I’M PROUD to say that if you come to Ireland for a holiday now you will dine well if you dine out. I’m on the north coast this week and one theory suggested to me for why the food is so good is that local hotels and restaurants have raised their standard for the influx of visitors coming to see the Open in Portrush.
At the Marine Hotel in Ballycastle they have a seafood night on the first Friday of each month. I got wry looks when I asked if this was in keeping with the Catholic tradition of the First Fridays novena which guarantees a happy death, or did when I was at school.
Round the corner and up the main street there is a little cafe called Thyme and Co which serves delicatessen type food like feta cheese and spinach wrapped in filo pastry. Lovely. And they have special nights on Saturdays when they serve pizza. This is so popular that you have to book your place and get your name written in the book.
In Ursa Minor, further up main street, I had a savoury Danish pastry with potato.
I had a starter with crab and fennel with apple and cucumber in the Bayview Hotel in Portballintrae. It was the contrivance of a culinary artist.
This is not the Ireland I grew up in.
And none of this is what you’d call Irish food.
For a country with such a rich sense of tradition in music, literature and politics we don’t have a native cuisine.
OK, a slab of steak with potatoes, boiled cabbage and carrots. That’s about as indigenous as you’d get, and many hotels still serve it with Sunday dinner because that’s what people are used to.
I recall days in my childhood when my mother would put out a big bowl of new potatoes which had been boiled in their jackets. And the skin could be rubbed off with your thumb to expose a marble white surface that you’d dip in butter and salt.
This was when I discovered that eating could be more than the functional address of the wee problem of hunger but could be a sensual indulgence.
The main takeaway was fish and chips, or pastie and chips or even sausages and chips. These were Irish, only in that we Irish ate them, usually with salt and vinegar and wrapped in newspaper. The smell of musty newsprint was intrinsic to the overall experience.
But the English and Scottish were eating like this too.
My mother would make a weekly pot of broth with a bone to flavour the spuds and barley to add more substance. Even that wasn’t distinctly Irish. It is what, when sold in tins, is called scotch broth.
We ate fish on Friday of course but I grew up thinking there were only two types, white and brown.
There were local treats that my father might bring home from the pub he worked in, williks or pigs’ feet. The williks you picked out of their shells with a pin. The pigs’ feet you chewed down to their knuckle.
The song says Molly Malone served cockles and mussels, but even that shows an unimaginative engagement with the products of the shore.
No one in my youth had ever heard of samphire. Now it is ubiquitous. Mint was a weed. If you liked the taste you got it from chewing gum.
Vegetarianism was for cows.
Our native breads, wheaten and soda, are drab and heavy.
Now we delight in the cuisines of other nations. The most common takeaway is the pizza. Before that it was Chinese food.
I was probably forty when I had my first pizza and about the same age when I had my first bagel or croissant. Now every supermarket on the road I live on sells both, often fresh and warm. And pain au chocolat. I can imagine what my da would have said to the idea of chocolate in bread - for breakfast!
I never in all my childhood years had tasted a pepper or broccoli.
We now eat Indian food, Lebanese food, Italian food.
Fast food is still appallingly dull, bits of dead chicken with everything. I don’t know when I last saw a cold beef sandwich in a display counter.
And that’s the other side of it. The dull Irish appetite honed on spuds and chunks of cow and pig flesh has little interest in diversity. Nor does it want herbs and spices but loves plenty of salt.
I have heard chefs complain that their customers really just want a big steak with roast potatoes and that this demand inhibits their creativity.
The current diversity of food is a measure of our exposure to the wider world.
Ireland’s lack of a culinary tradition of its own has left a space for lavish cosmopolitan dining, but also for local invention. I mean, would you get a savoury Danish pastry with potato in Paris, Beirut, Oslo or New Delhi?
You’ll have to come to Ballycastle for that.
Malachi O’Doherty’s novel on the Northern Irish Troubles
Terry Brankin Has A Gun is published by Merrion Press
How To Fix Northern Ireland is published by Atlantic Books
See More: Causeway Coast, Cuisine, Irish Culinary Scene
