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Irish & Elegant
By JANET K. KEELER, Times Staff Writer
If you told Noreen Kinney 30 years ago that someday there would be a gourmet market near Limerick, Ireland, selling organic feta cheese, she would have wanted to believe you. She'd have had trouble, though. You see, Kinney spent about 20 years trying to convince the Irish that there was more to eating than Irish stew and potatoes. In the 1970s and 1980s, she donned elegant gowns to give cooking demonstrations in fancy Irish hotels. Eager audiences learned how to make a volcanic mold of salmon mousse covered with avocado frosting -- it was the '70s, after all -- and were reminded that vegetables could be eaten raw, something largely avoided in Ireland at the time. Sometimes 100 people would be watching; occasionally a newspaper would cover the event. "It was an unflattering remark heard overseas that people in Ireland lived on a diet of Irish potatoes, which made Noreen decide that she could prove Irish ingredients and food were as good as the world's best," wrote a reporter in the Wexford People in November 1974.
To make her revolutionary dishes more folksy, Kinney gave them names such as Leprechaun's Dainty Delight (wafer-thin slices of liver sauteed with onions and lots of butter) and Winter Wonderland (pears and chocolate cake with a fluffy whipped cream blanket of snow). She published her recipes in several cookbooks that are now out of print. Not everyone was receptive, clever names notwithstanding. So ingrained was the limited, hearty food of old Ireland that even the government didn't see the delicious possibilities. "I believed Ireland could be a gourmet's paradise," Kinney says, perched on the sofa in her St. Petersburg condo, nestled between Tampa Bay and the Pinellas approach to the Sunshine Skyway bridge. Her home is filled with mementos of a life lived globally: childhood in India, college in England, and marriage and motherhood in Ireland. Kinney, now in her early 60s, moved to Florida in 1990; her two daughters live nearby. She is writing a book about the Irish food revolution. Kinney's pioneering efforts finally were validated in 1994 when the government established Bord Bia/the Irish Food Board to promote the foods of Ireland. Today, those foods include farmhouse cheeses, freshwater salmon, shellfish and honey -- in essence, regional foods. Even with all the work Kinney did, followed by the efforts of Irish chefs, food writers and the government, to bring Ireland's cuisine out of the Age of Potatoes, there are still misconceptions about Irish food. Some might even wonder, is there such a thing as Irish cuisine? You certainly wouldn't know it by the massive quantities of corned beef and cabbage that many Americans, with or without Irish ancestry, eat on St. Patrick's Day, which is Monday. Dublin's sweet Molly Malone cried "cockles and mussels," but most of us forget that Ireland is an island, surrounded by succulent seafood. How about salmon for St. Patrick's Day? Is corned beef and cabbage even Irish? Well, sort of. "It's basically a New England boiled dinner," says Margaret M. Johnson, author of The New Irish Table, published this month by Chronicle Books. "The huge influx of Irish immigrants who came to Boston started the tradition. It's an Irish-American dish." Corned beef stood in for Irish slab bacon, which is the traditional meat in the dish the immigrants were re-creating: bacon and cabbage. People, even Irish-Americans, turn to the traditional corned beef because they are in a rut, Johnson says. Johnson gives a nod to Kinney's early culinary efforts, noting that it took many years for her ideas to take hold. "There are so many more things to be cooked," she says. For example: Baked Oysters with Bacon, Cabbage and Guinness Sabayon, from Johnson's book. This is an Irish adaptation of Oysters Rockefeller, with bacon and cabbage replacing the spinach. (Irish bacon is meatier than American varieties and more akin to Canadian bacon, which can be substituted in this recipe.) Without abandoning the Irish potato, Johnson says, consider making something with cheese, a new and robust industry in Ireland. Cheesemaking began in Ireland in the 1970s, she says, as a result of European Union milk quotas and immigration. When Ireland joined the EU, mandated milk quotas resulted in a surplus. That extra milk was the beginning of Irish cheesemaking, Johnson says. Before that, milk was only for drinking and making butter, she says. Immigrants from Germany, Holland and Switzerland, with their great traditions of cheesemaking, pushed Ireland's fledgling efforts along. Today, more than 50 cheeses are made in Ireland, including Abbey Brie, Cashel Blue and Dubliner. Some Irish cheeses can be found in larger grocery stores in the Tampa Bay area, and many are carried in specialty shops. So the new Irish cuisine uses a lot of cheese. And a fair amount of stout or whiskey, according to Johnson's book. Main dishes and desserts pay homage to Ireland's storied tradition of spirits, with Guinness stout, Bushmills whiskey and Baileys Irish Cream among ingredients. Guinness-spiked brownies are served at Dublin's Grace Neill's, the oldest bar in Ireland, and could make a jolly ender to your St. Patrick's Day meal. The brownies are dense and moist; we love them with mint chocolate chip ice cream. Kinney's Seashore Delicacy, a scallop and shrimp gratin, is as at home in tropical Florida as it is on the Emerald Isle. The ingredients are readily available, and simple preparation makes this a satisfying, quick entree. Though Johnson loves corned beef and cabbage, she encourages something different for a holiday dinner, such as chef Noel McMeel's Braised Lamb Shanks with Roasted Garden Vegetables. Serve the lamb shanks with champ, a mixture of smashed potatoes and green onions served in a mound with a well of melted butter in the middle. Champ is sometimes called poundies. McMeel, the head chef at Castle Leslie in northern Ireland, honed his skills with California food pioneer Alice Waters and the late legendary French chef Jean-Louis Palladin, who conquered America with his upscale restaurants. An Irish chef who trained with the founder of California cuisine? Locals crowding gourmet markets to buy handmade Irish cheeses? A cover story on sophisticated Irish cuisine in this month's issue of Saveur magazine? That's a very long way from the Tipperary that Kinney knew, where food was cooked beyond recognition and spice meant salt and pepper. From her Florida condo she applauds the changes but gently reminds that she told them what was possible way back when.
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From the Times Taste section From the features wire | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
