An Irish Country Cookbook

by Patrick Taylor

This beautiful dish was given to me by Paul McKnight, the executive chef of the Culloden Hotel. Culloden Estate and Spa, 1 Bangor Road, Holywood. Co. Down. N Ireland.

  Serves 6 to 8

  Juice of 2 limes

  1 Tbsp good-quality olive oil

  A pinch of superfine sugar

  1 ripe avocado, peeled, pitted, and finely diced

  1 ripe mango, peeled and pitted

  ½ red bell pepper

  2 scallions, finely shredded

  One small red chili, seeded and finely chopped

  8 large scallops, coral (tendon) removed (must be fresh)

  Flaky sea salt, such as Maldon, and freshly ground black pepper

  Chopped fresh cilantro

  Cut each scallop horizontally into 4 thin slices, arrange on plate overlapping to form a circle.

  Cut avocado, mango, and pepper into small neat dice. Mix with juice of two limes, olive oil, superfine sugar, scallions, and red chili to make dressing.

  Season the scallops with salt and pepper.

  Spoon the dressing over the scallops, leave to marinate for 5 to 10 minutes.

  Before serving, sprinkle with chopped cilantro or with micro cilantro.

  Tuna Tartare

  Serves 4

  8 oz/227 g raw tuna steak, chopped

  Grated zest and juice of 1 lime or lemon

  2 avocadoes, peeled, pitted, and chopped

  3 oz/85 g cucumber, peeled and chopped

  1 oz/28 g red or white salad onion, chopped

  ½ tsp wasabi or horseradish

  Chopped fresh cilantro or dill

  Marinate the tuna overnight in the refrigerator in the lime juice and zest.

  Add the avocadoes, cucumber, onion, and wasabi and mix everything together. Plate using a ring to make a little tower. (Alternatively, use a silicone mold.) Sprinkle each tower with cilantro and finish each plate with mixed lettuce leaves lightly dressed with lime juice and olive oil.

  Kinky’s Note:

  When serving fish raw, always use fish that has been frozen, as this destroys any parasites that may have been present.

  The Grave’s a Fine and Private Place

  We had just finished one of Kinky’s “shmall little” dinners—creamy lentil soup, steak and mushroom pie with Brussels sprouts and carrots. Dessert had been Eton Mess topped with whipped cream. Totally replete, I would have been happy to sit for a while gently digesting, but one of O’Reilly’s patients needed him and so off we’d set.

  Outside the big speeding Rover car, it was one of those gentle early summer evenings in Ulster. Cotton wool clouds too lazy to scud drifted across a sky of robin’s eggshell blue, and the sun—not yet the fiery orb of mid-July and August—warmed the salt- and-clover-perfumed air and stitched flashing sequins on the ripples of Belfast Lough. Out on the water, a small fleet of Fairy yachts, sailing dinghys with secret aspirations to grow into bigger boats, tacked and jostled for position before the start of one of the Royal North of Ireland Yacht Club’s evening races off the village of Cultra.

  Inside the car was different, and akin to the inside of a steel foundry: hot, smoky, and tense, as Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly’s briar belched Erinmore Flake tobacco fumes. I wound down the window and clung on to the sides of my seat as he hurled the juggernaut into a hairpin bend. I muttered, “Slow down,” under my breath and had about as much influence on his driving as a wren would if it tried to tackle a bull head-on.

  “I’m worried,” O’Reilly said.

  Not nearly as much as I was, but my concern was merely for my life. His was about an entirely different matter. “Maggie MacCorkle just told me something about Neill McLoughlin and I want to make sure he’s all right. The poor man must be worried stiff.”

  And when O’Reilly was worried about one of his patients, a squadron of Centurion main battle tanks would not have stood in his way.

  I hunched down in my seat and recalled the details of matters leading up to his current concern. The story is convoluted, but bear with me and I’ll try to explain. It revolves around both the superstitious nature of the Irish and the basic pragmatism of the Ulsterman.

  Nearly a year ago, I had been introduced to a couple who had been married for forty-odd years. And odd they must have been. Neill McLoughlin, who farmed up in the Ballybucklebo Hills, was a small man, balding, soft-spoken, self-effacing. His wife, Cecily, was brawny and florid-faced, and might have been described by the English as either a virago or a termagant. In Ulster she qualified as being a “right ould targe” who dominated her husband. Just as O’Reilly was instantly obeyed by his Labrador, Arthur Guinness, Cecily could make Neill come to heel by fixing him with a sub-Arctic stare and saying one word, “Neill,” in a voice as loaded with venom as the sacs of a king cobra. How he’d stuck it for so long was a mystery to everyone in the village of Ballybucklebo.

  O’Reilly braked, stopped, and said, “Get out. We’ll walk. It’s quicker. And I’ll explain as we go.”

  I followed. There was a back lane to the farmhouse.

  “The drive for cars and farm vehicles is at the other side of the farm and we’d need to drive about four miles to get to it,” he said.

  “Fine by me,” I said, falling into step. The grass crushed by our footsteps gave off a new-mown hay scent, and I could make out the fluted phrases, repeated six times, of a mistle thrush high in a leafy sycamore growing at the end of the lane.

  “You know that Cecily died eight months ago?” O’Reilly asked.

  “I did,” I said. “In the Royal Victoria Hospital. Cerebral aneurysm, as I recall. Unexpected and sudden.” When a weakness of one of the arteries inside the brain burst, death could be rapid. “She regained consciousnes for a day but…” I shrugged. “I seem to remember Neill was pretty stoical about it.”

  “De mortuis nihil nisi bonum…” O’Reilly said.

  “Speak nothing but good of the dead, from the original Greek translated into Latin in the fifteenth century. We had to learn it at school.”

  “Quite,” O’Reilly said, “but the tag doesn’t stop me observing that the dearness of the departed may have left something to be desired and that Neill wasn’t so much exhibiting a stiff upper lip as evincing a great deal of relief. A least that was what was widely believed in the village, and there was great deal of empathy for the man.” O’Reilly plucked a long grass stem to stick between his teeth. “We can be a pretty understanding lot, Ulsterfolk, and it was a combination of that and our archaic superstitiousness that brought Maggie MacCorkle round to see me a wee while back.”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “It seems, and it’s common knowledge, that in the last month Neill has started walking out with the widow Carmichael.” O’Reilly removed the grass stem. “Maggie told me that there’s a belief that Neill is going to propose to the widow.”

  “More power to his wheel,” I said, pleased for them. “And I’ll bet that everybody approves.” I frowned. “I don’t see what Maggie would be concerned about.”

  “That,” said O’Reilly, “is where the superstition comes in. Apparently Cissie Sloan told Aggie Arbuthnot, Aggie told Flo Bishop, and she told Maggie that a patient in the next bed heard Cecily yell at Neill the afternoon before she died that if she went to join the choir invisible and he married again she’d dig herself up from her grave and come to haunt him.”

  That stopped me in my tracks. Coincidentally, the song of the mistle thrush stopped, too. Silence.

  O’Reilly said, “Even dead, she’ll be making the man’s life miserable. He’ll believe he’s accursed. He’d have saved himself a lot of trouble if he’d had her cremated, but you know how country folks feel about that. Our job, at least mine, is to try and get him to see sense. Stop worrying. And it’ll take tact and delicacy.”

  Which, as I had seen repeatedly, were hardly Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly’s long suits.

  “Come on,” he said and strode off.

  I nodded and started to walk the last few yards to the back door of
the McLoughlin farmhouse. We were greeted by a barking border collie. The dog’s racket must have alerted Neill, who opened the back door, said quietly, “Wheest now, Jock. Into your kennel,” waited until the dog had obeyed, and then said, “Come ahead doctors. Old Jock won’t hurt you.” He looked around and remarked, “Brave evening, for the time of year it’s in.”

  We were shown into a spacious kitchen. Neither the range nor the turf fire were lit. The tidy tile-floored room smelled of furniture polish and fried lambs’ liver, bacon, and onions that Neill would have cooked for his tea. “Please sit down,” he said, indicating two arm chairs, and when we were seated asked, “Now what can I do for youse?”

  This was definitely O’Reilly’s problem, so I said nothing. Simply watched and listened.

  “Um,” said O’Reilly, whipping out his half-moon spectacles and perching them on his bent nose, “please understand, Mister McLoughlin, neither Doctor Laverty nor I wish to intrude.”

  Mister McLoughlin smiled and said, “Sure how could you do that, sir? Haven’t yiz been my doctor since after the war? You likely know more about me than I do.”

  The man was certainly making it easy for O’Reilly to broach what for that time in Ulster would have been a delicate matter.

  “It seems,” O’Reilly said, “that when your wife was on her deathbed someone overheard her, ahem, put a curse on you.”

  The man’s smile faded. “That’s right, so it is,” he said. “Mind you, no harm to her, but the way Cecily spoke, never mind hearing in the next bed. They likely heard her the whole length of the Grosvenor Road.”

  I hid a smile, but O’Reilly said, “Would you mind telling me what the curse was?”

  “Mind? Not at all.”

  I frowned. In my experience, country Ulsterfolk took the supernatural very seriously. Neill McLoughlin didn’t seem one bit put out.

  “Please go ahead,” O’Reilly said, leaning back and steepling his fingers.

  “She telt me if I ever looked at another woman she’d dig her way up and come and haunt me.”

  “And,” O’Reilly said, “I’m guessing it’s got you pretty worried because…”

  “Excuse me for interrupting, sir, because I’m walking out with Molly Carmichael?”

  “Well, I, that is…” O’Reilly frowned.

  I confess so did I. With most Ulstermen, O’Reilly would have been right on the money. They would have been terrified.

  O’Reilly said, in his most professional manner, “I can reassure you that medically, scientifically coming back to haunt you, that would be quite impossible.”

  “That’s very kind of you doctor, sir, to try til comfort me. Very kind indeed. And you’re right, you know…”

  I saw O’Reilly relax, smile.

  “Because even if you’re wrong…”

  O’Reilly stiffened.

  “Mister Coffin the undertaker’d heard the rumour too. He’s got a heart of corn, that man. He seen I was dead worried, but told me there was a solution, so there was. And he made the funeral arrangements.”

  I remembered seeing the strangely named village undertaker before. The poor man had an enormous rhinophyma, a condition of blockage of the sebaceous glands of his nose that made him look like Chuckles the Clown wearing only one piece of stage makeup.

  O’Reilly whipped off his half-moons and leant forward.

  I waited to hear about counterspells with getting moss from the skull of a recently buried murderer, “eye of newt, toe of frog, wool of bat, tongue of dog,” that kind of stuff, but the pragmatic answer that Mister Coffin had come up with was blinding in its simplicity.

  O’Reilly said in a hushed voice, “And?”

  “Mister Coffin said, and I was happy til agree, ‘If that’s the case we can fix that. We’ll bury her facedown.’”

  O’Reilly said, “What?” and started to chuckle.

  “Aye,” said Neill McLoughlin, “and if Cecily’s heard I’ve proposed til Molly Carmichael, which I have and she’s accepted, and Cecily’s got started already,” he paused, I think for effect, before saying, “she’s got one hell of a long way to go.”

  Bread

  Homemade bread in Ireland was traditionally soda bread made with soft wheat flour, buttermilk, and bicarbonate of soda (baking soda). Ma seemed to make it every day and I loved to watch. It took no time at all, just a few little minutes, and she never weighed the ingredients but sure didn’t it always turn out just perfect.

  The buttermilk was delivered to the door by “the Buttermilk Man” on his horse and cart. Ma would take an enamel jug out to have it filled from the large steel urn on the back of the cart. Sometimes the horse would leave behind a little gift, which Ma said was very good for the roses as she shovelled it up.

  Of course the bread was delicious, while it was still hot from the baking, with the homemade jam that Ma made with raspberries and strawberries from the garden and blackberries picked in the autumn from the hedgerows in the country lanes by me and my sisters.

  Barmbrack

  This was a traditional sweet bread made at Halloween, and often a ring or silver charms would have been wrapped in greaseproof paper and placed in the mixture before baking. The lucky ingredients included a gold ring (usually a brass curtain ring) to foretell marriage; a silver threepenny bit or a sixpence to forecast wealth; a thimble to forecast spinsterhood; and a button to forecast bachelorhood. This is normally eaten toasted with butter and is much nicer if you can keep it for a day in an airtight tin.

  Makes 1

  12 oz/340 g mixed dried fruit

  4½ oz/127 g soft brown sugar

  9 oz/265 ml brewed black tea

  3½ Tbsp whiskey

  8 oz/227 g all-purpose flour

  1 egg, beaten

  2 tsp baking powder

  ½ tsp pumpkin pie spice (optional)

  1 Tbsp/ 15 ml honey to glaze

  Soak the fruit and sugar in the tea and whiskey overnight. The next day, preheat the oven to 325°F/170°C. Grease a 9 by 5-inch/23 by 12-cm loaf tin (or two smaller loaf tins). (In Ireland this was traditionally made in a round tin about 6 to 7 inches in diameter.) Mix in the flour and egg with the dried fruit, mixture of whiskey and tea, baking powder, and pumpkin pie spice (if you like it spicy) and mix well. Turn into the tin and bake for 1 hour (less if using smaller tins). Turn the loaf out onto a wire rack to cool, then melt the honey and brush the top of the loaf to give it a fine glaze.

  Buttermilk Pancakes

  Makes 10 to 14, depending on thickness

  8 oz/227 g all-purpose flour

  2 oz/56 g sugar

  ¼ tsp salt

  2 eggs

  1 tsp baking soda

  10 oz/295 ml buttermilk

  2 oz/56 g butter, melted, plus extra for the pan

  Sift the flour, sugar, and salt into a large bowl. In a separate bowl, whisk the eggs. Dissolve the baking soda in the buttermilk. Now add the melted butter, beaten eggs, and buttermilk progressively to the flour mixture, beating until there are no lumps. If you leave this to sit in the refrigerator for 10 minutes the batter will be smoother. Just give it another stir. It should look quite thick; however, if you think it is too thick, just add a little more buttermilk.

  Grease a large frying pan with a little butter for the first pancake only and heat over a medium heat. Pour enough batter into the hot pan to make a 6-inch/15-cm pancake. When the beady bubbles burst on the surface of the pancake it is time to flip it over and cook the other side. The second side will only take a minute or less and you may need to reduce the heat too. Leave the pancake on a wire rack to cool or keep warm to serve. Continue with the remaining batter. These pancakes freeze very well.

  Soda Farls

  The word “farl” comes from the Scots word fardel, meaning “fourth.” The bread was shaped into a round and cut into four quarters and cooked on a griddle over an open fire. Nowadays I use a large frying pan instead. They take no time at all to make and are cooked in a shmall little minute.

  Ma
kes 4

  8 oz/227 g all-purpose flour

  ½ tsp baking soda

  ½ tsp salt

  1½ Tbsp butter

  10 oz/295 ml buttermilk

  First warm a griddle or a large frying pan over a medium heat and dust with a little flour. This will stop the wet dough mixture from sticking to the pan.

  Sift the flour, baking soda, and salt into a bowl and rub in the butter. Now make a well in the middle and pour in about three-quarters of the buttermilk, stirring quickly. (The baking soda will react on contact with the buttermilk as the leavening agent, and if you take too long at this step the bread will not rise sufficiently.) Add the remaining buttermilk if needed. While the mixture should be quite wet and sticky it is not as wet as a pancake mixture would be. It should not be too wet and sloppy or you will not be able to shape it. Now if it still looks a little too wet to shape add some more flour gradually until it is like a bread dough and not a pancake batter. Now turn your dough out onto a well-floured work surface and knead lightly, then shape into a flat round.

  Cut the dough into four wedges (farls) and place on the griddle. They should take 5 to 10 minutes on each side. Just to be sure they are cooked through to the centre, you could test with a skewer. Now put the farls on their edges and turn them every few minutes so that the side edges are cooked, too. This is called harning. Allow to cool on a wire rack under a slightly damp Irish linen teacloth. These can be frozen until required.

  Kinky’s Note:

  1. These farls are very quick to make but if you are in a hurry you could substitute vegetable oil for butter and add with the buttermilk. If you cannot find buttermilk in the store you could use sweet milk with the addition of a teaspoonful of cream of tartar and a little lemon juice.

  2. However you make it, no self-respecting Ulster Fry (here) should ever be without a soda farl. The farl is cut in half and fried in the bacon fat until it is crisp on both sides.

  VARIATIONS