preserved and what it failed to see.

Its beauty and its blindspots.

Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), published a decade after Roden’s book, provides a useful framework for understanding this contradiction. Said argued that the “Orient” was not simply discovered and described by Western writers. It was produced through systems of representation that classified, simplified and rendered the East intelligible to Western readers. Roden’s work is markedly different from the imperial scholars and travel writers Said criticised.

She writes from within the region, from exile, and with affection for the people whose food she records.

Yet her book still enters a British publishing culture in which the Middle East is mapped and explained for a Western audience.5

Its authority therefore depends partly on the power to name: to decide which communities constitute nations, which remain regions, and which disappear into general categories such as “Arab” or “Middle Eastern”.

The naming of Israel alongside the absence of Palestine reveals what Said might call the “political character of representation”. Palestine is not explicitly attacked. It is simply made unavailable as a category of knowledge.

And knowledge, as we know, is power: power to represent, power to silence.

Palestinian food can be described, consumed and admired, while Palestinian historical identity remains outside the book’s map.

Roden complicates Orientalism because she is herself an exiled Middle Easterner rather than a detached European observer, but this does not place her beyond its structures. It shows instead that colonial systems of classification can be inherited and reproduced in a culture (such as 1960s Britain) even by writers whose work seeks sympathetically to recover cultures threatened by displacement.

Canonical books are not weakened by being examined in this way and neither are their authors cancelled.

They are weakened when admiration prevents examination.

Roden’s importance makes the omissions more, rather than less, worthy of attention because influential books do not merely record culinary geography. They help produce it. They determine which peoples are encountered as historical subjects and which remain sources of ingredients, recipes and local colour.

The deepest irony of A Book of Middle Eastern Food is therefore that a work created to resist the erasures of exile contains an erasure of its own.

Roden understood that displaced Egyptian Jews carried a lost world through their food. She did not grant the same narrative space to Palestinians carrying keys, memories and recipes from their own lost homes.

Her work teaches us that food can preserve what political history attempts to destroy. Its silence regarding Palestine demonstrates the reverse, that is, food writing can also preserve the dishes while obscuring the people who made them.

To acknowledge this is not to reject Claudia Roden, or her writings. It is important to stress this again. This is not a personal criticism of her or her writings. It is rather to read her with the seriousness that her work deserves and rethink its positons and build upon it to produce a more equitable food story for the 21st century.

Her book remains essential, for me and others, but it is not the complete story.

Their absences and omissions belong to their legacy as surely as their achievements do. The task now is not to discard the archive she created but to reopen it, to restore the names, places and histories that its original map left blank.

The omission therefore participates, whether consciously or not, in a broader historical process by which Palestinian culinary presence is retained while Palestinian national authorship is removed.

This is precisely why a newer generation of Palestinian chefs and food writers insists upon naming not only dishes, but also the towns, families, farmers and agricultural landscapes from which they emerge. Sami Tamimi has spoken openly of his frustration at seeing dishes such as maqluba and mujadara presented as part of a new Israeli cuisine while their histories, rituals and Palestinian contexts are stripped away, erased.

His books Falastin: A Cookbook (2020) [written with Tara Wigley] and Boustany: A Celebration of Vegetables from My Palestine (2025) seek to return food to the land, stories and practices that produced it.

Fadi Kattan’s Bethlehem: A Celebration of Palestinian Food (2024) performs a similarly deliberate act of restoration. It moves through the city by way of its cooks, spice merchants, farmers and artisans, because, as Kattan puts it, “we owe this to them”.

Yasmin Khan’s Zaitoun: Recipes and Stories from the Palestinian Kitchen (2018) likewise maps Palestine through Akka, Gaza, Nablus, Jenin, Bethlehem, Nazareth, the Galilee and the Jordan Valley, refusing the placeless and colonial category of “Middle Eastern food”.

One might also place beside them Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt’s The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey (first edition 2013; second edition 2016; third, expanded edition 2021), which records the distinct domestic cuisine of Gaza at a moment when both its people and material culture are threatened with destruction.

These writers do more than claim ownership of recipes.

They restore provenance, plurality and human presence.

Where Roden’s original map allows Palestinian food to survive without Palestine, their work insists that a cuisine cannot be separated from the people who cultivated its land, named its dishes and carried its memories into exile.6

There is no empty land without food.

Just a people who cannot see it.

Yours, Jp.

26th July, 2026.

The disguises, miraculous escapes, threatened executions, hidden identities and last-minute rescues of The Shaughraun (1874) may appear to belong to a theatrical world far removed from the bare road of Waiting for Godot (1953/55). Boucicault fills the stage with every conceivable incident. Beckett seems to remove incidents altogether. One playwright creates a world of sensation and resolution in the turning arch of 19^th century theatre, while the other leaves two men beside a tree, waiting for something that never happens.

Beckett grew up in a Dublin theatrical culture in which Boucicault’s Irish melodramas, particularly The Shaughraun, The Colleen Bawn (1860) and Arrah-na-Pogue (1864), remained familiar popular works. They had been repeatedly revived in Dublin around the turn of the century and formed part of the theatrical inheritance against which the Abbey and the Literary Revival defined themselves, as Christoper Murray observes in his essay “Echoes down the Corridor: The Abbey Theatre, 1904-2004” (2007).

While we do not know if Beckett actually witnessed a Boucicault production in the Abbey, we know he knew and admired Yeats’s painting In Memory of Boucicault and Bianconi (1937), which depicts a travelling theatrical company apparently performing a scene from Boucicault’s The Shaughraun. In his book Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts (Cambridge University Press, 2018) Conor Carville notes that this was the painting that initially prompted Beckett to connect Yeats with Watteau. Though this does not prove that Beckett had carefully studied Boucicault’s complete dramatic works, it does show that Boucicault and The Shaughraun belonged to the theatrical and visual vocabulary Beckett understood in terms of his own developing aesthetic.

Beckett certainly knew who Boucicault was and understood the theatrical world represented by his Irish melodramas at home and abroad. However, a sustained or consciously acknowledged Boucicault influence on Beckett has never been firmly documented, despite papers, books and PhD’s tracing their trajectory for Ireland’s theatrical history.1

A more interesting argument may be less that Beckett imitated or was influenced by Boucicault than that he emptied out the machinery of melodrama for this postwar purpose. Boucicault’s plays give us threatened bodies and miraculous escapes, villains and revelations, disguises and last-minute rescues. Beckett’s plays retain the waiting, the delayed entrances, the silly repeated routines, the physical jeopardy and the expectation of rescue. But he removes the rescue. In that sense, Waiting for Godot could be read as an Irish melodrama after the plot, spectacle and providential conclusion have disappeared. The duality of the comic Irish double act appears for both, but in very different ways. Beckett infects Boucicault so that we can no longer see his melodrama as some quaint Victorian form.

Vivian Mercier’s account of The Irish Comic Tradition (1962) provides another way of understanding the continuity between the two playwrights, both backwards and forwards. Mercier argues that Irish comedy is marked not simply by verbal wit or genial humour, but by fantasy, grotesquerie, the macabre and an unusual intimacy between laughter and death. Comedy does not necessarily overcome suffering.

It inhabits it and often makes it bearable.

Bodies are beaten, starved, dismembered, resurrected or made ridiculous, while language continues to turn catastrophe into performance. Beckett, whom Mercier knew, regarded him as an inheritor of this older Gaelic tradition, radicalises rather than abandons its comic logic. His famous description of Waiting for Godot as a play in which “nothing happens, twice” identifies repetition itself as a source of comedy, but the repetition is inseparable from exhaustion, hunger and the anticipation of death (Mercier, 1977).

Boucicault and Beckett therefore occupy different regions of the same Irish comic imagination. In Boucicault, the threatened body escapes and the apparent corpse rises. In Beckett, the body fails repeatedly but is denied even the completion of death. The man falls, gets up, complains and begins the routine again.

Druid’s productions of the two plays reveal this complicated relationship. Garry Hynes’s 2016 production of Waiting for Godot featured Aaron Monaghan as Estragon, Marty Rea as Vladimir and Rory Nolan as Pozzo. Ten years later, the same actors return in Druid’s 2026 production of The Shaughraun: Monaghan as Conn, Rea as Robert Ffolliott and Nolan as Corry Kinchela. Francis O’Connor designed both productions, while Nick Winston worked on movement for each. The repetition of actors and creative personnel encourages us to see Boucicault not simply as a Victorian predecessor whom Beckett rendered obsolete, but as part of a continuing Irish performance tradition. We are in the space of afters: Beckett after Boucicault as well as Boucicault after Beckett. Beckett exerts a kind of retroactive influence or anachronic thinking upon Boucicault. Once we have seen Waiting for Godot, certain gestures, doubles and structures in Boucicault become newly visible. In a Borgesian reversal of literary chronology, Beckett appears to create Boucicault as one of his precursors.

The casting choice produces a kind of theatrical memory.

When Monaghan, Rea and Nolan appear in The Shaughraun, the bodies that inhabited Beckett’s landscape are still present beneath Boucicault’s costumes. The audience may remember their proportions, rhythms and relationships: Monaghan’s compact physical comedy, Rea’s height and anxious attentiveness, Nolan’s capacity to fill the stage with dangerous authority. The actors do not play the same characters, but they occupy comparable theatrical functions. Boucicault’s figures begin to look like the ancestors, or perhaps future ghosts of Beckett’s plays. This is not about inheritance. It is about creative invention, an anachronic side step, that shows us that time travels in more than one direction.

Aaron Monaghan’s Conn is the clearest example. Conn is the shaughraun: the wanderer and trickster, poacher and fiddler. He is the unlikely hero who moves between the settled structures of the play. A vagabond, of sorts. He belongs everywhere and nowhere. He possesses no conventional authority, yet he repeatedly controls events through his speech and the physicality of his performance. Seen after Monaghan’s Estragon, Conn appears as another version of the Irish comic survivor in the tradition of Flann O’Brien and many others.

Like Conn, Estragon lives outside settled society. His possessions are uncertain. His body is vulnerable and his immediate concerns are physical. He is all about his boots, his hunger, his sleep, and of course, the beating he received during the night. Like Conn, he survives through comic routines and through his relationship with another man. Both characters possess the intelligence of the melodramatic body. They fall, recover, improvise and turn suffering into performance.

But Conn inhabits a world in which comic ingenuity still works. He can intervene in history. His tricks have consequences. He can rescue Robert, defeat Kinchela, reunite lovers and help restore the community. Estragon retains the gestures of the trickster but has lost the trickster’s power. His routines fill time rather than transform the time around him. He can play at leaving, hanging himself or assuming another identity, but he cannot alter the structure in which he is trapped.

Estragon might therefore be understood as Conn after the possibility of rescue has disappeared. We can imagine Conn leaving the stage and living his life. There is no hope for Beckett’s Estragon. He waits, jokes, but nothing ever happens.

The Feast That Never Comes

The food of Waiting for Godot belongs to the same process of theatrical reduction. Boucicault’s drama moves towards the restoration of household, property, marriage and community. These are the structures within which eating might once again become communal and hopeful for a living Irish community. Beckett removes the household (perhaps it was wiped out in the war) and leaves only portable scraps: a carrot, a turnip, a radish, a piece of chicken and the bones that remain only after another man has eaten.

Estragon’s hunger is immediate and bodily. He does not wait only for Godot. He waits for relief, from his boots and beatings, exhaustion and his appetite that is never fulfilled. Vladimir’s vegetables offer momentary comfort. They never constitute a meal. There is no dinner time in Beckett. They are drawn from his pocket one at a time, as though hospitality itself has contracted into the private distribution of dwindling provisions in a landscape of famine and failure. Even the distinction between carrot and turnip matters because so little else changes. Taste becomes one of the few remaining forms of event in relation to food.

We may laugh, but this is not farce.

It is the failure of a food system unfolding in the play. As Thierry Dubost observes in his recent paper “A Sisyphean Carrot in Waiting for Godot” (2026) presented at the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium:

Estragon wages a losing battle against hunger, an attitude that possibly echoed the suffering of civilians during World War II or that may have resonated with the famines that had plagued Beckett’s native country in the nineteenth century (3).

Pozzo’s meal makes the social structure of food more explicit. Lucky carries the basket, Pozzo eats the chicken, and Estragon asks for the discarded bones. The meal is divided into labour, consumption and waste. Each character occupies a different position within that economy. Pozzo’s authority is not abstract: it is visible in his possession of food and in his freedom to eat before hungry spectators. Lucky, who carries the provisions, receives nothing.

Estragon may have only what the master has finished with. His food is a failure of commensality, the social act of eating together.

Read beside The Shaughraun, the scene suggests what Beckett has removed from Irish melodrama. Boucicault’s plots seek to recover the house, the land, the lovers and the rightful social order. The conclusion promises a world in which the community can gather again. Beckett retains hunger but abolishes the feast that would traditionally follow restoration. Godot’s arrival might bring employment, shelter, salvation or simply supper; because he never arrives, these possibilities remain indistinguishable.

The difference between Conn and Estragon can therefore be expressed through food as well as action. Conn belongs to a theatrical world in which survival may lead back into society. Estragon eats because survival is all that remains. He lives in a work of afters and ends. Boucicault’s comic body escapes danger and returns to the community. Beckett’s comic body eats a carrot beside the road and waits for tomorrow.

Boucicault offers threatened abundance restored.

Beckett leaves hunger, leftovers and postponed hospitality.

The connection is not one of direct influence so much as theatrical reduction. Beckett takes the Irish comic wanderer and removes the social world that once made his improvisations effective. Conn has a fiddle and a dog, and a community capable of recognising his achievement. Estragon has Vladimir, a boot, and a carrot. Conn’s mobility allows him to cross boundaries and become the hero. Estragon’s movement always returns him to the same place, where he remains the same, which is, in effect, nothing.

Marty Rea’s passage from Vladimir to Robert Ffolliott offers a second correspondence in our invetigation. Robert is the displaced innocent at the centre of Boucicault’s plot. Falsely accused and transported, he is separated from his home, his sister and the woman he loves. Much of The Shaughraun is organised around his absence, his anticipated return, recapture and his eventual restoration. He is a man for whom others wait.

He is a Godot of sorts.

Yet Robert must also wait. He must wait for vindication, reunion and the recovery of his place in the world. Though his suffering remains attached to a coherent narrative. There may have been an injustice, but the wrong can be corrected. Justice in Boucicault may be prolonged, but it still moves towards revelation. Time moves towards a resolution.

Vladimir also believes that waiting has a purpose. Of the two tramps, he is the one who continues to remember their appointment with Godot. He maintains the story that gives their waiting meaning. Godot knows them. Godot has promised to come. Tomorrow will be different. Vladimir resembles the custodian of a melodramatic plot after the plot has ceased to function. He still believes that there is an absent figure whose arrival will explain their suffering, change their condition, and make sense of their own narrative.

Robert returns.

Godot does not.

Rea’s casting makes this distinction particularly suggestive. In Boucicault, he embodies the absent man whose return brings the narrative towards completion. In Beckett, he embodies the man waiting for an absent figure who never arrives. Robert occupies the place that Godot refuses to occupy. He is the returned exile, the recovered innocent, the living proof that waiting may be rewarded.

But what happens when we see all this backwards?

Will Valdimir be ultimately rewarded in time?

If only he waits long enough?

We return to a space where we need endings.

Beckett after Boucicault after Beckett.

Tragedy as farce becomes comedy.

We all laugh and go home to out happy lives.

Rory Nolan’s movement from Pozzo to Corry Kinchela exposes another continuity. Both characters represent power, possession and theatrical authority. Pozzo arrives leading Lucky by a rope. He controls movement, food, speech and the conditions under which another person may rest or think. His authority is at once brutal and performative. He needs spectators, an audience looking at him. He announces himself, displays his possessions, gives orders and stages Lucky’s dance and speech for Vladimir and Estragon.

Kinchela similarly treats people and land as things that can be possessed, or at least, things that he can possess. His power depends on the manipulation of law, property, information and his brute physical force. He is the villain required by the moral architecture of Boucicault’s play. He is the source of injustice whose exposure permits the restoration of order. If Pozzo appears monstrous, his monstrosity cannot be resolved so easily. He is not exposed and punished. Indeed, when he returns blind in the second act, the relationship between master and servant persists. But can we say that he has been punished?

The world has changed without becoming more just.

Order merely shifts its position.

It does not work its way towards resocliton.

There is no law or justice in Beckett’s world.

Kinchela belongs to a drama that can still isolate evil in an individual. Pozzo belongs to a theatre in which domination has become a structural feature of a world in flux.

Here again, Beckett does not necessarily reject Boucicault’s melodrama.

He removes its mechanism of moral resolution. The villain is no longer defeated because there is no longer a stable community capable of judging him. Pozzo comes and goes. Lucky remains tied to him. Vladimir and Estragon watch, object briefly and then return to waiting.

Druid’s ensemble casting enables these relationships to pass through the actors’ bodies. Monaghan, Rea and Nolan carry one play into the other. The same physical contrasts recur: the smaller comic survivor, the taller figure who attempts to maintain meaning, and the expansive man of power who enters their world. The comparison reminds us that Waiting for Godot is not only a philosophical drama about universal existence. It is also an Irish play containing recognisable residues of popular theatre: the comic pair, the wandering rogue, the landlord or master, the abused servant, the mysterious appointment, the delayed arrival and the repeated promise of deliverance.

The overlap between the two productions extends beyond casting into Druid’s visual language. Francis O’Connor’s design for The Shaughraun reuses the moon created for the company’s 2016 Waiting for Godot.

“It’s Druid’s moon”, O’Connor remarks, a practical consequence of the company’s commitment to reusing scenery, but also a suggestive act of theatrical inheritance. In Godot, the moon rises abruptly over a barren road, marking the arrival of night and the repetition of another unfulfilled day. The Irish Times described it as “smooth and reflective as a marble”, its appearance changing the emotional temperature of the production.

In The Shaughraun, that same moon now hangs above a theatrical world crowded with landscape, action, pursuit and escape. The object carries the memory of Beckett’s emptiness into Boucicault’s abundance. Hynes has said that the production brings “everything theatre has learned since Boucicault back into the room,” and the moon makes that process materially visible.

Boucicault is not reconstructed as though Beckett had never happened but staged through a directorial and design vocabulary shaped by the theatre that followed him. We are looking backwards through time. The same celestial prop looks down on two radically different experiences of theatrical time—one in which night confirms postponement and another in which darkness provides cover for action, deception and eventual rescue.

Beckett’s stage is often described as empty. But perhaps it is better understood as a stage from which an earlier Irish drama has recently departed. The road, the tree and the waiting figures are what remain after the houses, estates, lovers, policemen, villains, dogs and rescue plots have been taken away.

This is what it means to consider Boucicault after Beckett. We do not need to claim that Boucicault anticipated absurdism or that Beckett consciously rewrote The Shaughraun. Rather, Beckett teaches us to notice the anxiety concealed inside melodramatic certainty. Every rescue depends upon a period in which rescue may not happen. Every return contains the possibility that the absent person will remain absent. Every apparent resurrection asks the audience to imagine, however briefly, that the dead may stay dead.

Boucicault uses that anxiety and then releases us from it.

Beckett refuses the release.

In The Shaughraun, absence is temporary. Robert returns from transportation. Conn survives apparent death. Kinchela’s plot is uncovered. Lovers are reunited and the disordered community is repaired. The theatrical machine works with extraordinary efficiency, pulling the characters back from catastrophe before the curtain falls.

In Waiting for Godot, the machine is still running, but the rescue has been removed. Estragon and Vladimir continue to perform the preliminary business of melodrama. They wait for the important arrival. They exchange information, encounter strangers, consider escape and prepare themselves for a change in fortune. A messenger even comes at the end of each act. But he brings only postponement. The message that would once have set the final rescue in motion now announces that the play must begin again.

In Boucicault, someone arrives in time.

In Beckett, someone may arrive tomorrow.

The achievement of Druid’s two productions is to allow both theatrical worlds to inhabit the same performers. Conn stands behind Estragon, as Estragon now stands behind Conn. Robert’s successful return haunts Vladimir’s unsuccessful waiting. Kinchela’s exposure throws Pozzo’s continuing power into sharper relief. Boucicault’s crowded stage and Beckett’s empty one becomes not opposites, but different states of the same theatrical tradition.

After Beckett, The Shaughraun can no longer be dismissed as a naïve melodrama that believes too easily in rescue. Its exuberance becomes poignant because we have seen what remains when rescue is no longer possible.

After Boucicault, Waiting for Godot may appear less like the beginning of an entirely new theatre than the ghost of an older one. Irish melodrama after the hero has failed to arrive, the villain has escaped punishment, and the curtain has forgotten how to fall.

Farce and failure.

And don’t forget the food.

Yours in Irish food,

Jp.

23rd July.

Note

This article is part of a series that tries to highlight food in the other spaces of the arts in Ireland. Bringing food into this space highlights the cultrual role and significance of food in Ireland more than just as a commodity or an object of sustenance and nutrition.

Yet it never feels native in the way that sorrel, nettle, and seaweed do. When placed between wild garlic and meadowsweet it seems as foreign as a fried taco.

It is a spice in Ireland, but it is not an Irish spice. It came from elsewhere, entered our 19th cupboards, settled into the cake tin, and gradually became part of the taste of home through the 20th century. It was domesticed by the many women who baked each day in their tiny cottage kitchens.

The “seed” of the caraway is not really a seed at all. It is rather the dried fruit of the caraway plant. It is small and ridged and looks like cumin’s darker and thinner cousin. Though its flavour is quite different. Caraway screams of exotic islands, of aniseed and orange peel, a bitter pepper dancing upon the tongue. There is something medicinal and old-fashioned about it and perhaps this is why it's flavour has fallen out of fashion.

Caraway belongs to the carrot family, along with fennel, dill, coriander, parsley and cumin. Like many of those plants it carries within it both the possibility of use in the kitchen and as well as a cure. It is aromatic enough to season bread and strong enough to linger on the breath when sucked.

In Ireland, caraway’s most familiar appearance is in seed cake. This is one of the forgotten cakes of the old Irish kitchen, made simply with some caraway seeds folded through a regular cake batter. It is not your great aunts coffee cake. It does not announce itself with cream or icing or even fruit. It is plainer again, made for cups of tea rather than celebration . It belongs to the distant world of visitors on sunday afternoons, of women who baked without making a performance of their baking for the whole street to see.

From the 19th century onwards seed cake travelled through the neighbouring food culture of Britain and finally became one of those adopted things in Ireland that lost its foreignness through every day repetition. This is often how food culture works. Often there is no grand plan. It's often a woman baking in the kitchen that makes the change.

An ingredient arrives to Ireland by trade or empire, class or fashion, medicine or religion. Or just by bloody accident. At first it is exotic and rare. Exclusive, even. Then it becomes widespread and ordinary. Ignored. Finally, for us, it becomes nostalgic. We race back to it, trying to recover a past we were not witness to, in order, if only, to bolster our present precarious identity.

We forget the journey, the thousands of baked loaves and remember only the taste. Caraway is not native in the narrow sense, but many Irish foods are not native in that sense. Tea is not native. Sugar is not native. Cinnamon, pepper, cloves, coffee, oranges, raisins and currants are not native. Yet they have shaped Irish memory. The Irish kitchen has always been more porous than the nationalist imagination allows.

Caraway also belongs to bread. In parts of Europe it is married to rye, cabbage, pork, cheese and even spirits. In Irish and Irish-American baking it sometimes appears in soda bread, though this is not the plain soda bread of coarse wheat flour and buttermilk. It is a richer, more festive loaf, often with raisins or currants, closer to a cake than a bread.

Caraway has a particular affinity with dairy and fermentation: butter, buttermilk, cheese, sour cabbage, cured meat, pickles. Its strong aroma cuts through fat. It brings brightness to the often brown and the sour of Irish food.

Caraway also has another, darker side in Irish life. James Joyce catches it perfectly in “Counterparts” in Dubliners (1914). Farrington, trapped in his dark and muggy office, angry and humiliated, slips out to O’Neill’s pub for a porter. He drinks it quickly and asks for a caraway seed before returning to work. It is a tiny detail, but Joyce’s details are never insignificant.

The seed is not there for flavour. It is there to disguise, to coneal. In those days, Caraway was chewed to mask the smell of alcohol on the breath. Especially for day time drinkers.

In that moment, the spice moves from cake to concealment. It becomes part of the social choreography of drink: the quick glass, the dark snug, the penny on the counter, the breath disguised, the return to labour and the little lie carried back in the mouth of the employee.

That is what makes caraway interesting for us in Ireland. It sits between domestic respectability and public shame. In seed cake it perfumes the parlour. In Dubliners, it covers the evidence of the pub. In one context it is a form of hospitality, in another it is secrecy. It is the taste of tea and the smell of porter hidden from an employer. It is a spice of politeness and evasion.

There is something very Irish in that doubleness. Of course, food and drink in Ireland have often carried moral weight. Bread, butter, tea and cake belong to order. Porter, whiskey and stout belong to sociability, but also to anxiety. They belong to work missed and damaged masculinity.

Joyce understood that Ireland’s food and drink culture was never simply about nourishment. It was about class and control, performance as well paralysis.

Farrington’s caraway seed is almost comic. He thinks he is hiding the drink, but Joyce lets us smell the whole life around it.

It is also tragic.

Joyce returns to seedcake in Ulysses (1922) but there it has moved from concealment into intimacy.

In Molly Bloom’s final monologue, she remembers Howth Head and the moment when she gave Bloom “the bit of seedcake out of my mouth”. It is one of the great erotic food moments in Irish and world literature.

It is cake as courtship and consent, and bodily closeness between lovers. If Farrington’s caraway seed in “Counterparts” is used to hide porter on the breath, Molly’s seedcake does the opposite.

It makes the mouth visible.

It turns flavour into a secret touch.

The same aromatic spice that can disguise shame in Dubliners becomes, in Ulysses, a seed of desire and recollection. There it is a foreign flavour fully absorbed into the private mythology of Dublin life.

The seed itself becomes a kind of witness to the hidden side of Irish life.

Sex, seedcake and alcohol.

In essence, Caraway testifies to the imported nature of taste of much of food in Ireland, to the old folk medicinal uses of spices, to the habits of baking and the small strategies people used to survive work.

It reminds us that Irish food history is not only about great famines and Celtic feasts.

It is also about little moments of modern life.

It is about what was sprinkled into a cake, what was chewed before going back to the mundanity of office work in the early modern period.

At Aniar, we don't treat caraway as nostalgia but as a historical flavour to acknowledge our diverse food past. Toasted, it becomes warmer and nuttier, for use in fennel crackers for cheese. Ground, it becomes more forceful in food and is better paired with stout or whiskey in cakes and sauces for game, such as venison or pigeon.

Caraway is therefore a small spice with a large cultural shadow. It tells us that Irish food is not pure and never was. That is a myth. It is borrowed and traded, adapted. A seed in a cake. A seed after porter. A seed on the breath of a man trying to pass as sober. A foreign flavour made intimate by use in a romantic situation, on top of a hill, looking out over Dublin Bay.

Yours in Irish food,

Jp.

15th July, 2026.

I only met you once.

That is a strange thing to say about grief, or about influence. We imagine that influence comes from intimacy, from long conversations, from shared kitchens, from years of proximity.

Sometimes it does.

But sometimes it comes from a single encounter. The way someone speaks. The way they hold themselves. The way they talk about food not as a career or a product, but as a way of being in the world. The way they posit hospitality as both and a family and an art form.

That is what I remember most about Bertrand Grébaut.

Bertrand died on the 2nd of July 2026, at the age of forty-four. His death was announced this morning (4th July) by his friend and long-time business partner Théophile Pourriat, with whom he built Septime and many other places in Paris. Since that announcement many people have rightly written about the restaurant, the awards, the influence, the way Septime changed the language of contemporary French fine dining. It opened in 2011 in the 11th arrondissement and became one of those rare restaurants that seemed to alter the atmosphere around it, and even those restaurants far away. It was a serious place without being solemn. It was beautiful without being overtly precious about its presentation.

But this is not an obituary.

Others knew Bertrand better than I. Others worked beside him, ate with him, loved him, built with him. This is only a small note from someone who met him once in a farm in Dublin and nevertheless felt the charge of that meeting.

Bertrand spoke at Food on the Edge in 2021. He came to Dublin, to the Airfield Estate in Dundrum, to speak not only about cooking but about a philosophy of food that permeated through his businesses.

Food on the Edge has always been built around that idea: that food is not merely what happens on the plate, but what happens before and after it. From the soil to the sea, from the worker to the guest, from the politics to the art. Bertrand understood all this deeply. His work at Septime, Clamato, Septime La Cave, D’Une Île and Tapisserie was not simply expansion. It was the creation of an ecosystem: restaurant, wine, pastry and people.

What struck me most was his enthusiasm.

It was not a loud enthusiasm. It was not performative. It was not the kind we often mistake for passion in the ego-driven restaurant world, where intensity can become another word for toxicity. Bertrand’s enthusiasm was quieter, smaller and more exact. It came from his attention to details. He had the air of someone who believed food, especially fish and vegetables, could still be renewed everyday, that a restaurant could still be a place of experiment, generosity and collective life.

That matters.

It is why I still go to work every day. Without passion for food, for creativity, for expérimentation, there is nothing.

Restaurants can harden you.

They can make you cynical.

The daily work is repetitive, physical, and often punishing, on friends, on family, on your own broken body.

There are the constant bills. Staff always leaving at crucial times. Reviews distorting your work for clicks.

The industry asks us to become brands when most of us became cooks because we were interested in the opposite: touch, taste, craft, the unrepeatable moment of cooking a courgette.

What Bertrand seemed to offer was a way through that.

It was not escape, but rather a kind of clarity.

At Aniar, we have always tried to cook from where we are. From the Atlantic edge. From Galway.

From seaweed and wild herbs, to preserves and ferments, we have tried to make an Irish restaurant that is not nostalgic about a fake past, but rather alive to the seasons and shellfish that surround it.

Aniar is a restaurant that understands the past as something active, something still fermenting everyday.

Bertrand’s way of thinking helped me affirm that instinct. It gave confidence in times of doubt. He showed me that a restaurant could be contemporary without severing itself from place. It could serve it staff as well as its customers.

It could be informal without losing gravity or depth.

It could be ingredient led without becoming pompous.

It could be intellectual without becoming cold.

At our café and wine bar Tartare (which sadly closed after Covid), there was also a strong influence. The idea that casual food did not have to mean careless food. That wine, bread, vegetables, fish, pickles, ferments, and the everyday gestures of eating could carry as much meaning as a tasting menu. That small plates didn't just mean something trendy but rather a philosophy of eating in our contemporary world. That the democratic restaurant, the informal restaurant, the place open to the all could still have a philosophy of hospitality and happiness.

This, for me, is part of Bertrand’s legacy: he made seriousness feel light, made it smile.

That is not easy.

Anyone can make food heavy and serious. Anyone can attach words like ‘classic’ to a dish to justify what they do. Anyone can turn a restaurant into theatre or self-mythologise about his or her own importance.

It is much harder to create a place where the food feels free, where the room breathes, and where the staff and guests are part of the meaning of the place.

That was the gist of his talk in 2021.

Staff are family.

Le Fooding wrote of him not as a monument but rather as a movement. That feels right to me. A monument is a fixed thing. A movement continues. Rolls on. It enters other kitchens, other restaurants around the world.

It changes the way a chef sees a vegetable, treats a commis, chooses a plate, speaks to a farmer, or opens a bottle of wine without the pedantic manners of a old fashioned sommelier.

It changes the way we imagine what a restaurant can be.

When I think of Bertrand now, I think not only of Septime, but of all the restaurants that came after it, knowingly or unknowingly carrying some part of its spirit.

Restaurants where the table is bare, the wine is alive, the vegetables are not an afterthought, the service is human, the cooking is precise but not imprisoned by tradition.

Restaurants that understand that hospitality is not luxury or for the better off. It is attention to detail.

I only met you once.

It was enough. Enough to feel the warmth of another person’s conviction. Enough to be reminded that food is still worth thinking about. Enough to carry something home to Galway and let it settle into our own kitchens, our own landscape, our own way of cooking.

There is a great sadness inside in losing someone so young, especially someone whose work still felt unfinished.

But all meaningful work is unfinished.

That is what makes it meaningful.

The best restaurants are never complete. They are always evolving.

They continue through the people who visit them.

They continue through the people who stood at the edge of his dining room and thought: Yes, food can be this like too.

Thank you, Bertrand.

For your enthusiasm.

For your freedom.

For your bravery.

For the reminder that a restaurant can be a philosophy made edible.

Yours, Jp.

4th July, 2026

Its Irish name, airgead luachra, is often translated as “silver rush” or “rush silver”, a name that seems to come from the pale underside of the leaf as much as from the way the plant shines above the wet grass.

It flowers from June into September, sending up reddish stems topped with creamy, frothy blossoms. It smells of almond, honey, and hay, as well as medicine and old country cottages.

It is one of those plants that seems to belong half to the field and half to the house.

Its place in the Irish food calendar becomes clearest at the end of July. In the Dúchas Schools’ Collection, one account from Galway records that on “Domhnach a’ Chrom Dubh” (the last Sunday of July) people scattered the white flowers of meadowsweet across the floors of their houses (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0064, Page 014).

This is a beautiful and rare seasonal detail were the plant is not only being eaten.

It is part of the domestic ritual of the year (the same was done with woodruff). It is brought from the meadow into the house and spread underfoot. The white flowers are allowed to scent the room as the years turns toward the first harvest. The last Sunday of July stands close to Lúnasa, the first-fruits festival, and meadowsweet becomes one of the plants that marks this major threshold in the old Irish year. Summer is at its fullest, but the harvest is not yet gathered. In a way, it was the house opening to the fragrance and the flavour of the field.

This scattering of flowers also reminds us that food culture is not only made from what we put in our mouths. It is made from what perfumes a room, sweetens a drink, or cures a pain.

Meadowsweet is an aromatic compound as well as an ingredient. It belongs to the older domestic world of strewing herbs across the cottage floor. These plants sweeten damp houses, mask animal smells, and brought freshness indoors. Before modern disinfectants and air fresheners, houses were scented with herbs and flowers. In this sense, meadowsweet was part of the invisible architecture of the home. It cleaned the air that people had to share with cows and pigs that might wander into the hose at any time.

The Dúchas material also gives meadowsweet a definite place in Irish folk medicine. In Lisdoonan, County Monaghan, it was recorded as “a herb for dropsy and kidney trouble” and “excellent for diarrhoea in children” (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0930, Page 150).

In Pallasgreen, County Limerick, it was said to be good for many maladies. For the young Philip Gleeson writing in 1938:

Meadow-Sweet, which grows in meadows in the month of May is said to be very good for Rheumatism. The plant must be pulled and dried and then let stand for some time in boiling water. When the juice of the plant has got into the water people may drink it and cure their Rheumatism (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0518, Page 191).

These and other accounts demonstrate how the plant lived in ordinary and everyday knowledge. It was not a botanical curiosity, as it is for many of us today, but something known by local healers as well as the community at large. It therefore belonged to the medicine chest of Irish food.

The medicinal reputation of meadowsweet bears a scientific echo. The plant contains salicylate compounds, and in the nineteenth century chemists investigated meadowsweet, then classified under Spiraea. This investigation eventually led toward the creation of common pain killer aspirin. It would be too simple to say that aspirin comes directly from meadowsweet. Plants such as meadowsweet helped shape modern pain relief and anti-inflammatory medicine as we can see in folk literature. This gives the plant a curious double life. It is an old folk remedy, but also part of the story of modern pharmacology.

Its older English name, meadwort or meadsweet, points to one of its other culinary associations. That is, the flavouring of fermented drinks. The modern name “meadowsweet” is sometimes misread as meaning a sweet plant of the meadow, but its older sense is closer to a herb that sweetened or scented the honey based drink mead. This connection places it in a long European tradition of aromatic plants used before hops became dominant in brewing, especially in Ireland. Meadowsweet brings a soft bitter-almond note, a faint wintergreen quality and a honeyed sweetness without being sweet.

Culinarily, meadowsweet is most useful when infused into fat, sugar, salt and alcohol/vinegar. Though too much heat can ruin its gentle perfume, pulling out a harsher medicinal bitterness. When dried, it works beautifully with dairy in Aniar. From custards to ice-cream, meadowsweet is our replacement for vanilla in our all Irish kitchen. It complements gooseberries, as well as brown butter oats. In savoury cooking, it can lift shellfish and white fish such as turbot or cod. Just think of a meadowsweet butter sauce split with chicken fat accompanying a plate of freshly picked and cooked girolles.

For an Irish food calendar, meadowsweet belongs to that moment when summer is full but still fresh to our mouths and minds. The new potatoes are being lifted, strawberries are disappearing from roadside stalls, the elderflower is fading, and the first mushrooms begin to appear after warm rain.

The plant stands at the hinge between bloom and harvest, at the entrance to Lúnasa. It reminds us that seasonality is atmosphere as much as eating. So the next time you find yourself out in a damp field, try and catch the sweet almond scent of these yellow flowers.

They carry the memory of old cures, of bygone cottages, and future culinary endeavours filled with the breath of the Irish meadow.

Yours in Irish Food,

Jp.

1st July, 2026.

At first, you hear the pattern of the piano, Glass’s “music with repetitive structures”. A few notes and a phrase turning over on itself, again and again. It seems simple, almost too simple. Then, slowly, the ear begins to notice change. What you thought was the same begins to reveal itself as many tiny differences. A note changes slightly, or arrives a fraction later than the ear expected. The rhythm thickens or speeds up. A small harmonic shift opens the whole piece outwards to a new sonic world.

The music has not moved very far, only a note or two, but you have moved even more. Glass never use srepetition to say the same thing again. He uses it to teach us how to listen, to learn that similar patterns played repeatedly give meaning to our lives.

In my world, wild food does something similar.

Every year, the same things return. Nettles in spring. Wild garlic in the damp shade of woods in April and May. Elderflower and roses in June. Meadowsweet along ditches and riverbank in July. Sea beet and large oracle dotted along the shore begging to be used. Blackberries popping up to mark the beginning of autumn. Then the sloes, made usable, after the first frost.

On the surface, it is the simple repetition of the natural world. The same plants in the same places. The same old hedgerows. The same well worn paths. The same Galway coastline. But it is never the same year twice.

To forage is to engage with a pattern that began long before you arrived. The plant does not appear because you want it to. It comes when the season and place align. You return to the same patch of ramsons in Barna woods and find them early one year, late the next. Or only yesterday, bleached by the summer sun. You go looking for elderflower and realise the tree facing south has opened, while the shaded one is still tight with buds. Or it has been cut down since you last visited the site and is now no longer. You pick blackberries along the Cappagh road and discover that the fruit is sharper this year, or smaller, or already taken by birds. The battle with the birds is a constant problem!

The melody is familiar, but the performance of picking changes in ways only you can appreciate.

This is where Glass’s music becomes useful. His music is often described as minimalist, but that word can be misleading, just as it is with the work of Samuel Beckett who influenced Glass in the 1960s. It suggests a stripping away, a reduction, a refusal to work with what you have got. Yet when you listen closely, the opposite is true. The apparent simplicity makes abundance possible. The repeated phrase becomes a vessel for difference and thus, difficulty.

The more you hear it, and the more you play it, the more it contains.

The simple it gets.

The more difficult it gets.

The same is true of wild food.

A blackberry is never just a blackberry. It is hunger, or the memory of childhoods. It is stain, ditch and birdsong. It is the old act of slow picking with the hands, eating before the fruit collapses and dissolves to mush. It preserving what cannot last bt itself. It is jam and gin. It is the fruit itself and all the years you have gone out to find it.

In Irish food culture, wild food has always carried this sense of pattern, albeit unconsciously for most of us nowadays The year was once read through what appeared and disappeared in front of our eyes. The first nettles. The first new potatoes. Bilberries on the hills on Garland Sunday. Hazelnuts on the corkscrew hill in the Burren in autumn. Seaweed cut and dried on a Connemara coast. Oysters gathered according to tide and season with my friend John Ward. Food was not simply bought or consumed. It was observed. It had to be waited for. It was understood as part of a rhythm larger than any one household.

It was the daily repeated patterns of a community.

The modern kitchen often wants novelty. New dishes. New ingredients. New techniques. But wild food asks for a different intelligence. It asks us to return. To look again. To pay attention to what we think we already know.

How can I use these sea herbs differently this year?

This is the lesson of repetition.

In a restaurant like Aniar, wild food is not just a garnish or a romantic flourish. It is a way of structuring time and attempting to taste it. The menu becomes seasonal not in the supermarket sense, where seasons are flattened into the global marketing of sameness, but in the older sense: as a record of what is actually happening outside your front door. A dish might begin with ramson seed heads, salted and pickled like Irish capers. Or elderflower preserved in syrup. Or spruce tips. Or sea herbs. Or rose petals. Or meadowsweet. These ingredients are not permanent. Their scarcity is part of their meaning on our menu.

You cannot have them whenever you like and if you don't pick them then there is nowhere to buy them.

This is the frustrating beauty of wild food.

That limitation is important. It gives the ingredient its force. It reminds the chef that the world is not endlessly available. The wild plant arrives, offers itself briefly, and then disappears again for another year. The work of the kitchen is to meet it at the right moment. To preserve some of it, yes, but also to accept that much of its beauty lies in disappearance. And of course, sometimes you miss the moment and you have to wait another year for it to emerge.

Glass’s music often feels like this: a pattern unfolding in time, altered by duration, made meaningful by the space of our attention. The phrase repeats itself under my fingers, but each return is changed by what came before.

You search within the familiar for what has shifted and learn to find difference in repetition.

Wild food teaches us the same patience. You learn by going back. You learn the road where the alexanders come up in North County Dublin, the canal wall where pennywort that no one ever wants grows, the shoreline where only arrowgrass appears, the tree that elder tree that flowers before the others. You learn that abundance is never general. It is specific.

There is something deeply Irish in that. Not in the narrow nationalist sense, but in the way Irish food has always been shaped by close observation of weather and land. Most of our food culture over the centuries was not built on spectacle. Rather it was founded upon repetition, such as soda bread baked every second day, or salting fish in the Aran islands to preserve it for the winter. The same acts repeated across generations, capturing space and time in their tiny acts. But inside those acts live small variations, old local knowledge, family recipes, memory and improvisation.

A dish made once is an event. A dish made every day becomes a silent ritual embedded in time. A wild. plant picked once is an ingredient. A wild plant returned to over the years becomes part of how you understand space, time and history. It loads itself into your identity, your very being.

This is why wild food matters now. Not because it is fashionable (though that is changing after Covid). Or not because it looks good on a plate. It matters because it reconnects cooking to attention and mindfulness. It slows you down. It asks you to notice the weather, the shore, and all the different bits of a field. It restores a sense of pattern to a food culture increasingly dominated by convenience and speed

For Glass, repetition changes the way in which we listen and perceive:

What you hear depends on how you focus your ear. We're not talking about inventing a new language, but rather inventing new perceptions of existing languages.

You do not simply hear the pattern of his music. The pattern of his music changes how you hear it. Similarly, wild food changes how you see the world. Once you begin to notice it, the landscape is never empty again. It is never just something out there. You are in it. The ditch becomes a larder. The shore becomes your garden. The woods become your way of understanding the calendar. June is not just June, but elderflower and wild roses. August is not just August, but bilberries, meadowsweet, chanterelles, and the first blackberries.

It begins quietly.

Shoots, then leaves, then greens, then flowers, then fruit, then nuts, then roots.

We preserve to placate our hunger. Each year you repeats the form, but the notes change. The rain changes them. The heat changes them. There are griefs, or new memories to the same places that you always go.

Perhaps this is why I feel Glass’s music and wild food can feel meditative without being passive or pedantic. They ask for a quiet discipline. They ask you to stay with something longer than your general habit will allow.

A repeated musical phrase.

A plant returning each spring.

A flavour you thought you understood.

The point is not to escape repetition, but to enter it more deeply and find the difference within.

This is what I hear when I play (or try to play) the piano Philip Glass. It is a belief that if we attend closely enough to a pattern, it will open itself to us, unconditionally. I think wild food asks for the same devotion. It asks us to repeat the walk, repeat the picking, repeat the preserving, repeat the dish, and, hopefully, each time we will understand it differently and learn something new.

The world is not short of novelty. Wild food is one way back to a slow kind of attention. The music of Philip Glass gives us another. Both remind us that repetition is not the enemy of creativity. It may be where creativity begins. The phrase returns. The season returns. We return.

And if we listen properly, nothing is ever quite the same.

It is different.

Yours in Irish food,

Jp.

24th June, 2026.

Go mbeirimid beo ar an am seo arís” (That we may be alive at this time again).

There are few foods in Ireland as humble as the new potato, and yet few arrive with such quiet ceremony. They don’t arrive not a feast day or government proclamation, but with the first real turn of summer: late May if the year is kind, but by June and July the taste is there to be savoured. The skin is loose and thin, and it comes away under your thumb, something that fascinated me as a child. The potato itself is small, waxy, almost sweet, and needs very little from the cook: water, salt, and good butter.

To eat them is to taste the beginning of the Irish summer.

In the old agricultural year, the potato was not merely a vegetable but a measure of time, and hence, survival. In the Dúchas Schools’ Collection, the work of potato growing is described in intimate detail: the cutting of seed potatoes, the care taken that each piece had an “eye”, the opening and closing of drills, the use of farmyard manure, the later moulding of the young plants.

On 3^rd March, Margaret Timlin from Class V in Gort, Castlebar (Co. Mayo) wrote:

The farmers plough the land with an iron plough. Sometimes wooden ploughs are used but the iron ones are the best. The wooden ploughs are easy to break. While the farmers are ploughing the women split the potatoes. They get a sharp knife and cut each potato into a few slits; they watch to see that there is a little white bud called an eye in each slit and if not they leave them there for the pigs.

When the land is ready the farmer brings the slits to the field and gets his bag fills it and goes along the ridges and leaves each slit in little holes with a spade. He puts three or sometimes four slits in each line. He leaves each line about a foot apart. Then he goes along and covers each slit with clay. He leaves it there until the stalks appear. Then he soils them and spreads manure. When the stalks get stronger he moulds them and in a few weeks after he sprays them

(The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0094, Page 144).

This account is deeply practical, rather than romantic and serves as a reminder to us before the potato became nostalgic to our generation who rarely encounter a potato field. The potato was hard work and in it contained knowledge both of the year and past generations.

In his The Year in Ireland (1972), Kevin Danaher places Irish food customs within the broader rhythm of the year, between feast days, harvest, and fairs. The new potato belongs to this rhythm. It is not quite harvest in the full Lúnasa sense, as we shall see, but it is a first reward, a sign that the hungry gap of has been crossed. Before the maincrop, before the storing potatoes of autumn and winter, this is this first taste that the earth gives back (Mahon, 1991: 135). Early planting in February or March produced a May harvest, while planting in April was for a June or July harvest.

The varieties carry their own memories.

Home Guard, one of the classic first earlies, has that wartime name and early promise. British Queen, flourier and deeply loved in Ireland, has long been associated with summer eating, their thin skins splitting open under butter and salt. Orla and Colleen are more recent Irish varieties, clean, reliable, suited to the modern grower, such as Beechlawn farm in Ballinasloe, Co. Galwya.

Queens remain, for many, the taste of July in Ireland.

Charlotte, though not Irish in origin, has become familiar on Irish tables: waxy, elegant, good warm with butter or cold in a salad. This is the variety we often serve in June in Aniar, cooking them submerged in butter until the break open.

Each variety has its own texture, but the idea is the same. It is the potato before it has hardened in storage, before it has become food of the winter.

For many of us of a certain generation, new potatoes also belong to the green and verdant roadside, to a world before motorways. They sit in my memory beside summer strawberries: punnets and paper bags, hand-painted signs and a white trestle table, the smell of warm tarmac under the summer sun. From Wexford to Galway, in pockets all over the country, the road itself became, and still is in some cases, a little seasonal market. You knew summer had arrived when strawberries and new potatoes appeared together on the side of the road.

Memory and desire mixes together as the young lady passed you both bags.

One stained the fingers red while the other often left clay under the nails.

Both were temporary and both had to be eaten quickly.

New potatoes gave substance to domesticity, the promise of real dinner of ritual. Boiled in their skins, rolled in a little butter (or Flora in my grandma’s house), they needed no culinary ambition, or forsake the best. They were best eaten with steam rising from the bowl.

They paired beautifully with tinned mackerel, with roast lamb or ham on a Sunday, with chopped scallions straight from the garden scattered through the butter, or cold at teatime with a boiled egg and some salad cream. Growing up in the early 1980s, they were the perfect expression of Irish summer. They were our food culture before we even had words to define it as such.

The new potato is not the great tragic potato of Irish history, that is the lumper potato, though its shadow is always present.

It is a lighter thing.

The new potato resides before storage and scarcity, before the memory of the famine darkens our vision of what the potato means to Irish food. The new potato reminds us that Irish food culture is not only about famine, loss and hunger.

It is just as much about anticipation and pleasure.

It is a bag of potatoes bought from the side of the road. It is a saucepan on the stove. It is butter melting over fluffed skins. It is salt and steam on an evening in June when time seems to stand still and all is good with Irish food.

Yours in Irish food,

Jp.

17th June, 2026.

This is ramson time.

Wild garlic is one of the true great gifts of the Irish spring and early summer. We tend to celebrate the leaves first, then the flowers, but the seed heads are perhaps the most interesting of all in terms of our journey at Aniar over the last fifteen years. They arrive when the plant is beginning to retreat back toward the ground, when the energy of the leaf has gone upward into flower and seed. They are sharp, green and garlicky.

Blink and you will miss them.

You have to be there at the right moment sometime in early June.

The act of picking them is arduous. You cannot rush it. You go out into the wood, bend down, look carefully, and begin to see what is there. One seed head at a time. Or a cluster if you’re lucky. On your knees in the wood the smell of damp earth and leaf mould rises up. Though June there is still rain and because to this, there is plenty of verdant shade. In a world that asks us to move faster and faster, to create new dishes, foraging asks the opposite.

It asks us to stop.

To look.

To notice.

To take only what we need.

To return to the previous year and think about it.

At Aniar, we salt the ramson seed heads for a week, drawing out moisture and firming their texture. Then we pickle them in malt vinegar for three months. The result is something like an Irish caper: sour and salty, pungent yet alive with the memory of the summer forest. They can be scattered over fish, lamb, or even potatoes, or folded through sauces, where a dish needs a small shock of acidity and garlic. Our roast celeriac with whey sauce always has ramsons scattered over it when it’s on the menu.

There is something beautiful in the transformation of seed head to caper. A plant that appears briefly in the woods becomes a condiment for the darker winter months. June is captured in vinegar. The forest is preserved in a jar. But we always have to think ahead. They can only be picked in June and take three months to make, so we always need to pick enough to keep us going until the following September.

Foraging, at its best, is not just the act of gathering food. It is a form of attention. It is a way of entering the Irish food calendar through the body: knees bent, fingers stained, the senses open to the forest. Ramson capers remind us that Irish food is not only in the field, the farm, or the sea. It is also in the quiet moment when we step into the wood and let the season show itself. Foraging is not an easy undertaking, but it does bring us closer to the earth.

It is an act of mindfulness.

Yours in Irish food,

Jp.

11th June, 2024.

In April and May, before it becomes the tall, hollow, bamboo-like cane that many people fear, Japanese knotweed appears as young shoots: pink, red, green, speckled, fleshy. They look almost edible before we know what they are. In Japan, where the plant belongs, the young shoots are eaten as a spring vegetable. In the West, chefs and foragers have compared its flavour to rhubarb: sour and sharp. As rhubarb, it can be stewed with sugar, folded into tarts, turned into cordial by juicing, or pickled in vinegar. In the kitchen, it seems to ask the same question as many wild foods in Ireland.

What do we do with abundance?

Japanese knotweed is not like wild garlic or meadowsweet. It is not a gift we can gather innocently from the hedgerow or the wood. It is a dangerous and invasive plant, introduced to Ireland in the 19^th century as an ornamental curiosity. Now it is one of the most difficult plants to manage. Its roots spread deep underground. A small fragment can generate a new plant. In this sense, it is a very modern food. It is a food of disturbance and development, neglect and unintended consequence if managed badly.

That is what makes it interesting for an Irish food calendar. It does not carry the old seasonal reassurance of May blossom or the first potatoes. Instead, it belongs to a more uneasy Irish food calendar. It resides alongside climate change, biosecurity, and ecological anxiety. It reminds us that a landscape is never fixed. The Irish ditch is not a museum, nor was it ever. It is alive and contingent on us, changing all the time.

There is a temptation, especially among ecologically minded chefs, to turn every problem into an ingredient. If it is invasive, eat it. If it is everywhere, preserve it. If it grows too well, stick it on the menu. There is a certain soothing logic to this. Kitchens have always found ways to use excess: too many strawberries become jam, whey becomes a new sauce, stale bread becomes pudding, fish bones become stock. Japanese knotweed seems to fit this older economy of essential thrift. Its tartness works beautifully with sugar. It behaves like rhubarb in a crumble or like sorrel in a sauce.

Eating is not Eradication

Yet, eating this plant it is not a step towards eradication. A restaurant cannot cook its way out of all ecological problems. We must be careful not to romanticise damage simply because it tastes good to our contemporary palates. Japanese knotweed asks for a different kind of culinary imagination. It is one that demands responsibility. It should never be casually dug up. It should never be taken from roadsides where it may have been sprayed or contaminated. It should never be composted at home.

In Aniar, the idea of Japanese knotweed is compelling precisely because it sits at the precarious edge of contemporary Irish food culture. It is not traditional, though that does not count for much. Irish food has always absorbed the foreign: potatoes from the Peru, spices and sugar through trade and empire. The difference is that Japanese knotweed arrived as beauty first and then became a threat. It was not planted to feed us. It is a reminder that appetite and ecology must now speak to one another in order for us to understand.

In the restaurant we pickled young shoots in sweeten vinegar. We dry them to use as an acidic powder over raw shellfish. We juice them to serve over fresh oyster It has the taste of a plant that should not be here and yet is. Japanese knotweed may never become beloved in Ireland, and perhaps it never should. Some plants deserve affection. Others deserve attention. Japanese Knotweed resides with the latter. It is a ingredient with a warning attached, a sour taste with a damaged edge, the consequences of what we once planted because we thought it beautiful.

To eat Japanese knotweed is not to celebrate it. It is to confront it head on. It is to taste the strange modern fact that not all abundance is a good thing.

Yours in Irish food,

Jp.

8th June, 2026.

Disclaimer

Japanese knotweed is listed in Ireland as an invasive species under national and EU invasive-species designations, and the National Biodiversity Data Centre records it widely across the country. It was introduced as an ornamental plant in the 19th century and later escaped from gardens into the wider environment. It should never be dug up or composted as fragments can spread the plant. To discard stems that haven’t been used, pour boiling water over them or bake at 100°C for 20 minutes. Once sterilized and dead, throw it securely into your household rubbish bin. Never put it in garden compost. If you’re not sure, don’t pick it.

For me, it is the journey to Wexford with my grandparents sometime in the mi 1980s. The old orange Hunter, heavy with bags and trapped with heat, travels the long road stretching ahead. Then, suddenly, there is the sight of a small roadside stall: punnets of strawberries stacked in the sun, their red bright against cardboard and timber. Placed beside bags of new Irish potatoes, you could almost smell them before the car even stopped. Sweetness and dust, warm plastic and petrol, the promise of the sea somewhere further on down the road.

Wexford strawberries were never simply fruit. They were a sign that the Irish summer had properly arrived. They belonged to that ritual of travel before cheap flights and the internet took hold of us as a nation. The stopping and the buying; the instruction not to eat them all before we arrived. Of course, we often ate them anyway. If we were lucky with cheap ice-cream or pouring cream. Some were perfect, others were bruised. Contained within them was the taste of the travel itself, the taste of being a child in between two places, unknown.

In Irish food culture, strawberries occupy a slightly strange position. They are of course beloved, but they do not carry the same mythic weight as blackberries, sloes, hazelnuts or fraughans. They are not central to the great symbolic storehouse of Irish food culture that has been passed down to us through oral and written text. They do not appear in the old seasonal calendar in the way fraughans do at Lúnasa, or butter does around May Day, or apples do at Halloween. The strawberry feels much more modern, more cultivated. It is, in my imagination at least, more associated with roadside stalls, market gardens, jam factories, and the soft-fruit industry of the south-east. And yet, before the punnet and the polytunnel, before the “Wexford strawberries” sign, there was the wild strawberry.

The wild strawberry, Fragaria vesca, is native to Ireland. It is a small plant of hedgerows and woodland edges, of sunny clearings on a mid-summer morn. Its Irish name, Sú talún fhián, is poetic and beautiful. It is often translated as the “juice” or “sap” of the earth. The wild plant flowers from late spring into summer, producing small red fruits with white flowers that are nothing like the large, cultivated strawberries we know now. They are tiny, intense, and fleeting, more perfume than actual substance.

Dúchas entries record wild strawberries being used for local cures and charms:

Wild Strawberry leaves pinned to your clothing is a local cure for nervousness. The leaves are to be found particularly in the spring time growing wild in the ditches (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0487, Page 491).

However, despite this lack of edible information, to imagine the wild strawberry in Ireland is to imagine a much older food world than all of us on the island. It is one that existed before fields, before grain and the dairy cow became central to the Irish diet. Mesolithic people in Ireland lived by an intimate knowledge of wild food. The fished. They hunted for wild pig and birds, such as mallard. The gathered nuts and seeds, roots and fruits. The strongest Irish archaeological evidence is for hazelnuts and other gathered plant foods rather than strawberries specifically, so it is important not to overstate the case (Mallory 2013). But wild strawberries were part of the edible flora of north-west Europe, and Mesolithic evidence elsewhere shows Fragaria vesca among the wild fruits available to hunter-gatherers. Ireland’s early people certainly lived in a world where such seasonal sweetness mattered, even if it rarely survives clearly in the archaeological record.

This is one of the difficulties of writing Irish food history. The most delicate things often leave the faintest trace. Bones and oyster shells survive. Charred hazelnuts survive. But the strawberry, like much flora, disappears almost as soon as it is picked. It is eaten in the hand. It stains the fingers and then is gone. That is perhaps why the wild strawberry belongs more to memory than to monument in Irish food history.

There are some instances of edibility in the Dúchas Schools’ Collection. One entry from Co. Galway recalls people on long journeys becoming hungry and going into woods to eat wild fruits such as blackberries and wild strawberries (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0016, Page 453). Another from Co. Kerry places strawberries near a fort, alongside sloes and hurts, in a landscape touched by fairy belief (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0457, Page 840). These are modest appearances in a vast collection, but that is precisely their value to us now. The wild strawberry enters folklore not as a grand ceremonial food, but as a wayside fruit, a thing of woods and local exchange.

Danaher’s The Year in Ireland (1972) gives us the larger structure within which to place this information. His work is not, as far as I can see, especially concerned with wild food, but with the rhythm of the year: seasonal labour, harvests and fairs, beliefs and superstition, and the old relationship between food and time. Strawberries fit into that rhythm as an early summer threshold ingredient. They arrive after the hunger of spring has passed, before the heavier harvests of Autumn. They are not a staple of Irish food but rather a sign of sweetness in the middle of the year.

The cultivated strawberry, the one we know now, belongs to a different, more recent history. The modern garden strawberry, Fragaria × ananassa, is not the same as the tiny wild strawberry of the ditches. It is a hybrid fruit, enlarged and bred for yield, which traces it roots back to Brittany in the 18^th century.

In Ireland, the modern strawberry industry became especially associated with Wexford. Local histories often point to the Second World War as a turning point. With imported fruit restricted, Irish growers expanded domestic production to sell into England. Wexford’s strawberry industry is commonly dated from around 1939, when wartime disruption helped create the conditions for local cultivation.

This is important detail as the Wexford strawberry feels ancient because our childhood memories make it ancient. But as an image of national Irish food, it is relatively modern. It is a twentieth-century fruit tradition that has managed to feel timeless because of the way in which our food memoires manipulate us. That is how food culture works. What begins as necessity becomes trade. What becomes trade becomes habit. What becomes habit becomes memory. And memory, if repeated often enough, becomes heritage. Hence, my nostalgic feelings for country trips to Gory in the summer of 1988.

The roadside strawberry stall is part of that heritage now. It is one of the great informal food architectures of Ireland: a sign, a stack of punnets, and a person sitting under shelter from the sun and rain waiting for cars to pull in. At its peak, Wexford had hundreds of berry growers, with fruit sold at roadside stands and into local markets, mostly for jam-making. Writing in The Irish Times, Russ Parsons notes that Irish strawberry growing expanded during the Second World War, and that Wexford once had more than 1,000 berry growers, supplying markets and food processors such as Chivers (Parsons 2025).

There is a whole social history hidden here: small farms and seasonal Irish labour of women and children, roadside selling and domestic jam-making. Strawberries do not travel easily. That is part of their charm and their problem. They bruise. They collapse. They ferment. They demand speed. A strawberry is a kind of natural clock letting us know that everything changes over time.

Today, the Irish strawberry has moved from the roadside stall to the national supermarket shelf. Keelings, perhaps the most recognisable Irish berry brand, traces its first strawberry planting to 1937 and now uses glasshouses to extend the Irish berry season.

The supermarket strawberry, as opposed to the wild strawberry or the roadside strawberry, allows Irish-grown fruit to reach people who may never pass a Wexford roadside stall. It extends the season and gives the strawberry a place in ordinary weekly shopping of us all. But something is inevitably lost when a fruit of journey and place becomes a product of constant availability for most of the year.

The roadside strawberry tasted of where it was bought, or at least, that how I imagined it. The supermarket strawberry tastes more often of the system that delivers it to us on a weekly basis.

That is not a moral judgement, but a cultural one.

Irish food culture, as all modern food culture, lives in the tension between memory and modernity, between my grandmother’s kitchen in Mount Merrion and the supermarket shelf. The strawberry allows us to see that clearly. On the one side, we have the wild strawberry, tiny and elusive, gathered from banks by people who only knew the landscape through hunger and season. On the other, there is the Wexford punnet, bought on the road with our parents and grandparents, eaten warm and temperate from the stall. Or another still: the branded national berry, grown under glass, distributed across Ireland, available far beyond the old narrow window of the short Irish summer.

All three are Irish food stories worth telling.

At Aniar, the Irish strawberry, both wild and cultivated, asks a series of questions. How do we take something so familiar and return attention to it? We do this by not by making it complicated for the sake of complication, but by remembering its nature and what grows with it.

A strawberry has a fragrant perfume but it also carries acidity and sugar mixed with time and memory. It belongs in my childhood mind with cream and vanilla, but now, as adult it is often coupled with a whole host of ingredients from buttermilk to woodruff, elderflower to sweet cicely, from rose to hay and honey and meadowsweet. I could go on. In our minds, strawberries are most often eaten fresh but they can be preserved with vinegar, fermented lightly, dried and turned into a delicious powder, or combined with gin or vodka to make a summer liquor.

The wild strawberry, when we can get it, is different again. It should almost be left alone. A few berries can change a dish more through scent more than flavour. Though this is the rarity nowadays.

Perhaps that is the lesson of the strawberry for the Irish food calendar. It is not one of the great ceremonial foods of Ireland. It does not announce itself with the force of the potato or the pig. It is much smaller than that. It belongs somewhere else, between the roadside and the child’s hand holding it aloft on the backseat of an old orange car.

An Irish strawberry is summer made brief. It is the earth’s red sweetness. It is a fruit that begins in the wild and ends in the supermarket, but somewhere in between it stands on the side of the road in Wexford, waiting for my grandfather’s car to stop.

Strawberries

It stains the fingers
And is gone.

But it not Not gone.

It remains
Where taste remains,

In the mouths
Of our ancient ancestors;

In the child Of Ireland,

Before Ireland Had learned

To call Itself so.

It waits underfoot Close to the earth,

As if the earth Had never thought

Of such a small red thing
With no weight.

It stains the fingers
And is gone.

But it is not gone. It is never gone.

Yours in Irish food,

Jp

25th May, 2026.

But the idea felt clear enough.

What would Ireland look like if we celebrated food as culture, not merely as commerce, nutrition, tourism, or hospitality? What if we looked upon food creatively, as we do with all the arts in Ireland?

Butter Day

To begin, what would it look like if we had a National Butter Day?

A day when every schoolchild in the country ate a slice of homemade soda bread with Irish butter. A day when food historians spoke about grass and milk, about churns and dairies, about the Cork Butter Market, about the women who in the old days, turned cream into an economy with their hands. Imagine a day when butter was not reduced to a supermarket block or an export slogan, but for a brief moment was understood as something almost sacred in Irish life and culture.

Picture a street food festival somewhere in Ireland.

Butter on potatoes.

Butter on soda bread.

Butter melting into freshly made champ.

Butter in the folklore of May Day, where people feared it could be stolen by charm or envy.

Imagine butter as both labour and art, eating and thinking and talking, connecting the generations together through this golden substance.

Oyster Day

What if we had a National Oyster Day?

Not just for the few, not just with champagne or plenty of pints, but as a recognition of our coast. We are an island after all. Yet we often behave as if the sea is scenery. Our oysters tells a different story. They are Galway Bay, Clarenbridge, Carlingford, Achill, Dungarvan, Flaggy Shore, and much more.

It is the taste of the sea and memory.

The oyster is not one thing. It is many places held in a shell.

A National Oyster Day would be a day for growers, shuckers, chefs, fishmongers, pubs and coastal communities to all come together. It would be a day to teach people that Irish food is not only about the field and the farm, but also about the estuary and the shore.

Potato Day

What if we had a National Potato Day?

This, of course, would be complicated. The potato is, or was, never just food in Ireland. It is sustenance, dependence, and catastrophe. But perhaps that is exactly why it deserves a day. Not as a cheap joke. Not as a postcard for silly stereotypes of Irish food.

Rather as a serious day of celebration of our food culture.

Imagine a day for new potatoes with butter. For boxty, colcannon, champ, pandy, potato cakes, farls, gratins, crisps, chips and just plain old mash potato. A day to speak of ridges and lazy beds, of first fruits, of the Famine, of the small farmer, of migration, of the kitchen table. A day to ask what one crop can mean to a people, and what happens when a people are forced to live too narrowly from it.

Fish Day

What if we had a National Fish Day?

Ireland has one of the great coastlines of Europe, and yet fish is often treated as marginal in our food culture, especially for us living on the island. We export so much of what surrounds us. We speak of being an island, but do not always eat like one. We give up quotas, allow other countries to pillage our fish.

A National Fish Day could be an act of historic correction.

A day for mackerel, hake, haddock, herring, monkfish, plaice, pollock, and turbot.

A day for fishmongers and coastal boats.

A day for the Friday fish tradition to remerge.

A day for smoked fish, for chowder, for fish and chips, for the old herring barrels and the new questions of sustainability.

A day for demonstrations, talks, school visits, and education about our oceans.

A day to ask why Irish children can name more imported brands than fish from their own coast.

Pork Day

What if we had a National Pork Day?

The pig has always been close to the Irish household and dwelling, since Mesolithic times.

It was the animal of the small farm,the market, the Irish breakfast plate in the form of rashers, sausages and pudding.

Pork is bacon and cabbage.

Pork is crubeens in Cork City.

It’s collar and ribs in Herterich’s in Galway.

It’s brawn in Ballymun.

It’s boiled bacon in Maynooth making the whole house smell of fat and salt.

It’s thrift and celebration at once.

A National Pork Day would allow us to speak about the animal honestly: about nose-to-tail cooking before it became a restaurant phrase sometimes in the 1990s; about curing, salting and smoking; about the pig as food security in the past.

It could also ask contemporary questions about farming, welfare, and the scale of our pork industry.

A food day should not be propaganda. It should be culture, and culture must be able to think. Free range pork from Andarl Farm in Co. Mayo for example, should be seen as a shining light of our pork industry.

Seaweed Day

What if we had a National Seaweed Day?

This one feels the most urgent.

Seaweed is one of the great forgotten Irish foods, and one of the great future foods.

Dulse, dillisk, carrageen, and kelp: these are just a few of the seaweeds that populate our costal waters.

We once used seaweed as food, medicine, and finally as fertiliser for potatoes. Then, like many things too close to poverty, it became slightly embarrassing to even mention it in public. Now it returns through chefs, foragers, and scientists

Seaweed is the future of Irish food.

A National Seaweed Day could gather the old and the new together. Carrageen moss pudding and seaweed baths in Doolin, Co. Clare.

It could be a day for the Wild Atlantic Way, for knowledge carried in coastal families to urban children, and especially for a future Irish cuisine that finally takes the shore seriously.

Beef Day

What if we had a National Beef Day?

This would be the most difficult one, and perhaps the most necessary. Cattle are everywhere in Ireland. They shape our fields, our exports, and our politics.

Beef is the iconic Irish food, from stews, to corned beef and Sunday roasts. Yet, beef is also affecting our climate and it’s something we need to talk about.

A National Beef Day should not avoid the vulnerability of our dependency. It should not be a day of blind celebration. It should be a day of grown-up cultural conversation.

How do we value the animal? How do we support our small and medium beef farmers? How do we eat less but better? How do we connect grass, breed and butcher? How do we move beyond empty slogans and green washing, whether from our own industry or from its critics?

To celebrate food culturally is not to make it innocent. It is to make it visible, and place it on a stage for debate.

Vegetable Day

And finally, what if we had a National Vegetable Day?

This might be the most radical day of all.

Ireland is green, but nowhere near edible. Our fields are full, but often not with food for our own tables.

They are green, yet empty of sustenance.

We import huge amounts of fruit and vegetables while speaking endlessly about our agricultural greatness.

A National Vegetable Day could ask a simple, uncomfortable question: why do we not grow more of what we eat? What is stopped us being more sovereign in terms of vegetables?

This day could celebrate all those Irish vegetables that we turns away from, such as cabbage, carrots, onions, leeks, turnips, and parsnips.

It could honour these vegetables.

It could highlight our market gardeners, our organic growers, and our small vegetable farms.

It could produce more allotments, school gardens and urban growing.

It could connect old kitchen gardens to new food sovereignty.

It could bring vegetables out of the side-dish shadows and place them at the centre of Irish food culture.

Because perhaps the future of Irish food will not only be in the heroic products we export, but in the ordinary foods we learn to grow, cook and value again, like our grandparents did back in the day.

The point of these national food days would not be to create another set of marketing hooks for more tourism. We have enough of those.

Nor should they become empty hashtags, used for one day and forgotten the next.

The should be for us to develop our food culture, like our Spanish neighbours.

We do not lack food culture in Ireland. We lack the confidence, structures and rituals to celebrate it properly.

Other countries understand this. Spain celebrates the calçot. France celebrates wine, bread, and cheese. Italy turns food into a honorary civic identity. Not because every celebration is perfect, or pure, but because food is understood as a language of belonging.

It is how a place speaks of itself.

In Ireland we still hesitate.

In recent years, we have celebrated food through the idea of the restaurant, the award, the export figure, the international tourism campaign.

These things matter.

Of course they do.

But they are not enough.

Food culture must also belong to us.

To the the farmer.

To the fisherman.

To the family.

To the school.

An Irish Food Calendar

Imagine a calendar of Irish food days spread across the year. Seaweed in spring, when the shore begins to offer itself again. Fish around Easter or Good Friday. Butter in June, when the grass is high. Potatoes and vegetables in late summer around harvest time. Oysters in September. as the native season begins again. Beef in autumn, when the fields begin to turn brown again. And finally, pork in winter, as the country goes to sleep again.

Each day could have a public ritual. Bread and butter in schools. Oyster trails along the coast. Potato suppers. Fish in every school canteen. Seaweed walks. Butchery demonstrations. Vegetable markets. Talks, folklore, history, cooking classes, and farm visits.

But the heart of it should remain simple: Ireland learning to celebrate its own food culture.

Ireland does not need to invent a food culture. It needs to recognise the one beneath its feet, in its abundance and in its contradictions.

The drawing in my notebook is only a simple circle with radiating dials.

Yet, perhaps every good food culture begins that way: with something simple and something shared.

With an idea to change.

With an idea to develop a food culture that is already there, just buried beneath our history and our inability to celebrate food as integral part of our identity on this small island.

Let's do it.

Let's find days to celebrate food.

Yours in Irish food,

Jp.

20th May, 2026.

The new festival was another arts-oriented addition to the Irish Arts Calendar. I have no issue with that. We are good at this in Ireland. We understand the value of theatre, music, literature, dance, film, and visual art, since at least the foundation of the state. We understand, at least in theory, that culture requires public support, that it augments our identity.

The Arts Council’s own 2026 funding schedule speaks about maintaining stability and continuity for arts organisations and supporting arts infrastructure across the country for all ages and demographics. Local arts festival supports are similarly framed around recognised art forms, such as, theatre, literature, opera, film, and visual art, to name a few.

Food, somehow, remains outside the room, perpetually in the corridor waiting for its moment.

Of course, I’m not talking only about food as a form of entertainment. Nor am I only talking about food as the remit of hospitality, the restaurant, the chef, or the hungry tourist.

I mean food as culture.

Food as community.

Food as the place where history, labour language, seasonality and landscape meet to form us.

Other countries understand this and we could learn a little from them.

In Spain, the Catalans understand that food is not merely something you eat before culture begins. Food is culture. It is the thing around which towns gather, families return, streets fill, and seasons are marked.

Take the calçotada in Catalonia. At one level, it is a festival of onions. More precisely, it is a celebration of calçots. These are long, sweet onion shoots grown by earthing up the plant, then grilled over fire and eaten with salvitxada or romesco sauce, botifarra sausage, red wine or Cava, smoke and plenty of laughter.

The town of Valls, located 100km from Barcelona, is recognised as the birth place tradition, but calçot festivals are now part of the broader Catalan winter and spring calendar from January through to March.

Imagine for a moment that we had a national, regional, public celebration of a leek-like onion in Ireland. Not an ironic one. Not a novelty shrouded in greenness.

A real celebration of food.

A people’s celebration of food in the streets.

A historical ritual of appetite linked to time and place.

A democratic ceremony of food were we get out hands dirty with ash and smoke.

In Ireland, we have the ingredients for this. We have always had them. We have potato planting in March. We have wild garlic, bush customs and butter charms in May. We have elderflower in June, bilberries and wild mushrooms in August, and much more. We have a food calendar as rich as any country in Europe.

We have folklore and farms, cheesemakers and growers, chefs and bakers, butchers, fishermongers and foragers.

What we do not have is the confidence to celebrate them publicly.

Or perhaps we do have the confidence, but not the funding.

In Galway, Blas na Bealtaine, the May food festival that we run through Blas na Gaillimhe (A Taste of Galway), has been built around exactly this idea: that food is not simply a consumer experience but a living expression of Galway’s community. The festival brings together restaurants, producers, drinks makers, and food people across the month of May in the city and county.

But the difference between having a festival and being able to celebrate a festival properly is enormous in modern Ireland.

To build something meaningful on a national level, you need money. You need media support. You need infrastructure and belief. You need to be able to pay people. You need to be able commission events. You need to print programmes, market properly, bring in visiting chefs and speakers, support producers, create public moments, and make the thing visible for the community to see.

Otherwise, a food festival becomes another act of voluntary cultural labour: passionate people doing what they can, as I have done, while the structures around them quietly imply that food is not quite serious enough.

This is the strange contradiction in Ireland.

We sell ourselves as a food island. We speak about green fields, hospitality, provenance and local produce. We ask chefs and producers to represent Ireland abroad. We place food at the centre of tourism campaigns. We know that visitors want to eat the place they are visiting. Yet when it comes to funding food as culture, it often falls between departments, schemes and definitions.

It is tourism, but not only tourism.

It is agriculture, but not only agriculture.

It is hospitality, but not only hospitality.

It is culture, but not officially enough.

There are funding streams. Galway City Council, for example, have a Regional Festivals Fund, which is supported by Fáilte Ireland. This supports Blas Na Gallaimhe and keeps it alive each year.

That is welcome.

But the deeper issue remains one of status. Arts festivals are understood as cultural infrastructure with millions of euros in funding. Food festivals are treated as commercial activity, tourism animation, or local colour, with thousands of euros in funding.

This distinction, and there monetary equivilant, matters.

When we fund an arts festival, we are not merely funding ticket sales. We are funding public meaning and its signification. We are saying that a poem, a play or a concert helps us understand who we are. We are saying that culture deserves space before it becomes profitable. We are saying that a nation needs more than markets. It needs art for its identity.

Food deserves the same recognition.

A festival of Irish food should not have to justify itself only through bed nights, visitor numbers, or economic impact. It should be allowed to speak of memory, landscape, and the sheer joy of food.

It should be allowed to honour the farmer as much as the artist, the baker as much as the poet, the fisherman as much as the musician, the cheesemaker as much as the dramatist.

Because food is where ordinary life becomes ceremonial.

We all know this privately, in the comfort of our mother's kitchens.

We know it at weddings, at funerals, at Christmas, at the first summer barbecue in May, at the bag of chips from Vinny’s after a night out in the Westend, and at the brown bread cooling by the window in our grandmother’s kitchen.

We know food marks time.

We know it carries grief and celebration.

We know it remembers people, or helps us remember them, after they are gone.

But we have not yet made that knowledge public enough to make a difference for our food culture.

We have not built the Irish equivalent of the calçotada.

A national oyster day.

A butter festival that goes beyond nostalgia.

A seaweed festival of the Wild Atlantic Way.

A potato planting festival in spring and a first potato festival in summer.

A bilberry festival for Lughnasa.

A harvest festival that is not merely symbolic but connected to real growers, that brings young children back to our potato farms.

A bread festival that tells the story of oats and wheat in Ireland since Neolithic times.

These are quaint ideas.

But they represent the possibilities of food cultural infrastructure in Ireland.

It is worth saying that to celebrate food in Ireland is not to avoid the difficult parts of our past. It is to face them. It is to say that food is not only pleasure. It is trauma and difficult, and sometimes awful, memories.

Perhaps that is why we hesitate.

To celebrate food properly in Ireland would require us to look again at the land. At who owns it. At what we grow. At why so many of our fields are empty of people and full of animals. At why we import so much fruit and vegetables. At why producers struggle while the language of provenance is used so easily. At why restaurants are expected to be ambassadors for Irish food while also fighting for survival. At why food education is still treated as secondary. At why a chef is more likely to be framed as an entrepreneur than as a cultural worker or artist.

But this is exactly why Irish food needs celebration.

Not the shallow celebration of consumption, but the deeper celebration of attention.

A real food festival should teach people how to look at their enviroment.

It says food matters.

That is what the calçotada does.

It takes a humble crop and gives it theatre. It gives it smoke, sauce, and public ritual. It turns the agricultural into civic pride. It tells people that a vegetable is reason enough to celebrate our humble lives.

Ireland needs to learn this.

We do not need to imitate Catalonia, but we do need to stop treating food as something that only becomes culturally legitimate when it is expensive, exported, or attached to tourism.

Food is not an add-on to Irish culture.

It is one of its foundations.

And until we fund it, protect it, and celebrate it in the same way we celebrate other cultural forms, we will continue to ask chefs, producers, and small local festivals to carry a national story on a local budget.

Yours in Irish food,

Jp.

12th May, 2026.

In late spring, at the end of the branches, the spruce sends out its new growth. It is soft and pale green, appearing almost luminous against the older dark needles of the previous year. These young tips are tender enough to eat. They have the sharpness of citrus peel, the sweetness of new grass, and the resinous depth of the forest. Orange zest in the Irish countryside was one of my first observations after tasting these tips straight from the tree somewhere in Roscommon. After orange, comes rosemary, and then resin. A touch of tannin.

If you catch them at the right moment, before they toughen, they seem to belong naturally to the early Irish summer, even if they have not yet found their place in the older record. Perhaps this is how new food traditions begin.

Ireland has always made use of the edges of things. From our hedgerows and shorelines, bogs and fields, ditches and riverbanks, we have eaten always what was practical and seasonal. But modern Irish cooking has also had to learn how to look again at its own landscape. Not everything worth eating comes already sanctified by folklore of years of tradition. Not every food moment begins in the distant past. Sometimes it begins when a cook notices a flavour in the landscape and returns to it, year after year, until it becomes part of a practice.

If Ireland offers little obvious folk record for spruce tips, the Nordic countries offer a way of thinking about them. In Finland, the young green shoots of spruce are made into kuusenkerkkäsiirappi, a spruce tip syrup, often used as a sweetener and, in folk practice, as a remedy for coughs and colds. Further north, in Sápmi, Scots pine had an even deeper place in food culture. Its inner bark was harvested in early summer, dried, ground, and used in bread and other foods. This was not simply famine eating, but part of the Finnish people’s broader relationship with the forest. Later, the New Nordic movement transformed these northern practices into a new restaurant language.

The Swedish chef Magnus Nilsson famously utilized pine tree bark in his cuisine at Fäviken, most notably in a dish featuring pine bark cake with preserved egg yolk and spruce ice cream. Others made pine butter, spruce-shoot gels, pickled pine, and cooked young cones in sugar syrup. The forest had become a seasoning. At Aniar, when we pickle spruce tips, steep them in honey, scatter them fresh over raw shellfish, or preserve them in sugar syrup, we are not claiming an ancient Irish custom. We are allowing a northern idea to take root here, in the west of Ireland. This is important to acknowledge, as we need to trace our present practices as well as our past ones.

There is no point assuming just because we have had spruce trees in Ireland, from at least the 16^th century onwards, that we ate them.

The influence of the New Nordic movement was, and still is, important to us because it gave Irish chefs permission to treat the local landscape with seriousness. It was not only about edible moss and the smoke of birch branches, though these became the visible grammar of it. At its best, it was about attention to time and place. This is turn led to a renewed interest in preservation of the wild, which was a practice that has fallen foul of modern living. The Nordic Manifesto (2004) showed that the forest could be a larder, not in a romantic or decorative sense, but in a precise culinary one.1

Green pine and spruce could sit beside raw langoustines. Birch sap could become a tasty syrup. Young pine needles could flavour oil or cream and be served with smoked asparagus. Pine cones could be blanched and then cooked for hours in sugar or vinegar until they became soft, fruity, and usually spicy.

This matters in Ireland because our own food history has often been narrated through necessity and famine. We know how to speak about the potato or the pig. We know how to speak about hunger and want. But we are still learning how to speak about our own natural abundance of small wild things. This is not an abundance that exists in the grand potato or barley harvests, but in brief appearances: a wild garlic flower, a hawthorn blossom, or a birch tree running with sap.

In May, at Aniar, spruce tips and young pine cones have become part of that way of seeing. In terms of the tender tips, we pickle them while they are still soft, holding their citric brightness in vinegar for use later in the year. We steep them in honey, where their resinous perfume slowly moves into sweetness over many days at a low heat. We use them fresh over raw shellfish, where their sharpness cuts through the iodine and richness of oysters, scallops, crab, and my favourite, langoustines.

The pastry chef makes syrups with them, capturing that brief May-green flavour before it disappears back into the branch for another year. Regarding the young cones, when still tender, can be treated with sugar, syrup, vinegar, or honey, becoming something between condiment and preserve.

There is a lovely tension in them. They are both ancient and new. Ancient, because trees have always stood around us, releasing scent after rain, marking the edges of fields and roads, darkening the hillsides in winter. Many trees were here before of us. New, because we are only now beginning to use them in this way in Irish cooking culture. They do not carry the same inherited meaning as butter or bread or potatoes. They do not come with a ready-made folk story. But maybe that is what makes them useful. They allow us to see tradition as something alive rather than something fixed. Perhaps in a hundred years, they will have stories of their own from this island.

There is a temptation, when writing about Irish food, to make everything old. To pretend every ingredient has a continuous tradition behind it. But sometimes the more honest thing is to say: this is new. Or rather, this is newly seen. We have no history for is. Spruce tips may not have belonged to the Irish food calendar before, but they can belong to it now. They mark a precise moment in the year: the softening of the forest, the brightening of the branch, and the brief green flare before summer thickens in verdant leafiness.

They remind us that tradition is not a museum. It is a practice. It is made and remade, adapted for elsewhere, and sometimes invented from scratch in a small kitchen in Galway.

In that sense, spruce tips are not outside the Irish food calendar at all. They are part of its future. A small green proof that the calendar is still alive, still growing at the ends of its branches.

Yours in Irish food,

Jp.

11th May, 2026.

We often imagine Ireland is one thing.

Then we turn our heads around and we realise it a place of multiplicity.

The head of this Limerick household is Carlo Marcella. He was forty-five years old. He was born in Italy and was Roman Catholic. He listed by occupation as running a “Fish & Chip Shop.” His wife Annie, forty-two, was born in London. Their daughter Norah, ten years old, was born in Belfast. Italy, London, Belfast, Limerick: four places gathered together in one single census. In 1926, the new Irish state was counting itself into existence, but on this census form we glimpse another Ireland already taking shape. Not one of some type of imaginary Gaelic purity, but one build around a migrant, urban and working class Catholic family.

The detail of Marcella’s profession is small, but it opens a door on to our food culture at the beginning of the Ireland's existence. The 1926 census was the first census of the Irish Free State. It was an administrative act, of course, but it was also something deeply symbolic. It was an administrative act whereby the new state looked and named itself for the first time. putting itself into columns.

The country had come through revolution, partition and civil war. It was poor and rural, many were emigrating. It imagined itself mostly through its farms and parishes, its small towns and schools, its family kitchens. Yet here, in Limerick, is Carlo Marcella, born in Italy, selling fish and chips from his little shop.

There is a whole history of modern Ireland hidden in that entry.

The chipper does not fit neatly into the food story Ireland likes to tell itself. The chipper was not domestic. It belonged to the street rather than the country cottage hearth so beloved by folklorists. It belonged to towns and cities, to workers on late evenings, to post-pub hunger. It was food eaten from paper and carried in the hand. It did not require a table. It did not require any sort of ceremony.

It answered a simpler question: are you hungry?

And yet fish and chips were also, in their own way, deeply Irish. Fish was from the sea. Potatoes were from the field. These are not alien things. But what was new was the form: the frying, the shop, the commercial transaction, the speed and publicness of it. Fish and chips took ingredients already familiar to Irish people and rearranged them through modern migration and urban life. It is one of those foods that proves national cuisines are never pure and are at best mythological. They are made by movement and labour, appetite and accident, and most of all, adaptation.

The better known origin story of the Irish chipper usually begins in Dublin in the 1880s, with Giuseppe Cervi, the Italian immigrant traditionally credited with establishing the first fish and chip business in Ireland. Like all origin stories, it has gathered some folklore around itself. Cervi is said to have arrived at Queenstown, now Cobh, possibly on his way to America, before making his way to Dublin. There, the story goes, he worked as a labourer, saved money, bought a coal-fired cooker and began selling chips from a handcart outside pubs before eventually opening a shop on Great Brunswick Street, now Pearse Street.

Whether every detail of that story is exact matters less than what it tells us. The chipper in Ireland begins not as a grand culinary idea but as an survival strategy. It begins with work, with a man finding a way to feed others in order to feed himself. It begins with the city at night. It begins with the smell of hot beef fat and potatoes outside public houses. It begins with a food that is cheap, immediate and comforting for those modern urban Irish.

From there, Italian families became central to the Irish chipper tradition. Many came from the Lazio region, especially from towns and villages around Frosinone, Casalattico and Picinisco. The surnames became part of Irish town life: Cervi, Macari, Borza, Cafolla, Fusciardi, Aprile, Forte, Morelli, and many others. They were foreign names that became local landmarks. They appeared above lit windows on wet main streets. They became places where young children were sent with money, where teenagers and young lovers lingered, where workers bought dinner, where families marked a small treat at the end of the week with the few bob that was spare.

This is why Carlo Marcella matters. He takes the story beyond Dublin. He shows us that by 1926 fish and chips had already travelled into provincial Ireland. Limerick, with its docks and markets, bacon factories and barracks, terraces, lanes and working-class life, was exactly the kind of city where the chipper could take root. It was a city of labour and movement. It was a place where food had to be practical.

The Marcella household also complicates the idea of belonging. Carlo was born in Italy. His wife was Annie was born in London. His daughter Norah was born in Belfast. By 1926 they were living in Limerick. I don't know how they got there. But their family story crosses borders that the new Irish state was only beginning to harden in its imagination. Italy, England, the North, the Free State. Yes, the household is Catholic, but not simply Irish. It is European, British, Irish, and migrant all at once. In a country often remembered as closed mindee and homogeneous, this little census form tells us another story about our fair island.

It is tempting to imagine Carlo behind the counter. The census does not tell us what his shop looked like. It does not give us the smell of the place or whether the potatoes were cut thick or whether the family lived above the shop. It does not tell us whether customers pronounced his name correctly, or whether they thought of him as Italian or a Limerick man. But food history often begins in precisely these gaps, in these in-between spaces. The archive gives us a name, an age, a birthplace and an occupation. The rest has to be approached with care, imagination and restraint.

What we can say is this: in 1926, while the Free State was counting itself into existence, Carlo Marcella’s fish and chip shop was already part of modern Irish life. Not as a symbol in a speech. Not as a dish in a cookbook. Not as a government project. But as a small business. As a place where people went to eat.

The chipper grew up in Ireland because it answered the needs of ordinary working people. It was democratic food. You did not need to know how to order it. You did not need to sit still. You did not need to dress well. You just asked for fish and chips. Over time, the chipper developed its own language, a grammar of appetite that varied from town to town but was understood everywhere.

One and one.

By the 1960s, fish and chips had become part of the ordinary rhythm of Irish life. Ireland was changing. The old rural certainties were loosening. More people were living in towns and suburbs. Cinemas, dance halls and showbands; television, supermarkets and housing estates in new burgeoning suburbs. New patterns of teenage life were reshaping the old country. The chipper sat at the edge of all this change. It was a minor food revolution. A way of fighting back. It was where children often tasted their first aroma of independence. It was where families bought a treat when nobody wanted to cook. It was food for Friday evenings after school, late nights after the pub, paydays and just ordinary oldhunger.

Before pizza became normal, before kebabs, before Chinese takeaways spread across Irish towns, before spice bags, burritos, sushi counters, bao buns and ramen bars, the chipper was Ireland’s great takeaway. It taught us how to eat outside the home. It taught us how migrant food becomes local food. It taught us that something can arrive from elsewhere and within a generation or two it can feel as if it had always belonged here.

Such is our passion for the potato.

That is one of the strange fates of immigrant food. First it is foreign. Then slowly it becomes familiar. Then, ironically, it becomes nostalgic. Eventually, people defend it as a tradition. The chipper followed that path so completely that we sometimes forget how hybrid it is.

Fish and chips in Ireland are not simply English.

They are not simply Italian.

They are not simply Irish.

They are all of these things, transformed by the particular conditions of Irish life: Catholic fasting, coastal supply, potato culture, urban poverty, late-night drinking, family labour, and the entrepreneurial resilience of Italian migrants.

There is also a quiet religious thread in the story. Many of the Italian chipper families were Catholic, entering, whst was the, a deeply Catholic country. Religion may have offered a point of recognition. But it did not erase cultural difference. Their accents and names, food practices and family networks marked them out. Yet the chipper allowed them to become indispensable to the locals. We needed them them because they fed us.

That is no small thing.

Food is one of the ways strangers become neighbours.

Go anywhere in the world and break bread and you will experience this phenomenon.

The chipper also changed the Irish relationship to fish. Ireland is an island, but that does not mean we have always eaten fish with confidence or consistency. Fish has often been tangled up with poverty, fasting, coastal necessity, class prejudice and uneven distribution. Fish and chips made fish accessible in a new way. It battered it, fried it, salted it, wrapped it in paper and placed it beside the potato. It removed some of the suspicion. It made fish hot, crisp, filling and safe. It turned the sea into street food.

Today, fish and chips occupy several Irelands at once. There is still the old family chipper, with its stainless-steel counter, vinegar bottles, heat lamps and handwritten signs. There is the seaside version, eaten with hungry seagulls hanging around nearby. There is the pub version, plated with tartare sauce and mushy peas. There is the contemporary restaurant version, made with day-boat fish, better potatoes, a light careful and considered tempura-like batter, and perhaps some seaweed salt. There are chefs trying to refine the form, to source better, fry better, season better. But the emotional centre of fish and chips remains ordinary. It is still food for appetite rather than culinary performance.

This is why Carlo Marcella’s census form is so powerful. It allows us to begin the story not with nostalgia, not with a national cliché, but with an actual person. A man born in Italy. A wife born in London. A daughter born in Belfast. A small. household in Limerick. A fish and chip shop in the first census of the Irish Free State.

The new state counted him, but it probably did not know what he meant. That is often the way with food history in general. The things that matter most appear first as small details. Official history looks for declarations, borders, elections, wars and institutions. Food history looks at what people ate, what they bought, what migrants cooked, what children remembered in their school books , what became ordinary before anyone thought to call it food culture.

In 1926, Ireland was not only farmers, priests, and civil servants. It was also Carlo Marcella in Limerick, running a fish and chip shop. It was Annie, born in London, keeping the household together. It was Norah, born in Belfast, growing up in a new state that was still trying to understand itself. It was Italy, London, Belfast and Limerick gathered around one deep fat fryer filled with beef tallow.

From that small census entry, a larger truth emerges. Irish food has never been fixed or immutable. It has always been on the move. It has always been shaped by those who arrived on this island, those who left and then returned, and those who stayed long enough to become a local. The chipper may seem like the most ordinary thing in the world, but perhaps that is its genius. It entered Irish life quietly, through hunger and work, and became part of who we are.

One of this. One of that. Fish and chips. Ireland and elsewhere. Past and present. Carlo Marcella’s name on a census form. A paper parcel in the hand. A country, still becoming itself, eating in the street.

This is Irish food.

Yours,

Jp.

4th May, 2026.

Postscript

While the Di Vito family is often associated with the Fish and chips in Limerick, Carlo Marcella was a pioneering Italian immigrant who established the fish and chip trade in Limerick as early as the 1920s. The Marcella family, like many iconic Irish chipper families (such as the Borzas, Macaris, and Marsellas), originally hailed from the Lazio region of Italy, specifically around the village of Casalattico.

Lou Marcella was the son of Carlo Marcella. He was part of the second generation of the Marcella family to manage the iconic premises on the corner of O’Connell Street and Denmark Street. While his father, Carlo, was the pioneer who established the family’s presence in the Limerick chipper trade in the 1920s, Lou became the face of the business during its later years as the O’Connell Street Grill (the successor to Cafe Capri).

He is widely remembered by Limerick locals not just for the food, but for his extraordinary generosity, often providing free meals to the city’s homeless at the end of the night.

As Valerie O'Connor related to me:

My parents met in the Capri chipper, my Mum tells me my handsome, home from the merchant navy, father asked her for a chip. She told him "I'll give you a chip if you walk me home." This month they celebrate 60 years of marriage and a life in food too.

Such is the power of the Irish chipper.

"It often happened quickly; the photographic decision, like the jazz decision, must be instantaneous" (Dennis Stock).

There is a particular kind of photograph from 1950s America that still feels alive with movement. Black and white. Smoke in the room. A trumpet held at an angle. A saxophone resting against a chair. A man in a dark suit looking away from the camera, as if listening to something only he can hear. Another man laughing. Someone half-hidden at the back of the frame. A table. A glass. A cigarette. The sense of a night already in progress. Anticipation. Freedom.

Of course, I’m talking about the photos of Dennis Stock.

Stock’s jazz photographs from that period often carry this strange double energy. They are still photographs, yet everything in them seems to be moving. The music is not present, but you can almost hear it through the image. You can feel the breath before the note, the pressure of the fingers on the keys, the drummer waiting to come in, the bassist holding the whole room together from the shadows. Looking at those photographs, I found myself thinking not only about jazz musicians, but about chefs and cooks since the 1950s to present.

At first the comparison seems too easy. Jazz musicians improvise. Chefs improvise. Jazz musicians work late. Chefs work late. Jazz musicians travel from city to city, carrying their instruments with them. Chefs move from kitchen to kitchen, carrying their knives and notebooks.

But the more I thought about it, the more the parallel deepened.

There is something in the life of the working jazz musician that belongs also to the life of the working chef. It is the discipline behind the freedom, the often loneliness of the road, the dependency on others, a conjured family, the need to perform in the moment, the absolute impossibility of doing the same thing twice as you cook and play throughout the night.

A musician carries their instrument like a private language. A trumpet case. A saxophone case. A double bass on the back of man as he crosses the road. These are not simply tools. They are extensions of the body. They hold memory and pain. They hold labour.

They hold the hours spent learning scales.

Failing and repeating.

Trying again.

A chef’s knives can be constrused in a similar way. They are not glamorous in themselves. They are a combination of steel, weight and balance. But in the hand of the cook they become intimate and personal. A knife knows how you work. It knows whether you are careful or impatient, whether you cut from the wrist or the shoulder, and whether you have learned restraint over the years.

A knife is a musical instrument of sorts.

It plays its own kind of scales.

When chefs travel, they travel with their knives. It can seem absurd to anyone outside the profession. Why bring your own knife when there will be knives in the kitchen? But that is to misunderstand the relationship between the chef and his knife. The knife is not merely an object or vehicle of some king. It is a way of arriving prepared to play. It is a small form of continuity in a profession built on movement and change.

It says: I may not know this kitchen in this city, but I know this blade. I know how it sits in my hand.

Jazz musicians must have felt something similar opening a case in a new club, in a new town, under a new light. The room might be crap. The audience might be indifferent. The piano might be out of tune. The money might be poor. The night might be long.

But the instrument was there.

The instrument was home.

There is also the matter of improvisation. Nowadays, we often use the word too casually. In cooking, improvisation is often mistaken for randomness, as though a chef simply throws things together and hopes for the best. In jazz, the same misunderstanding exists. Jazz improvisation is a thorught of as a kind of freedom without structure. But real improvisation depends on knowledge. It is not the absence of discipline. It is discipline made invisible.

A jazz musician can improvise because they know harmony and rhythm. They know their phrasing. They know how to use silence. They know the tune so well that they can leave it and return to it without losing themselves.

A chef improvises in the same way. A sauce splits. A delivery does not arrive. The fish is smaller than expected. The wild garlic has gone too far, grown too large. The room fills up all at once.

Someone overcooks the garnish.

A good chef does not panic, or at least they do not allow panic to become visible. They listen to the kitchen. They adjust. As a art form. They make a decision inside the pressure of time.

“Improvisation, the essence of their art, dictated the form of this book. It often happened quickly; the photographic decision, like the jazz decision, must be instantaneous. I thoroughly enjoyed knowing the people. The artists who appear in this book. It is my intention that you have a comparable experience” (Dennis Stock).

This is perhaps where the comparison between jazz and cooking becomes most interesting. Both jazz and cooking are live art forms. A recording is not the same as the performance. A recipe is not the same as the finished dish in service. The thing happens in the moment, among people, under pressure.

It cannot be fully controlled.

It can only be prepared for.

Perfection is an impossible pursuit but we pursue it all the same.

Service in a restaurant has something of the jazz set about it. There is the structure. There is the menu, the sections, the bookings, the timing, the order of courses. But within that structure there is constant variation. No two chefs run their section in the same way. They play it. No two nights are ever the same. The dining room changes the kitchen, and vice versa. The weather changes the appetite. The produce changes the dish. The mood of the team changes the tempo. Sometimes everything comes togehter. Sometimes it does not. Sometimes the whole night is held together by one person quietly doing their job better than anyone notices.

Often a glass breaks, their is a leak, someone gets sick.

The show must go on.

We continue to play.

In a jazz band, each musician must listen. That is the most important thing. Not showing off. Not dominating the room. Listening. The drummer listens to the bassist. The saxaphonist listens to the piano player. The soloist listens to the silence around the notes as he plays. He lets them play him. The music only works when each person understands that freedom is a shared act.

A kitchen is no different. The pass listens to the hot section. The pastry section listens to the rhythm of the cold section. The commis chef listens to the chef de partie. The head chef listens to the dining room, though often indirectly, through the movement of plates and tickets and waiters’ faces.

All is read as musical notes.

A bad kitchen is noise.

A good kitchen has music.

And like jazz, cooking depends on repetition. This is another thing people outside the work often miss. They see the final flourish, the plate, the improvisation, the performance, the instagram photo. They do not see the practice. They do not see the same motion performed a thousand times until it becomes almost unconscious. The cutting of onions. The filleting of fish. The folding of dough. The seasoning of a sauce. The cleaning down. The sharpening of knives. The writing of prep lists.

The coming together after the fact.

Musicians practise scales. Chefs practise cuts. Musicians learn standards. Chefs learn stocks, sauces, breads, butchery, fish, pastry, etc. And then, if they are lucky, if they stay with it long enough, they begin to find their own sound.

That phrase matters: their own sound. We speak of musicians having a sound, but chefs have one too. You can taste it. Not in a single dish, perhaps, but across a body of work. A way of seasoning. A way of holding back. A way of treating vegetables, fish, and meat with acid, fat, salt, bitterness, sweetness and umami. A way of thinking about place. A way of allowing something to be itself as if it came from the ground.

I often feel I am still searching for my sound. Through seaweed, through wild food, through Irish food history.

The great jazz musicians were not great because they played the most notes. They were great because they knew which notes mattered. The same is true of chefs. Maturity in cooking often means doing less, not more. It means understanding that virtuosity can become vulgar if it has no feeling behind it. It means learning that restraint is not poverty.

It is confidence.

There is also a melancholy in those 1950s jazz photographs. They show glamour, but not comfort. Style, but not security. The musician on the road is a romantic figure only from a distance.

A kind of Jack Kerouac.

Up close, it is fatigue, bad food and cheap rooms. Days of difficult managers and missed trains. Late payments, racism, alcholoism and addiction, loneliness, and the endless demand to be brilliant at night regardless of what has happened during the day. And when the performance is over, you are no longer needed.

“My subjects – the bikers, hippies, road people, artists – are simply people who have sought a less conforming way to explore this difficult life that we all lead” (Dennis Stock).

The chef’s life has its own version of this. We have romanticised the kitchen for too long without attending to the cost of it. The travelling chef, the guest dinner, the stage, the pop-up, the festival, the new opening, the late night, the early flight, the borrowed kitchen, the performance of passion. It can be exhilarating. It can also be brutal. Like musicians, chefs are often asked to transform exhaustion into energy, doubt into confidence, private difficulty into public pleasure.

And yet people, like me, keep doing it.

Why?

Perhaps because there is something addictive about the live moment. The moment when the band finds the groove. The moment when the kitchen locks into rhythm of the night. The moment when all the mise-en-place disappears and only the doing remains. The moment when everyone knows, without saying it, that the thing is working, the night is playing itself out.

In jazz, that moment might be a solo that lifts the room, or a silence held for one beat longer than expected.

In a restaurant, it might be a plate leaving the pass exactly as it should, or the sudden quiet after a table begins to eat, or the knowledge that a sauce has come together in a way that feels inevitable, though it was never guaranteed.

The road matters too.

Jazz travelled because musicians travelled.

The music moved through cities, clubs, and bars.

It absorbed place as it went.

Chefs travel in a similar way. We learn by leaving. We bring things back. Not simply recipes, but ways of organising labour, ways of thinking about flavour, hospitalityand generosity.

A chef who travels well does not simply collect influences.

They are changed by them and they change their own food culture when they return.

But there is a danger here too. Travel can become extraction. Influence can become theft. Jazz teaches us something about this as well. It reminds us that forms come from people and their histories.

To borrow without listening is merely consumption. To be influenced properly is to acknowledge debt.

The same is true in cooking.

We do not own everything we touch.

We inherit, translate and attempt to honour.

The best we can do is to try and and remain as honest as we can about the journey.

Perhaps this is why the image of the musician Bill Crow with the his double bass case stays with me. It is an image of steadfastness but also vulnerability. To carry your instrument is to carry the possibility of failure.

The same is true of the chef’s knife roll. Inside it are the tools of work, but also the evidence of a life given over to repetition, service, movement, and risk.

A musician opens the case.

A chef unrolls the knives.

The night begins again.

There will be structure. There will be mistakes. There will be memory. There will be improvisation.

There will be others beside you and you will have to listen to them. There will be a moment, perhaps only one, when the whole thing lifts beyond labour and becomes something else.

Not art exactly, or not only art.

A form of musical attention.

A form of culinary survival.

A way of carrying the world with you, from one room to the next.

Keep that jazz spirit alive,

Jp.

27th April 2026.

“Nothing in the forager’s calendar is more seasonal than birch sap” (John Wright).

April is a month of rising sap in trees.

Before the leaves open, before the tree fully declares itself to our eyes, something has already begun deep inside its wood. Birch water belongs to this interval in the year. Clear, faintly sweet, and almost austere in its freshness when drunk straight from the tree, it is one of those seasonal substances that feels less harvested than briefly borrowed from nature. It appears and disappears so quickly. Miss the moment and the world has moved on. That brevity matters to our modern food psyche. As British forager John Wright notes in his piece “How to make birch sap wine” (2012), it is among the most fleeting ingredients in the forager’s calendar, with a usable season of only two or three weeks at most, depending on the weather. (Wright, 2012). Fresh birch sap tastes almost like water, but with a slight sweetness, and it keeps only for a few days in the fridge before it begins to turn. There is something almost paradoxical about it. It is a substance so delicate and so nearly invisible, yet one that has drawn enough attention over centuries to be tapped, carried home, fermented, and reduced.

Though for many of us, birch water will forever be a sign of the intractability of the natural world. When we think of spring foods in Ireland, we tend to think first of what comes out of the ground, such as, nettles, sorrel, wild garlic, young herbs, and the first lambs. But birch water reminds us that seasonality in Ireland was never only about field or furrow. It was also about trees, about weather, about noticing the brief occasions when the natural world offered something usable for only a week or two.

Birch sap is not a staple.

It is an event.

One of the most suggestive Irish references to birch wine survives not in print but in manuscript. The National Library of Ireland’s McGillycuddy of the Reeks recipe book, an eighteenth-century household volume contains recipes for “Cowslip Wine”, “Cowslip Vinegar”, “Birch Wine”, “Ginger Wine”, and “Raisin Wine”, with pages dated around 7^th July 1766 and the name “The Rev. Mr. Hutton”. This is a small catalogue notice, but it opens a larger world for Irish food culture. It shows us that Birch wine appears not as an eccentric singularity, but as part of a broader domestic culture of winemaking in the big houses of eighteenth-century Ireland.

That is what interests me most.

Birch water enters the Irish record here as part of the working life of the country house and the service economy of the estate. The big houses of the eighteenth century were not merely places of display and consumption. They were also places of production and preservation. The recipe books recorded what could be made from flowers, fruit, spices, herbs, sugar, and whatever the surrounding estate might provide. In such a setting, birch wine sat naturally alongside cowslip wine, ginger wine and raisin wine, as well as sloe gin and other shrubs. It was part of a world in which the household sought not just to preserve abundance, but to transform the fleeting into something durable and social, whether they wanted to or not.

And birch sap is especially fleeting. Wright notes that the sap contains very little sugar (he found it at no more than about 0.7% ) which helps explain both its subtle taste and the challenge of turning it into a country wine. In his modern recipe, the sap must be supplemented with sugar, lemon juice and white grape juice concentrate before fermentation, because on its own it offers too little sweetness and too little flavour to carry the wine (Wright 2012). That modern practical detail sheds light on the older manuscript world too. Birch wine was not simply nature poured into a bottle. It was a managed transformation, a turning of nature into culture. Sap had to be gathered at the right moment, treated quickly, and augmented by the domestic technologies of the 18^th kitchen.

It is not hard to imagine the process in an eighteenth-century Irish household. Somewhere on rough estate ground or near a stand of birch, a tree is tapped in the first movement of spring. The sap is gathered in buckets or vessels and brought back to the house. There, under the direction of a mistress, a housekeeper or a cook, it enters the order of the kitchen. It is heated and sweetened, then set to ferment, and finally bottled, perhaps brought out later as part of the hospitality of the house when visitors arrived. What begins as the quiet upward motion of a tree in April becomes, through labour and patience, a drink fit for the Irish country table for at least two centuries.

The McGillycuddy manuscript places birch wine within exactly this world of domestic ingenuity. Recipes circulated among families, neighbours, clergy and estate networks, copied from one book to another, attached to names and dates, moving through the social life of the Ascendancy house. That the catalogue notes The Rev. Mr. Hutton only reinforces the sense of a recipe culture built on exchange: a world where ingredients, methods and favours moved between kitchens and households as part of a wider web of practical knowledge. Birch wine is not only a recipe. It is evidence of a social system of making in Ireland in the 18^th century.

What appeals to me about birch water is that it unsettles our assumptions about Irish food history. We tend, too often, to divide the story into folk practice on the one hand and modern restaurant cooking on the other. Or we divide along the lines of native Irish vs coloniser. But the country house sits between those worlds in a complicated and revealing way. It took what was local and seasonal and subjected it to refinement, technique, labour and ambition. It is a hybrid of sorts, like everything in Irish food. Birch sap, pale and almost insubstantial, is exactly the kind of ingredient that demonstrates this coming together. It comes from the edge of the estate, from woodland and poor ground, from the native folk imagination, and it is turned into something preserved, civilised, and shared in the community.

What else is a food culture for?

At Aniar, we work with birch in another way. Rather than fermenting the sap into wine, we reduce it into syrup. Wright describes doing something similar, boiling the sap down first and then continuing the reduction very gently, noting that to make a true syrup from sap alone requires an enormous reduction and can become too strong and bitter for many tastes. Birch is not maple. Its sweetness is more elusive and its character more resinous. From 100 litres of birch water, you will get 1 litre of syrup. To reduce it is to concentrate not just sugar but the whole idea of the tree: its bitterness, its bark, its cool spring tension. This is why we often add brown sugar to try and stretch the syrup over the year. It is great brushed over chargrilled Irish blue fin tuna.

Perhaps that is what links the eighteenth-century manuscript to the contemporary kitchen of Aniar. In both cases, the point is not merely flavour, though flavour matters most when it comes to wild food. It is attentiveness. The season offers something briefly. The cook or chef intervenes, tries to seize the moment. What would otherwise vanish is captured in another form. In the McGillycuddy household of the 1760s, that form was wine. Close your eyes. Can you imagine them making it? In our kitchen now, it is syrup. The underlying impulse is the same. It is to notice the short season of the birch sap and to make something memorable from it before it is gone.

So birch water belongs in April not because it was ever common, but because it reveals something essential about spring and about food culture. It tells us that seasonality is not only about what is plentiful, but also about what is brief. It tells us that the big houses of eighteenth-century Ireland were places where local materials could be transformed into wines and preserves of surprising delicacy. And it tells us, too, that some ingredients remain valuable precisely because they refuse modern abundance.

Birch sap rises for a moment.

Then it passes.

As everything in this world.

The work of the kitchen, whether in 1766 or now, is to catch it in time.

Yours in Irish food,

Jp.

24th April, 2026.

Its name comes, of course, from St George’s Day, 23^rd April, by which time the mushroom is said to have appeared in both Britain and Ireland. While its scientific name, Calocybe gambosa, has a more measured and taxonomic elegance, its common name has always seemed to me to be a little imported, a little too English for our fields. This is despite the fact that the mushroom itself is very much here, fruiting quietly in grasslands around the country “in a ring, or at least a partial ring” (Wright: 2019, 128).

Some foods belong not to abundance but to chance, to local knowledge, to the person who knows where to look and returns each year to the same half-secret place (like our forager Edward). St George’s mushroom is often associated with grassland and field margins and is well known for reappearing in the same places, sometimes in arcs or rings. That habit of return gives it something more than culinary value. It becomes, in its own quiet way, a marker of the season, a kind of edible calendar written low across the ground.

One of the things I like most about spring foods is that they arrive before abundance. They do not belong to the rich confidence of summer or the deep larder of autumn. They belong instead to that in-between period in the Irish year when the old stores are beginning to tire and the new season is only just beginning to declare itself. In culinary terms, that is often the most exciting moment: everything still feels fragile, provisional, first. Wild garlic begins to push through. Rhubarb comes in soft and pink. The first herbs sharpen the edges of a dish. And then, almost unexpectedly, there is a mushroom.

Dúchas does not give us St George’s mushroom by name but does give us evidence of an older Irish familiarity with mushrooms as a wild food stuff, and as part of a wider vernacular knowledge of the field and the ditch in the calendar year. In one Schools’ Collection entry from Clonmel, we are told plainly that

Mushrooms grow very plentiful in some parts of Ireland. Mushrooms grow on rich ground. It has a shape like a cap with a short stem. People make hair-oil from them others boil them in new-milk and eat them.

Annie Lonergan,
Kincor,
Clonmel.

My Mother Mrs Lonergan told me this story.

(The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0568, Page 170).

In another, from Graignagower, Co. Waterford, we find that “some people boil them in milk and butter and others roast them with salt” (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0656, Page 204). It is the plainness of these lines, mixed with facts of fishing and berry picking, that I love the most. There is no performance to them, no romance of foraging, just a matter-of-fact understanding that mushrooms, when known, belong at the table as a food stuff.

But mushrooms in Irish tradition are never only food. They also belong to the other Ireland: the supernatural one, the one of rings, forts, thresholds, and warnings. In the folklore of the Schools’ Collection, mushrooms appear repeatedly around fairy rings. One account from Clonmacnoise, Co. Offaly notes that

There is a fairy ring in Jim Daly’s field in Creevaugh and every year a ring of mushrooms grows around it and whenever snow falls it doesn’t stop one minute until it melts away again. All the old people tell us that long ago the fairies used to be seen dancing around this ring.

These details remind us that mushrooms were once understood not simply as growths of the soil but as signs of some other life at work underneath the landscape. They arrived suddenly, overnight, and in often circles. They did not quite behave like ordinary plants, and so they easily slipped into the grammar of the uncanny.

That older attitude still has something to teach us in this digital age. Contemporary foraging can sometimes become too aesthetic, too polished: the basket, the knife, the curated sense of wildness, all for social media. But the older relationship was more exacting than that. You either knew, or you did not know. And if you knew, it was because someone had shown you. This field, not that one. This smell, not that one. This month, not later. St George’s mushroom has a distinctive mealy smell and appears early in the season, but as with many edible mushrooms, it also has its poisonous lookalikes, which is why reliable identification matters absolutely. That caution is part of the tradition too. Wild food was never merely romantic. It was practical, embodied, and exact.

Otherwise, it could kill you.

As a mushroom, St George’s has a certain solidity about it. It is pale, thick-fleshed, dense, often slightly misshapen, as though it has had to force its way up through the spring ground before the year was fully ready for it. It lacks the woodland autumnal elegance of chanterelles or ceps. It is not delicate in that way. It is closer, somehow, to the Irish spring itself: sturdy, pale, and a little damp, Perhaps that is why it feels so suited to our fields and roadside verges, to pasture that has not yet come fully into itself, to the edges of places rather than their centre.

In a kitchen, I think it asks for restraint. Spring ingredients nearly always do. They are best when treated as the first appearance of something rather than as raw material for elaboration. Eggs suit it. Butter suits it. Toast suits it. A little cream, perhaps. Young herbs, if used lightly. Irish asparagus, if you can get it. Hazelnuts, if you have them stored from the previous year. The point is not to disguise its taste but to honour it. What one tastes, or hopes to taste, is not just the mushroom but the season: that olfactory hinge in the Irish year when one thing is ending and another is beginning.

Perhaps that is why St George’s mushroom feels right for a new Irish food calendar. It unsettles the categories a little. It reminds us that spring is not only green. It is also cream and beige with old grass and fungal bloom. It has fairy rings, field margins, and the smell of damp in the air. It contains not just blossom and lambs and new leaves, but stranger things too: foods that arrive quietly, almost without announcement, and ask only that we notice them.

At Aniar, the mushroom’s brief return is something we try to honour simply. Sometimes we pickle St George’s mushrooms, so that their short season lingers a little longer into the year. Sometimes we cook them in butter with sage and serve them alongside brown trout, allowing their dense, savoury character to sit against the sweetness of the fish. In either form, what matters is not just the ingredient itself, but the moment it marks: that quiet turn in the Irish spring when the fields begin, once again, to offer something unexpected.

And perhaps that is the real value of a food calendar: not merely to tell us what is in season, but to train our attention towards the small, recurring things that might otherwise pass unnoticed. This is what we are missing nowadays. The year is always beginning again somewhere. Sometimes with wild garlic. Sometimes with forced rhubarb. Sometimes with the first brown trout. And sometimes, low to the ground and almost hidden in the grass, with a mushroom returning to the same place once more.

Yours in Irish food,

Jp.

17th April, 2026.

“People keep asking me, ‘Why didn’t you go more Irish?’ And I said, ‘Because I want to enjoy the dinner as well’,” (Rory McIlroy, April 2026).

Dear Rory McIlroy,

Congratulations on winning back-to-back Masters! Your achievement resonates far beyond sport, and it reflects the dedication, resilience, and quiet confidence that Ireland is known for across the globe. Watching you succeed at that level inspires us all who represent Ireland in our own fields to do better.

We also wanted to respectfully acknowledge your recent comments regarding Irish food. As chefs working both at home and abroad, we feel a deep responsibility to champion the true identity of Irish cuisine, one that is vibrant, progressive, and rooted in world-class produce. Ireland today is home to exceptional ingredients as well as world class chefs. We have wonderful grass-fed meats, pristine seafood, outstanding dairy, and a growing network of passionate farmers and artisan producers. Across the country and internationally, these producers along with Irish chefs are reshaping the idea of Irish food and transforming its culture. We strive to build an Irish food that honours tradition while pushing forward with creativity and pride in all aspects of Irish food culture.

We see a real opportunity, through voices like yours, to help share that story on a global stage. Your platform carries weight, and with it comes the chance to highlight the quality and integrity of Irish produce in a way that reflects where we are today. Today, contemporary Irish food is both exciting and enjoyable.

We hope to see Irish produce proudly featured on the Master’s menu next year and if you need any guidance or support sourcing the best of it, please don’t hesitate to reach out to either of us, or indeed to the many Irish chefs who are pushing the boundaries of Irish food nationally and internationally.

Once again, congratulations on an extraordinary achievement. You’ve made Ireland proud and you inspire us to keep trying to change the image of Irish food internationally.

With great respect,

Aidan McGee (Chef, The Dubliner and McGonagle’, Boston, MA, New York Times 2026 Top 50 restaurants in America).

Jp McMahon (Chef-Patron, Aniar, Galway, 1-Michelin star).

13th April, 2026.