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.

That may be one reason why it sits so naturally in April. By that stage, the cows are back on the grass, the milk beginning to strengthen, the whole dairy economy stirring again after winter. But April is still a threshold month, not yet abundant as May or June. Buttermilk belongs to these thresholds. It belongs to the Irish household and resides between scarcity and plenty, between milk and butter, between the labour of the churn and the meal on the table.

The Dúchas Schools’ Collection is full of such quiet evidence. In one Co. Tipperary account:

The buttermilk is used for several purposes especially for bread making. In olden times people used it for washing their faces when tender from the wind, and delicate people usually drink it (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0532, Page 208).

Another account from Co. Louth notes that after churning, buttermilk was used “for making bread, and for drinking, and for giving to the pigs, and for making whey” (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0669, Page 035). In Co. Donegal, older foodways are recalled with great simplicity:

Long ago the people used to eat great feeds. At their breakfast they would eat a great feed for porridge and buttermilk and when dinner-time came they would eat potatoes and buttermilk and at supper-time they would eat oat-cake and new milk. The people of long ago were very strong on account of the great appetites they had. They had great teeth on account of them eating oat-meal cakes. They used always do two hours work before their breakfast. (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0205, Page 283).

In Skerries, Co. Dublin too, “buttermilk and meal bread” appear as part of the ordinary daily meal:

In olden times people had three meals a day, which consisted of buttermilk and meal bread for the breakfast. Some people in olden times worked before breakfast. For dinner they would have potatoes, fresh ray or dried fish. In olden times people used shell cocoa instead. For their third meal the old people had shell cocoa and meal bread. Bacon was mostly long ago, and fresh meat was hardly ever eaten. Beef was generally eaten in olden times The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0785, Page 166).

None of this is grand, in terms of a culinary cuisine, but that is the point. It was ordinary in the way that bread is ordinary, or hunger is ordinary. It was just there and perhaps that is the image of Irish food that we often refuse.

That older Irish diet of potatoes, oat or maize meal, and milk in its various forms has long been remarked on by historians and folklorists. Kevin Danaher, in The Year in Ireland (1972), returns again and again to the yearly round of dairying, household labour, and the practical intimacy between people and animals in rural life, that is, the cycle of milk, cream, churning, and butter was not incidental to the year, but one of its structuring rhythms (174). Even where butter carried status or market value, buttermilk remained in the house: drunk and folded into all manner of baked goods. In his essay “Old Irish Buttermaking” (1949) Mícheál Ó Sé notes the antiquity of buttermilk in Irish Gaelic life, citing early medieval hagiographical references to churning and the produce of the churn (62). For Ó Sé, buttermilk is not a modern health drink but one of the old liquids of Ireland, which carried magical and religious associations:

And in the early twelfth century Life of St. Colmain, ‘after a churning […] he blessed the buttermilk and there came out of it a great curd’. The utilisation of the curd of skim milk and of buttermilk may help to explain the frequency of the references to whey as a drink. (64).

There is something moving in that. Butter goes outward to table, to market, to exchange, to status, even to export. But buttermilk remains at home to give life to the house. It is domestic in the deepest sense. Perhaps that is why it rarely receives much literary glamour. And yet it belongs to a whole register of Irish writing where plain food stands in for endurance, household economy, and the discipline of living close to the land. It is not hard to imagine it in the background of Kavanagh’s Monaghan or Heaney’s Derry: not as symbol exactly, but as fact, something present on the table before any poem begins. Heaney’s “Digging,” with its memory of “new potatoes” and work handed down through generations, is not about buttermilk, but it lives in that same rural economy of spade and soil (Heaney 1998: 3).

In terms of Irish food, Buttermilk has the virtue of forcing us to remember that Irish dairy culture was not simply, and perhaps never, about richness. It was about transformation of the ordinary into the edible. Milk became cream. Cream became butter. Butter left behind buttermilk. Nothing was wasted. Everything was upcycled for another purpose. In one Dúchas entry, buttermilk is used for bread; in another from Glennamaddy, Co. Galway it becomes scailteen, warmed and thickened with oatmeal, a kind of hot sustaining dish:

Scailteen: To make this a quart of buttermilk is procured and put into a saucepan on the fire to heat. When it is sufficiently warm oatmeal is put through it. It is kept constantly stirred and it is allowed to simmer for half an hour. When it is well done it is served while hot on plates together with sugar and butter (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0017, Page 298).

This making of this dish tells us something about taste as well as thrift in early 20^th century Ireland. Sourness had a place in the Irish mouth. The tang of cultured dairy, the bite of fermentation, the living acidity that sits so well with soda bread: this was not a marginal flavour but a familiar one that is now returning to us anew.

Yet, traces of that older palate still with us. The soda bread tradition depends on it, structurally as well as emotionally. The loaf made with buttermilk is one of the great Irish expressions of making do beautifully. In April especially, when the year is turning but has not yet turned fully, it feels like the right bread for the moment: plain, quick, and nourishing, served with soup.

In Aniar, where we make butter every second or third day, buttermilk comes as part of that same old transaction. It is easy enough in a modern kitchen to focus on the golden thing that forms, the thing you can shape and salt and serve. But the buttermilk is a reminder that food history is often hidden in by-products, in what remains after the obvious triumph. It carries with it a whole domestic archive: bread ovens, spring dairies, tired hands, and the practical intelligence of women who knew how to turn one process into several foods. We serve buttermilk with raw oysters, seaweed and sea herbs at this time of year, showing how old food traditions can be folded into new ones continually. The fresh acidity of buttermilk is our own kind of lemon on the north.

April, in that sense, is a buttermilk month. Not lush and not extravagant. But alive with the return of warmer weather and longer days. The grass and wild herbs growing. The milk is changing. The house begins again to gather those seasonal transformations it has known for generations, often unseen by our modern eyes. And somewhere, in some other time, in a basin or a jug or a loaf, the pale sour remainder is still doing its work for Irish food culture.

Yours in Irish food,

Jp.

7th April, 2026.

The word “visceral” describes deep, instinctive, and unreasoning emotions or sensations felt in the body, rather than through intellect. The meaning of the word originating in the 16th century from Latin viscera which related to ones “internal organs”. In Shakespeare’s langauge, it literally relates to the bowels or organs and figuratively refers to those raw, gut feelings, that were traditionally considered the seat of human emotion. A “visceral” Macbeth of blood and fear, appetite and spiritual unease. The Druid prodution captures this viscerality through its use of darkness, a squalid living force, pressing in on everything in the play, though mostly through the character of Macbeth, played by the inimitable Marty Rae, himself.

What stayed with me most was the table. A plain wooden table, but also not a plain wooden table. In theatre, as in life, as Roland Barthes has told us, a table is never just furniture. It is a sign of something else. It is where families gather, where bread is made, where wine is poured, where guests are welcomed, where bargains are struck, where stories are told, where bodies are fed. It is domestic, social, and sacred. In Druid’s double-bill, that table travels from Synge into Shakespeare, a ghost of itself. In Riders to the Sea (1904), Rachel O’Byrne’s Cathleen kneads bread there, an act both ordinary and ritualistic. Reviewers note that this bread-making reappears in Macbeth, with O’Byrne, now Lady Macduff, kneading bread again at the same wooden table. The image forms a bridge between the two plays: the daily bread of rural Ireland, women’s labour in the 16th century, feminine household continuity, and, of course, as we see today in the Palestine, the fragile work of keeping life going in a violent and contingent world.

That image matters because Macbeth is so often treated as a play of kings and generals, of prophecy and ambition, of men speaking in the language of destiny, with a couple of witches thrown in for good and humorous measure. But Druid insists on the image of the household in this play. It insists on the things that mad tyrants want to destroy.

Bread.

Children.

Tables.

Feasting.

The ordinary ceremonies that make civilisation possible in Shakespeare’s and Synge’s day, in our own on going days of war. Perhaps one of the most devastating details in this production is that Macbeth’s slaughter of Macduff’s family is staged not simply as a murder but as an assault on what Riders to the Sea had already taught us to value: bread, heirlooms, and the sacred remnants of family life.

Tyranny here is not only political.

It is anti-domestic.

As always, it tears up the tablecloth of the world for diabolical ends.

And then there is the issue of feasting. Shakespeare’s banquet scene has always been one of the great set-pieces of political theatre where power tries to look secure while panic blooms in public. But in Druid’s version, though muted and without food, the feast seems to draw on the Christian ritual of wine in order to profane upon it (as does the broken crucifix in the show). The Guardian describes the banquet as a twisted verision of the Last Supper, with glasses filled not with wine but with blood-tainted water. That is a remarkable perceptive image. Wine, in the Western imagination, is never just a drink. It is pleasure, hospitality, intoxication, liturgy, among many other things. To place bloodied water in its stead is to show a kingdom where even the symbols of fellowship have curdled from the evil which lives underneath.

This is where the production’s use of light and dark becomes so powerful. The Irish Times speak of Grenfell’s “miraculously etched shadows” of candlelight, storm, topsoil, low hidden entrances, and an “inhabited darkness” thickened by design and sound. Darkness in this production of Macbeth is not just atmosphere. It is a kind of moral weather. It is the condition under which power operates throughout the play. Light, when it does appear, does not console, or assuage. Even the normal comfort of Christian imagery is unstable. A crucified Christ hangs on the back wall. Macbeth climbs up and plucks his crown from the twisted figure of Christ. The crown is explicitly a Christian crown of thorns. The point of this desecration is clear: sacred light has been violated and turned into part of the theatre of domination.

Watching or even reading about this production, it is difficult not to think of Game of Thrones. Not because Druid has turned Shakespeare into television, but because both works understand that power is never abstract. It is sensual, bodily, theatrical. It happens in the midst of the ordinary: at feasts, in bedrooms, over cups, around tables, under banners, in rooms lit half by candle and half by dread. Violence and sex are never wholly separate in such worlds; both are tied to power, to succession, to legitimacy, to the fantasy of mastery. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as united in lust, for power and for one another, before ultimatley being destroyed by the very energies they unleash upon Scotland. That makes the comparison to Game of Thrones feel apt: not fantasy as escapism, but fantasy as a heightened realism of how power feeds on spectacle and desire.

And that brings us back to the present. The truly contemporary thing in Druid’s Macbeth is not its costumes or any superficial updating, but its understanding of tyranny. The Guardian remarked that although the production is set in a medieval world of omens, mud and candlelight, its portrayal of tyranny and the speed with which civility falls away feels anything but remote. That is exactly right. Modern dictators, as we know, rule through theatre, through performance. They pose with symbols, stand beneath religious icons, stage banquets, cultivate images of destiny, masculinity and historical inevitability: Make Macbeth Great Again.

They turn public ritual into personal myth. They hollow out institutions while borrowing their grandeur. What Druid’s Macbeth seems to understand is that tyranny is always aesthetic before it is administrative. It has to be seen. It has to be performed. It has to turn bloodshed into ceremony.

It has nothing to do with truth.

Which is why the act of bread making matters so much to this production. Bread is the opposite of tyranny’s spectacle. It is slow. Repetitive. Domestic. Made by women’s hand. It belongs to the maintenance of civilization, rather than its conquest. To see Lady Macduff kneading bread at the wooden table is to be reminded of what power is supposed to protect and what bad people always destroy. In that image lies the emotional and political heart of this production in the West of Ireland. Before the murders, before the banquet collapses into horror, before the shadows thicken completely, there is bread being made.

There is life being kept together by small acts of domestic continuity.

Perhaps that is finally what Druid’s Macbeth leaves us with: not simply a meditation on evil, but a vision of the things opposed to it. Bread against blood. Table versus throne. Household versus tyranny. Daily labour standing, as always, against spectacular violence. In a world of dictators, or indeed in a culture increasingly fascinated by the glamour of brutality on our tiny little screens, the act of making bread like a truth that is worth holding on to in this crazy world.

Leaving the Black Box in Galway last night, hammered by wind and rain, the image of a woman making bread at a wooden table remained with me. It is impossible now not to think of other tables, other kitchens, other women trying to keep life together in the midst of bombardment and fear, whether in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran or elsewhere. The distance between stage and world suddenly feels very small. A loaf on a table in the west of Ireland answers, however faintly, to bread made under drones, under curfew, under the long shadow of men who confuse power with destiny.

That may be the deepest light in Druid’s Macbeth. Not the light of kingship, nor religion, nor victory, but the ordinary light that falls on flour, wood, women’s hands and hunger. In a culture fascinated by the glamour of brutality, and in a world still governed in too many places by war and spectacle, that feels less like symbolism and more like truth.

To bake bread in an age of war is an act of resistance.

Yours in Irish food.

Jp.

4th April, 2026

Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born (W.B. Yeats, Easter, 1916).

Easter in Ireland has never belonged to a single dish. It is not like Christmas, with its goose or turkey, or even Shrove Tuesday, with its annual celebration of pancakes. Easter is broader than that, and rather represents a cluster of foods, prohibitions, releases, symbols, and small household ceremonies gathered around the end of Lent. To write about Easter in Irish food culture is to write not only about what was eaten, but about what had not been eaten for weeks beforehand. Easter food in Ireland is food returning to the kitchen table: eggs after abstinence, butter after denial, meat after restraint, sweetness after long severity. The feast matters most of all but the fast beforehand explains it.

In old Ireland lent was, by our modern standards, austere to the point of self-flagellation. Meat, eggs, dairy and alcohol were all restricted, depending on period, place, class, and degree of observance. Often to the point of complete abstinence to the chagrin of the many men who wanted a drink. The point of Easter, then, was not indulgence in the modern commercial sense, but release: the body and the household passing from discipline into celebration. The National Museum of Ireland notes that Easter morning marked the end of fasting, and that the accumulation of eggs and dairy during Lent helped provide a welcome breakfast. That small detail tells us a great deal. Easter Sunday was not merely commemorative; it was materially felt in the kitchen, pantry, and byre. It was tasted.

If one food stands at the centre of Irish Easter custom, it is the egg. In folklore, memory, and custom, eggs are the most persistent Easter food in Ireland. Dúchas material records again and again that people ate more eggs on Easter Sunday than on any other day of the year. In one Schools’ Collection entry from Killough, County Donegal, we are told:

Easter is the happiest time of the year it is kept in honour of Christ rising from the dead. In olden times there were many old customs kept, all the girls and boys when they get their holidays used to go around collecting eggs and they call that their “Easter Cludog”. It is customary to eat more eggs on Easter Sunday than any other day. It is said that the eggs that are layed on “Good Friday” are kept and eaten on Easter Sunday. Some people get up to see the sun dancing on Easter Sunday morning. All these customs are fading away now in this part of the country, people say the sun dances, but very few ever are so interested as to arise on this one morning in the year to see this unusual sight (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0726, Page 220).

In another, from Callan, Co. Kilkenny, young people are described going from house to house during Holy Week gathering eggs, and on Easter morning “the people eat two or three eggs each. This is called gathering the cúbóg” (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0854, Page 016). These are not grand dishes of Irish food culture, but they are revealing ones. Easter was often made not through culinary display but through abundance restored in the simple form the egg.

The egg carried more than nourishment. It was also symbol, reward, and a kind of vernacular theology of the day. A Dúchas entry from Drong, County Cavan, describes children lighting a fire outdoors and boiling eggs in it; the account explains that the eggs resemble the Resurrection:

Namely as the young bird springs forth from the egg, so in the same manner, did Our Saviour, spring forth from the grave” (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 1117, Page 226).

In the same tradition, whin blossoms might be boiled with the eggs to stain them yellow. What is striking here is the intimacy between doctrine and domestic practice: the Resurrection rendered not only in sermon but in shell, fire, colour, and appetite.

There are also the curious beliefs around Good Friday eggs, which open a window onto the overlap of food and folk protection. Several Dúchas entries note that eggs laid on Good Friday were kept and eaten on Easter Sunday. One entry from Ballycomoyle, Co. Westmeath, says these eggs were thought to give the family “good health for the year” (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0721, Page 270). Another preserves the same belief in slightly different form. Such customs remind us that Easter food was not merely celebratory. It was prophylactic, devotional, charged with luck and health. To eat at Easter was sometimes to do more than feed oneself: it was to partake in a timed blessing. Time and again in Irish food culture, we see this link between food and the sacred.

Children, unsurprisingly, seem to have occupied a vivid place in these customs. In several parts of Ireland, they gathered eggs in Holy Week. Elsewhere, Easter games and decorated eggs are recorded. The National Museum notes that there were usually enough eggs for children to decorate and use in Easter games, while Dúchas remembers “Easter houses” and outdoor fires where eggs were boiled and eaten with “griddle bread” and lashing of butter (Danaher, 76). This is worth dwelling on in terms of current secular attitudes. Easter in older Ireland was not only solemn. It had in it a note of sanctioned gaiety, a release of children’s (and the adults) appetite and energy after the long moral weather of Lent.

Fish sits in Irish Easter as both penance and ironic punchline. Good Friday, especially along the coast, carried strong inhibitions about the sea: folk belief held that it was an unsafe day to go out, and many communities kept boats in and avoided fishing not just because it was a day of abstinence, but because the day itself was considered dangerous for the water (McGarry, 26). Danaher (1972) observes that:

All along the coast people went to the beach and gathered shellfish and seaweed which they are as their main meal; as there is always a full moon in Holy Week there usually is not shortage of this bia tragha, ‘shore food’ (71).

With the ending of Lent, fish could become the scapegoat. In places like Cork and Drogheda, butchers, and their boys, staged a rowdy ritual sometimes called “Whipping the Herring”: herrings were paraded through the streets, beaten or “mock-buried,” and finally dumped into a river, a comic funeral for the food that had sustained the fast, and a public way of declaring that meat, and prosperity, was coming back. In some tellings, the herring’s “mock funeral” was followed by the raising of a lamb (or lamb imagery) as a counter-symbol of Easter renewal (Danaher, 72). The table turned from fish and restriction to spring meat and celebration.

If eggs are the most deeply rooted Irish Easter food, lamb belongs to a slightly different layer of meaning. It is less the folk custom of the morning than the formal feast of the day. Roast lamb is now one of the most familiar Easter dinners in Ireland, and the diaspora abroad. Its symbolism is plain enough: spring, sacrifice, renewal, the Lamb of God. In most people’s imaginations, roast lamb is one of the most traditional meals for Easter Sunday, heralding the end of Lent. Yet it is worth being careful here. Lamb may be traditional, but not every Irish household historically would have had equal access to it. For some, Easter dinner may have been lamb. Spring lamb is small and not for a large family. It is also expensive. For most of us, ham or bacon, or another meat made more sense economically. Tradition is often real without ever having been universal.

That said, lamb fits Easter beautifully in the Irish imagination. It arrives at the hinge between scarcity and growth of the land. The fields are turning, the first brighter shade of green is returning, the sun shines again after the long dark of winter, and the animal itself seems to carry a spring in its body. In culinary terms, it also marks a movement away from the hard, preserving logic of winter and into something more tender. In symbolic terms, it is almost overdetermined: Hebrew Passover, Christian sacrifice, pastoral seasonality, and the domestic desire for a proper feast all meet in the one roast. Even where the folkloric record is fuller on eggs than on lamb, the latter still belongs to the shape of Easter as a day of restored richness. Interestingly, one fifty year old observer from Cork mentions the consumption “a quarter of veal and eggs” at Easter (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0375, Page 114). Beef was also often consumed by “better off famers” but for those with less money (or no fresh meat), corned beef (salted from the previous winter) and cabbage would be the daily fair of Easter Sunday:

This custom is hardly remembered in Ireland now, but the memory of ‘corned beef and cabbage’ as the Irishman;s festive meal crossed the Atlantic with immigrants and still survives in America (Danaher, 79).

Hot cross buns take us back a step, to Good Friday, and to a food custom shared across Ireland and Britain. Their place in Easter is secure, but more specifically they belong to the day before the feast: a spiced, fruited bun marked with a cross, eaten with tea, carrying both liturgical symbolism and household familiarity. I recall many memories of them in my youth, and though I never quite liked the spiced aspect of the bun, I have made my peace with them, especially with a good amount of butter. Dúchas contains many references to them. One entry from Athboy simply notes: “Hot Cross buns are eaten on Good Friday” (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0696, Page 223). Another says it was customary to make them for Holy Thursday and Good Friday, and that they were eaten at teatime. Their importance lies partly in their timing. Even before Easter Sunday arrives, sweetness begins to edge back into the domestic day, in both symbolic and quotidian term.

The bun also belongs to that old world in which certain foods were thought to carry protective force because of when they were made. Across these islands, Good Friday baking was often believed to keep unusually well or to protect the house; Irish custom participated in that wider pattern. This is one of the most compelling features of Holy Week foodways in Ireland: bread and eggs are never just bread and eggs. Time itself alters them. A bun made on Good Friday, an egg laid on Good Friday, butter withheld until Easter: these become foods thickened by a sacred chronology that we seem to have lost in contemporary Ireland.

Simnel cake sits somewhat differently again. It belongs to the Easter season in Ireland, certainly, but it feels more adopted than native in the folkloric sense. Its deeper history is English and British, associated originally with Mothering Sunday and only later more strongly fixed to Easter. It travelled easily into Irish baking culture, especially in convent, bakery, and middle-class domestic contexts, and is now familiar enough on Irish Easter tables. But unlike eggs, it does not seem to carry the same dense vernacular presence in the Irish folk record. Simnel cake is part of Irish Easter, yes, but it is part of that Easter as received and adapted, rather than grown directly from the old local soil. Darina Allen (1995) observes that the cake more than likely entered Ireland in Elizabethan times as a spiced bread and was transformed into a cake over time.

Perhaps that is the larger point in our Irish food calendar. Easter in Ireland is not one thing but a layering of many things: official liturgy, folk belief, household economy, imported baking traditions, children’s rituals, and the old annual hunger for fat, eggs, butter and meat after weeks of denial and too many fish. The day is shaped as much by absence as by abundance. That is why eggs matter so much. They are plain, common, domestic, and yet at Easter they become almost ceremonial. They are the perfect Irish Easter food because they unite thrift, symbolism, season, theology, and appetite in one small form. Lamb may preside over the dinner table, hot cross buns over Good Friday tea, and simnel cake over the more Anglicised or modern Easter spread, but the egg remains the true vernacular emblem of the feast.

And perhaps that is why Easter still retains a peculiar emotional charge in Irish food memory. It is not simply that the table becomes richer. It is that the richness has been waited for. The first egg broken after Lent, the butter returned, the smell of a roast, the currants and spice of a bun, the marzipan of a simnel cake: all of these speak of a people long trained to feel the year through the disciplines of the church, the limits of the pantry, and the slow arrival of spring. Easter, in that sense, is not only a feast of resurrection.

It is a feast of permission.

Happy Easter everyone.

Jp.

3rd April, 2026.

Between St Patrick’s Day and Easter, I like to think of this as Ireland’s other spring tonic: not the roadside ditch, but the strand. It is not hedgerow medicine but a medicine of the sea. The first green relief coming up out of rock pools and shingle, bright and briny, and practical in a way that never needed to call itself foraging in old Ireland because it was so integrated into the daily lives of coastal people to practically become drudgery.

In March, the days get longer, though the sea is still cold, and the work of gathering feels like it belongs to the season of Lent: modest, disciplined, and coldly repetitive. Even where the shore harvest was done for cash (for example kelp and carrageen), there’s a familiar Irish logic to it: a small Irish industry built on hard weather and local knowledge to keep the hardship at bay.

Dúchas gives us these shore practices in a way in which many Irish people will have forgotten. These are the observations of seventy-three of John Regan from Fybagh in Co. Kerry:

The people long ago used gather a lot of seaweed because they used it for mostly everything. They used it as manure for the land - and long ago the people used give it to their horses and cattle to eat. They used it as food for themselves also. In the time of the famine when the people were very poor and they had not enough of money to buy food for themselves they used eat seaweed. They used first pick the soft part of the seaweeds and boil it in pots. They used put very little water in it. They used leave it boil well and it used get thick like porridge.

Then they used take it off the fire and eat it out of enamel plates. It was also very good for cold or cough. One day three women and a little girl set out from Castleisland to come to Keel to get something to eat along the strand. After three days they came to Boreen Ladarac and they went to the strand. They brought seaweed they boiled the seaweed over a little fire they made, and the little girl would not eat it and one of the women said, “Ate the let Mainín”. One of the women died and was buried in the boreen and another died and was buried inside Ned Casey’s gate. It is used for manure now. It is not good for the land because it poisons it. It is good for a crop in strong bawn ground. The seaweed the people ate during the famine years was a brown seaweed called Duilleamáin (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0432, Page 342).

This is the essence of Irish seaweed, that is, seaweed used in a multiplicity of ways: seaweed as texture, as warmth, as medicine, as survival. Arguably the biggest use of seaweed in March historically is as fertility, not as flavour, unfortunately. In Wexford, Dúchas records seaweed being taken from the beach as manure, valued enough to affect the economics of land

Seaweed (locally called “woar”) has been always used extensively as manure in the district of Bannow and on this account the rents of the holdings in the district were much higher than for similar land in other districts especially inland. The weed is taken from the beach without any attempt at selection and is regarded as especially suitable for root crops. It is never used for corn or meadow or grassland. Its value lasts for the one crop hence there is great labour owing to the continued drawing of the woar. […] The woar was to be drawn only from sunrise to sunset and any breach of the rule was reported by the man in charge of the woar for the landlord. Cases were brought to court in Duncormick and offenders fined. Owing to the great value of the weed and the restrictions on the beach there were often disputes and fighting. A farmer in trying to bring an extra heavy load often got held up and as passages were narrow the way would be blocked, and no others could come in or get out. That would cause a very severe fight. Even to delay talking or smoking would cause trouble (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0876, Page 031).

This is a crucial thing to keep in view when we think about seaweed in Ireland. Our relationship wasn’t only culinary. It was agricultural, industrial, and domestic all at once, and even led to “fighting and disputes”.

Do we still fight over seaweed?

One particular seaweed that feels perfectly placed in March, especially from a culinary point of view, is laver or sloke (sleabhcán) that dark, iron-rich leaf that was boiled down into something almost like a sea porridge to make laver bread. It was also cooked together with “sea lettuce, dulse and carrageen moss […] boiled together with limpets and oatmeal to make a dish called cruasach (meaning strength or vigour), and the cooking juice was used as a relish for potatoes” (Zocchi et al.).

In the main manuscript collection, Dúchas has a wonderful, slightly mournful note about the decline of seaweed harvesting in 1930s Ireland.

Sleabhean, Sladdy or sloke, an edible seaweed was formerly cooked for food. Some of the old people relished it more than any other dish. It was medicinal and health-giving. Not much used now. It is superseded by jam and other sweet foods. In the spring months it was at its best (The Main Manuscript Collection, Volume 0581, Page 142).

That sharp contrast, seaweed replaced by jam, captures a whole 20th-century change in Irish taste: the move away from brine, bitter, and sour flavours, into the sweetness and softness of industrial food stuffs. It’s also had a quietly political and ethical ring to it: what we stopped eating when sugar and imported luxuries became normal. In her book The Cookin’ Woman: Irish Country Recipes (1949), Florence Irwin includes a Co. Down recipe for sloke cakes (what the Welsh would call laver bread:

Take some boiled sloke, dress it with butter and cream and season it well. Into it mix enough oatmeal to enable you to form it into cakes. Make these about the size of small fish cakes. Toss in oatmeal. Fry I the pan after frying the bacon (198).

Nowadays in Aniar, we use laver every spring, often cooking it with stout, apple balsamic vinegar and apple syrup to make a seaweed “jam” to serve with poached fish or shellfish. It makes a dark luscious purée that is a quite saline and mineral in its aspect. Fresh laver can also be a folded in bread dough, or simply used fresh, to garnish shellfish and fish. Laver is one of those ingredients that can read as ancient and modern at the same time. Though it’s no fast food. It takes a few hours to cook in down to a purée. However, it can be used fresh to make a simple seaweed salsa with dillisk and sea lettuce, a few drops of cold pressed rapeseed oil and our seaweed vinegar.

Another seaweed that pops up in March is Carrageen moss. This one has a longer history of use in Ireland. It is an Irish shore ingredient that somehow managed to cross the boundary from necessity into comfort in many 19^th century households. After it is gathered, it is dried and stored for late use. Typically, t is used to thicken sweeten milk and turned into a king of sea-pudding or Blancmange (Irwin, 1949: 197). It’s also one of those foods that never entirely lost its folk-medicine aura. In old Irish recipe manuscripts collections, it is used for softening coughs and easing rheumatic weakness, and sleeplessness. It was a sweetened sea-cure disguised as a child’s treat in the from of sweet milk. A recent report observed that:

Carrageen moss is still the most important and well known Irish sea-vegetable [and has] long been hand-picked in the mid-and lower Intertidal from late Spring to early Autumn, dried and/or bleached for sale in Ireland and abroad as Carrageen moss or Irish moss (Morrissey et al.).

The Dúchas’ photographic collection includes images of carrageen picking showing how work on the shore was part of ordinary livelihood in the past. In a poem recorded in the Schools’ Collection, Carrageen shows up in the third verse:

How nice ‘tis to walk on a fine sunny day, To view the Sherries that will never decay,
Where the seagrass the seaweed and old carrageen, They grow on the rocks by the slopes of Dooneen.

(The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0400, Page 143-144).

Then there is kelp. I’m not talking about the romantic kelp (often called kombu) of today’s many tasting menus in Ireland (which comes from Japan), but the kelp of kilns and smoke, made for soda ash and later iodine. Back then, the shore was a whole into industry unto itself. There’s good archaeological scholarship describing kelp manufacture in Ireland from the 17th to early 20th centuries as a significant industry supplying materials for contemporary industries (Forsythe).

Burning seaweed into kelp ash produced two valuable things: an alkali (“soda ash”) and, later, iodine. The alkali was a basic industrial ingredient that was used to make soap, to help manufacture glass, and in textile processing and bleaching (including linen), as well as other early chemical uses. When iodine recovery became commercially important, it fed a different set of products: medicines and antiseptics, and iodine compounds used in photography (light-sensitive iodides), with some accounts linking it to dyes.

The Marine Institute of Ireland observes that kelp industry in Ireland was once “extremely strong” but later declined mainly because of cheaper industrial chemistry that produced soda ash and cheaper global sources of iodine from Chile. Dúchas catches this fact in a single plain line from the Dingle Peninsula: “The kelp industry has disappeared” (The Main Manuscript Collection, Volume 0211, Page 0503).

Nowadays, we use Irish kelp for making our seaweed broths (similar to a Dashi). As a cooked sea vegetable, I love its chewy texture, but evidence of historic eating is difficult to ascertain. However, as I’ve often said, absence of evidence it not evidence of absence.

Perhaps the most exciting part of March, in terms of our food calendar, is the return of lush green salty sea herbs. If seaweed is the shore’s dark pantry, then these plants are its bright one. They are greens that grow right on the edge of the Atlantic and taste like wind and the sea mixed together.

Aptly named, scurvygrass is a coastal plant with a maritime disease folded into its identity as it was said to cure scurvy. Dúchas gives us multiple local accounts of scurvygrass as a cure, one noting it “On the cliff beside Lake Muskerry on the Galtees, there is a weed called scurvy grass which will cure scurvy. (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0575, Page 327). Another, from Minard, Co. Kerry, says scurvygrass “grows in sandy places” and that people travelled to get it. (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0426, Page 256). Finally, a Rosscarbery, Co. Cork, entry lists Biolar Trágha (scurvy grass) and instructs making tea from it. (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0308, Page 152). This isn’t just simple plant folk lore. It’s a reminder that the coast was once a pharmacy for people who lived with constant fear of deficiency and long winters. March was a time when that natural green cure mattered to us most.

Sea kale is a type of cabbage that grows in sandy coastal areas around Ireland. Loved by Darina Allen of Ballymaloe, sea kale, which her mother-in-law Myrtle Allen championed as a forgotten Irish vegetable, gives you a lovely taste of things past. It is rare enough, almost as rare as wild salmon, so when we get it in Aniar, we always cook simply, blanching it and then seasoning. Myrtle Allen fried the sea kale and served it on soda bread with Hollandaise sauce. Many country houses, such as Ballymaloe, have sea kale in their walled gardens due to the difficulty in finding it.

In the Schools’ Collection, a Wexford account observes that “Sea Kale - years ago it was stewed with fish” (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0879, Page 016). We don’t often think of pairing brassicas (cabbage) with fish but it’s a vanished habit that we would do well to look back to, an old domestic and vanished habit, tying things to their place of origin.

Sea beet is the spinach of sea shore’s often paired with floury potatoes to make a lovely green soup. Its shiny, waxy leaves, are naturally seasoned by the salty air. It’s often called sea spinach in older Irish culinary writing. Sea beet is the ancestor of vegetables like beetroot, Swiss chard, and sugar beet. Sea beet acts as a bridge between inland weeds and shore weeds. It’s a little bit of salty green relief for those Irish who were a tad vitamin deficient after the long and cold winter. Sea beet blackens quickly after cooking so I often use the smaller leaves and eat them raw.

Rock samphire is the most theatrical of the sea herbs. Cliff-grown, aromatic, and historically associated with pickling, some foragers hate its bitter, petroleum like taste. Trinity’s Food History project notes that rock samphire was commonly cooked in vinegar and made into pickles across historical recipes. As well as being pickled, it also served as a medicine. Few sea herbs are as famous, not because they were widely consumed in recent history, but because rock samphire is mentions in Shakespeare’s King Lear (1607) ‘Half-way down Hangs one that gathers samphire; dreadful trade!’ (Act IV, Scene VI, Lines 14-15).

Pickled samphire still has a place in contemporary Irish cooking, especially in Anier, served where you’d use capers or gherkins, cutting though fat, waking up fish, or adding acidity to a rich buttery sauce. Its brine, both saline and acidic, is a useful substitute for lemon juice. Rock samphire is not an easy plant. It asks for confidence and care, due to tis terroir and taste. It’s another reminder that shore food aren’t just ingredients. They are the custodians of a secret history of Irish food.

So the shore hands us back to Easter in a different register. Inland, the calendar swells towards eggs and dairy, lamb and sweetness, the small ceremonies that feel like permission after Lent. The shore larder isn’t ceremonial in that way. It’s tougher and tastes more like salty wind.

Though even in the lean stretch of March, before the official abundance arrives, the coastline is already feeding us with survival and renewal: laver boiled down into the dark mineral softness of a Sligo sunset, scurvygrass as a cure disguised as a wasabi- like leaf, or simply charred sea kale with poached cod. The old kelp industry that once turned the shore into an economy has long gone, but the knowledge of the strand persists in another form: not kilns or commerce now, but flavour, restraint, and memories of an older way of living and eating.

March, on the coast at least, is Ireland reminding itself again it is an island.

Yours in Irish food,

Jp McMahon.

1st April, 2026.

If chicken curry with rice and chips feels like one of the most ordinary dishes today in Irish food culture, it is only because these different histories have settled so comfortably into one another that we no longer notice the seams in our daily lives of chicken balls and chips.

Imperial Origins

The first history of curry in Ireland is imperial. Curry entered Irish life through Britain’s entanglement with India, and the Irish were deeply implicated in that world. Though we may not like to admit it, the Irish served as soldiers, administrators, officers, medics, and retournées from that colonial project. What came back was not “Indian food” in any full or coherent sense, but an Anglo-Indian habit of curry: powdered and simplified, made portable for mess halls and upper-class domestic kitchens. History Ireland notes that curry had become part of officers’ messes and gentlemen’s clubs across the empire, a dish already some distance from its regional Indian origins. That is the world from which an aristocratic lobster curry in Co. Mayo in the early nineteenth century begins to make sense.

The Mahon Papers give us a striking glimpse of this older Irish curry world. In the National Library’s collection list, among household notes, remedies and recipes, there appears a group of culinary instructions including “tarts, plum puddings, lobster curry, etc.” material dated to around 1803. That detail matters. It tells us that curry had already entered the repertoire of an Irish landed household by the opening years of the nineteenth century, and not merely in the form of some exotic anecdote, but as part of the practical business of domestic cookery. The lobster is important too. Before chicken curry became the familiar language of takeaway and packet sauce, curry in Ireland could attach itself to luxury ingredients and coastal abundance, finding a place in the kitchens of the big house in the west of Ireland. In that sense, the genealogy of Irish curry begins not with the chipper or the Chinese takeaway, but with empire, class, and the adaptation of Indian flavours within aristocratic household management.

It is not an oddity.

It is evidence of our openness to a global food culture before we even understood the terms.

Our Curry Story

But Ireland’s curry story also has a more direct, stranger, and more beautiful connection to India and to England. Long before Veeraswamy, long before the high-street curry house, the first Indian restaurant in Britain was opened in London in 1810 by Sake Dean Mahomed, who had lived in Cork and married an Irish woman, Jane Daly. Brighton & Hove Museums describes the Hindoostane Coffee House as the first Indian restaurant in Britain. History Ireland ties Mahomed explicitly to Cork, where he met Daly, before moving to London. So the story of Indian restaurants in Britain is not just imperial. It is also partly Irish. An Indian entrepreneur comes to Cork, marries into Ireland, and then helps inaugurate Indian restaurant culture in London.

Now that’s a story worth telling to your grandkids.

Our own Curry House

Interestingly, Ireland was early on the restaurant front too. According to History Ireland, the first Indian restaurant in Ireland opened in summer 1908, when Karim Khan established the Indian Restaurant and Tea Rooms on Upper Sackville Street in Dublin, advertising “real Indian curries” and native waiters in costume. It lasted less than a year, but it pre-dated the first twentieth-century Indian restaurant in London by three years. That detail matters to our own food story. It reminds us that curry in Ireland was not simply a late postwar import or something which arrived in the 1980s from elsewhere. It had appeared publicly, performatively, in Dublin before the form properly took hold.

A Second History

And yet these early restaurants did not by themselves create the chicken curry most of us know today. For that we need the second history: the domestic softening of curry. In post-independence Ireland, as History Ireland puts it, knowledge of curry was often limited to a generic dish known simply as “Indian curry”. A 1923 warning from a self-styled “mem sahib” in The Irish Times complained that Irish cooks knew nothing about proper curries and sent up “a liquid mess of insipid flavour and doubtful colour”. That complaint is revealing. It tells us that curry was already circulating in Irish kitchens and beyond, but in diluted, improvised, and often disappointing forms for those in search of more.

This is where McDonnells becomes so important. McDonnells did not invent curry in Ireland, but it did help standardise what many people now think of as Irish curry. The Irish Times notes that the McDonnells packet says the recipe was developed in Drogheda in the 1980s. An industry case study is even more revealing: it describes McDonnells as “the most popular curry sauce in Ireland” and says its taste is associated with “home, comfort and Ireland,” calling it explicitly “the unique taste of Irish curry, made for the Irish palate”. That is extraordinary language, because it shows the product not merely as convenience food but as a national flavour system. McDonnells took the old Anglo-Irish idea of curry powder and gave it modern mass-market form for a burgeoning 1980s Ireland: thick, mild, slightly sweet, dependable, and ready to be poured over chips and rice, or made into chicken curry for a large family of between six and ten.

In other words, McDonnells is the bridge between the old imperial pantry and the modern family dinner. It naturalised curry not as an occasional colonial curiosity or restaurant treat, but as an everyday Irish sauce for all. It belongs to a deeper pattern in Irish food culture: the transformation of a travelled, distant flavour into a safe domestic staple. By the time people were eating curry in takeaways, pubs and homes across the country, many had already learned to expect curry to be thick rather than subtle, mild rather than fierce, and satisfying in the same way as gravy.

A Third History

The third history is restaurant and takeaway curry in modern Ireland. If Karim Khan’s 1908 restaurant was a brilliant early spark, the more durable public life of curry in Ireland took shape much later. History Ireland shows a second phase with the India Restaurant in Dublin in 1939, then the Bombay Restaurant in Bray in 1942, and later a major turning point in 1956 with Mohammed “Mike” Butt’s Golden Orient. Butt, a Kenyan of Kashmiri descent, and his Dublin-born wife Terry helped introduce many Dubliners to their first curry. The Golden Orient, and later Butt’s Tandoori Rooms, turned curry from novelty into urban habit. By the early 1970s, Dublin had a visible cluster of Indian restaurants, much to the chagrin of the native folk in search of meat and two veg.

That restaurant history matters because it sits beside, and eventually intersects with, the Chinese-Irish takeaway story. Chicken curry with rice and chips is not simply a descendant of Indian restaurant food in Ireland. Nor is it purely Chinese. It is a hybrid produced in the space where several Irish curry traditions met: imperial memory, domestic packet sauce, Indian restaurant culture, and Chinese-Irish takeaway economic pragmatism. Chicken was cheap, broadly acceptable, and easy to batch-cook in curry sauce for hungry punters after the pub. Rice signalled the foreignness of the dish. Chips restored the full force of Irish familiarity. We are a nation of chipper after, thanks to the Italians. And over all of it sat a sauce whose texture and flavour had already been taught to the palate by domestic curry powder and products like McDonnells. It may have been one dimensional, but it took Irish palates to another dimension.

Chicken, Curry, Rice and Chips

So when chicken curry, rice and chips lands on a plate in Ireland today, what arrives is not one history, but at least three, if not four, at once. There is the big-house curry of empire in the background. There is Dean Mahomed and Jane Daly, linking Ireland unexpectedly to the first Indian restaurant in Britain. There is Karim Khan’s short-lived Dublin venture in 1908, evidence that Ireland encountered restaurant curry early in European culture. There is Mike Butt and the mid-century restaurant scene that made curry part of Dublin life. And there is McDonnells, made in Drogheda, Co. Louth, fixing into the national imagination the taste of an Irish curry that is less about regional India than about comfort, familiarity and home.

That, I think, is the genealogy of the dish in a nutshell. Chicken curry with rice and chips is not a corruption of an original. It is an Irish settlement. It is what happens when empire becomes memory, memory becomes packet sauce, packet sauce meets migration, and migration meets the appetites of a chipper culture in Ireland. It is not one thing pretending to be another. It is a record of how Ireland learned to eat the world: partially, unevenly, pragmatically, and always with an eye to comfort because of the cold weather outside.

And perhaps that is why Irish people like it so much. Not because it is authentic, whatever that means, but because it has become one of those borrowed dishes that now feels impossible to separate from Irish life. Like tea, like the breakfast roll, or the chicken fillet roll, or the spice bag after it, it tells us that national food culture is rarely pure. It is made in the meeting point between elsewhere and here. In Ireland’s case, curry passed through India, Cork, London, Sackville Street, Lower Leeson Street, Drogheda, the Chinese takeaway, and even my own family kitchen in Maynooth, before it came to rest on the plate in its now familiar form: chicken, curry, rice, chips. A classic four-in-one. Too much for some, perhaps. Not enough for others. But also perfectly, unmistakably Irish.

Yours in Irish food,

Jp.

27th March, 2026.

“The dandylion is drawn like tea and drank. Nettles are boiled and eaten like cabbage. The mountains sage is used like dandelion and watercress is used like salad” (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0585, Page 036)

March in Ireland is a difficult month for food. We’re somewhere in between the seasons. Vegetables, and food in general, are scarce. The old Irish rhythm of the hungry gap is telling. Before the feast of spring and early summer vegetables, there is a dinner of different weeds, soft leaves, sharp leaves, bitter leaves. This was the kind of food our grandparents (or at least their parents) knew without romanticising. You didn’t “forage” in their day. You went out and picked. You didn’t post it on social media for the world to know. You ate it because the year, and the land, told you to.

Nettles

Nettles are one of the great contradictions of March. They are the first proper green and a small act of violence on the landscape. They arrive with a little sting and with medicine, and you can feel, even now, why people respected them so much. Dúchas is full of nettle lore that reads like a folk pharmacopoeia: rash cures, blood tonics, spring cleansing. One Schools’ Collection account states plainly that nettles were “good for the blood” taken as a boiled bitter juice that could be improved with improved with sugar (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0245, Page 008). What I love about this is the almost casual, matter-of-fact way this Roscommon observation is recorded. This wasn’t exotic knowledge. It was the ordinary domestic intelligence of Irish food. The same entry adds that “long ago nettles were used as vegetables just as we use cabbage nowadays”. That line alone encapsulates a whole worldview. It reminds us that the “wild” and the “cultivated” weren’t moral or separate categories in old Ireland. They were just what was available at the time. You ate what you had, or at least what you encountered.

There’s another beautifully blunt piece of March advice from Clonlara, Co, Clare: “if you eat three meals of nettles in March you will never get fever” (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0585, Page 036). Whether or not you believe it (and I’m certainly not asking anyone to), it tells us how March was understood as a month when the body needed to be reset, fortified, cleaned out, made ready for the year ahead.

In culinary terms, nettles are spinach’s wilder cousin. They are a deeper, more minerally green, a kind of iron note of the field. The first bowl of nettle soup in March is never just soup. It’s a signal. Winter has started to lose. Of course, a few potatoes will held soft the soup’s bitter edge, but often it was more of a broth or just a tea, purely medicinal, as with all wild herbs:

Long ago people used to give nettle soup to all the children in the month of March. It was supposed to keep away sickness for the year (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0060, Page 0051).

Dock leaves

One of the quiet beauties of Irish folk plant-lore is how often it insists that the remedy is nearby. You learn it as a child: if you’re stung with a nettle, there’ll be a dock leaf somewhere, and someone older will rub it on, with a confidence that feels like law. If nettles are the sting, dock is the cure. This was our mantra as we ran through summer fields hoping to avoid the nettles in the corners.

Dúchas records this exactly as a lived practice. In Lisín, Skibbereen, the cure is recited as a little charm:

“The Dock leaf is used to remove a nettle sting. The leaf is rolled and the injured spot rubbed with it repeating at the same time

Nettle out Dock in
Dock remove the nettle sting
In Doc out Nettle
Don’t let the blood settle” (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0880, Page 220).

In Wexford, there’s a more theatrical version recorded under “Old Cures”: “Take the sting of the nettle away, and you find it cures it because I did it hundreds of times.” These aren’t just remedies. They are rituals of reassurance for a child that is hurt. The natural world responds immediately, and language itself participates in the healing process. We have to remember that this was a time before the local GP could assists.

Long ago in Wexford the people had few doctors to come to them when they were sick, they depended on the herbs that grew. The herbs were their medicine but first they had to make their medicine out of the herbs. Some old people have kept the cures down from long ago (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0880, Page 220).

Dock also appears as a plant of deeper utility: boiling the root in water for stomach trouble, alongside dandelion leaves and dandelion tea (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0596, Page 065). So March offers Irish food a kind of medicinal pairing: nettle and dock, the sting and the answer, the lesson and the consolation. Our food calendar can hold both: the edible and the medicinal, the taste and the touch.

Sorrel

Sorrel is March’s sharpness, the sour note that makes you realise how long you’ve been eating brown food. In folk memory, as with our other Mach herbs, sorrel often sits between medicine and seasoning. In Rosenallis, Co. Laois, Dúchas notes: “Sorrel leaves were used in fever for the thirst; also in salad to take the place of vinegar” (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0823, Page 358). That’s a wonderful Irish sentence: fever and salad mentioned in the same breath, and vinegar replaced by something you can pick in a ditch.

The plant becomes both cure and condiment, the body’s thirst and the palate’s thirst answered by the same leaf. This is the part of March I think we’ve forgotten in Ireland. I don’t mean the idea of wild food as medicine, but the taste profile of spring in the context of an food calendar. March is bitter, sour, green, and cleansing. It’s not comfort. It’s more like an annual correction.

Dandelion

Dandelion is the most democratic plant in Ireland: it grows in the places we walk past without looking. And yet in the curative folk record it’s everywhere: warts, stomachs, liver, kidneys, longevity, rheumatics. One Schools’ Collection “Herbs” entry in Áth Treasna school in Newmarket, Co. Cork:

The Dandelion is a green plant, people boil the leaves and it is called dandelion tea and it is given to people who have rheumatics, The red dandelion leaves are boiled for medicine as Senna leaves. Long ago people drank dandelion
tea. It was said that people who drank dandelion tea were noted for length of life. The dandelion has a medical value because the leaves when they are boiled to a jelly the juice is used as a drink for a bad stomach The dandelion which is locally called “costerwan” makes good food for pigs (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0352, Page 232).

One of my favourite dandelion cures in the Dúchas Collection is one of the most Irish images I’ve ever encountered. It’s from Ballymakenny, in Co Louth:

Dandelion tea is a cure used in disease of the heart and liver. This tea is made by bruising the dandelion and putting it in a jug. Then the cow is milked down on it so that the milk will be hot. Strain and drink. (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0678, Page 151

That may not sound like wellness to our modern ears, but it is a old farmyard sacrament that negotiated heat, animal, plant, and illness in one truly ordinary act that brought comfort to generations of Irish people. If nettles were “good for the blood”, then dandelion was often framed as purifier too, explicitly called a “blood purifier”, set among other March-style cures. (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0585, Page 036).

In terms of writing, dandelion gives us a way to talk about bitterness as a virtue. It is a taste that modern Irish eating has largely trained out of itself. We have learned sweetness, salt, and fat. Yet, we are gradually relearning bitterness, slowly, through food we know better, such as coffee, dark chocolate, natural wine, and, yes, the humble dandelion.

Cow Parsley

Cow parsley, as called wild chervil, is less of a food tradition in the obvious Irish way. There’s no national cow-parsley dish that I know of, but it’s an herb that is deeply March in spirit. It is a plant that signals the hedge is waking up and that the verges of our landscape are changing their minds about winter.

Its Irish name is recorded as Peirsil bhó. And in the Dúchas Schools’ Collection it shows up in a way I love, not as fancy eating, but as making.

The children about here used to make toys for themselves, and some do yet. These are the toys they used to make. Windmills, mud pies, rush whips, rush hats, and syringes out of cow parsley (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 1109, Page 311).

Though not necessarily a detail of food, this attitude belongs to the same relationship to the wild world. It is close and intimate, practical and imaginative.

There’s also a fascinating little Dúchas line from Termonfeckin: “You can make a food called ‘angelica’ from cow parsley.” (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0676, Page 092). What did they mean locally by angelica (which is a different plant)? Was it a confusion of names, or a real practice of candying wild chervil stems? Even the ambiguity is useful for our modern sensibility.

It shows how folk naming and folk usage can slip and merge, how the hedge doesn’t organise itself by the Latin certainty of modern wild food names. Cow parsley sits in the same family as some famously rather dangerous plants, such as hemlock, and it reminds us how modern foraging carries responsibility and caution. It also shows us that old knowledge wasn’t reckless. It was slow and specific, learned by generational repetition and community. We need to honour that again as we look anew at the contemporary landscape of Ireland.

Though we use wild chervil in Aniar to season tartare (venison and beef), we also use it to flavour desserts, as its aniseed taste complements the clean flavour of sheep’s yoghurt. This, for me at least, represents a continuity of tradition in Irish food.

If we wanted to hang all these herbs on one hook it might be a spring tonic one. March was when the body was nudged back into motion: a bitter tea, a green soup, a sharp leaf, a belief that the blood needed changing after the harsh light of winter.

Irish folklore doesn’t describe these herbs with modern wellness vocabulary. It gives us raw instructions and blunt confidence: boil, rub, drink, repeat. Yet underneath this there’s a cultural intelligence about wild food in Ireland in March. The land may still cold, the larder may still be thin, but when the first green arrives, stingy, sour and bitter, we’ll take it in.

Between St Patrick’s Day and Easter, this is the real hinge: not the parade, not the chocolate, but the moment the roadside becomes edible again.

Yours in Irish food,

Jp.

25th March, 2026

St. Patrick’s Day almost always falls within Lent. And that fact, more than Patrick himself (c. 385 – c. 461), shaped how the Irish people ate.

For most of Irish history, Lent was observed with a seriousness that is difficult to fully grasp now in our modern Ireland of abundance. Meat was avoided. Dairy was restricted. Eggs were limited. Pleasure, in all its forms, was subdued, especially in terms of food. And then, on the 17th of March, there was a small loosening. Not a collapse of Catholic discipline, but a smal hinge in it, to allow a little madness to unfold.

The all powerful Church permitted a temporary lifting of Lenten restrictions. For one day, people could eat meat, drink alcohol, and allow a degree of indulgence. It was, in effect, a state sanctioned pause, a reminder that even in austerity, there could be a reprieve. I suppose you have to give people something to look forward to in times of penury and hardship.

This is where the food of the day begins for us.

Bacon and cabbage, now often lazily described as traditional Irish food, fits perfectly into this structure. It is not celebratory in the way a Christmas goose might be. It is not extravagant in any way. It is practical, seasonal, and slightly elevated. Salt pork, held over from winter, boiled with cabbage just coming into its own. It is a meal that acknowledges the day, but does not break the rhythm of the season entirely. As a child, I was afraid of it. The smell of overcooked cabbage would pervade the house and make mr retch.

In parts of Ireland, as Marion McGarry observes in her Irish Customs and Rituals (2020), people spoke of eating “St. Patrick’s fish” (23): that is, meat (usually bacon) dipped briefly in water so that it might pass, symbolically at least, as fish. It is both comic and deeply serious. A small act of theological loopholing. A kind of culinary wink. A reminder that food, in Ireland, has always existed in dialogue with rules (religious, social, or economic) and that the Irish have always found ways to bend those rules without quite breaking them, lest they feel too guilty.

Children, too, experienced the day differently. There are references in oral histories to small allowances: a sweet, a piece of cake, something outside the usual Lenten restraint. Not abundance, but exception. The memory of the day, for many, was not of excess but of difference. I recall eating whipped green ice-cream on top of a cone with a flake or being sent to the shop to purchase a small chocolate bar for 10p.

A Day of Work, Not Just Worship

There is another layer to the day that sits quietly beneath the religious one: agriculture.

St. Patrick’s Day marked, in many parts of the country, a turning in the land. It was associated with the beginning of the potato planting season, or at least the preparation for it. The ground, if not yet warm, was beginning to open. The evenings were getting longer. The year, in a practical sense, was starting again.

This is important. Because it means the day was not simply about looking back, to Patrick, to conversion, to the myth of our Irishness, but about looking forward. About labour, continuity, and survival: about putting next season’s food into the ground.

You can imagine the rhythm: a midday meal, slightly richer than usual, taken in the knowledge that the work of the year was about to begin.

Though due to the day being a feast day, no potato seeds were planted on the day itself. It was a day of rest, recollection and probably a pint. Though the farmers who waited to plant long after the 17th were “regarded by their neighbours as slovenly and lazy (Danaher, 66).

Public Holiday, Private Ritual

It is easy now to assume that St. Patrick’s Day was always what it has become: parades, crowds, and a gigantic public celebration around the globe. But this is a relatively recent construction.

The day only became an official public holiday in 1903. And even then, its character was not what we might expect. For much of the 20th century, pubs were closed on St. Patrick’s Day (they didn’t open until 1973). The idea of the day as one of public drinking would have seemed, if not entirely alien, then certainly restrained.

People drank, of course, as the Irish do. But they did so at home, or in what were known as “rambling houses” (McGarry 22). These were informal gathering places, taverns, where stories were told, music played, and small amounts of food and plenty of drink was shared. The social life of the day was domestic, local, and conversational, very unlike the outward facing event that is today.

After mass, people retired to their local tavern to partake from “St. Paticks pot” (pota Pádraig). Though, as Kevin Danaher observes, “seldom did the drinking stop at one pot” (63). Though the phrase “wetting the shamrock” appears in 1727, drinking and St. Patrick’s day goes back to at least 1681, as Thomas Dinely observed, “very few of the zealous are found sober at night”. In a poem of 1689, “usquebah” (whiskey) from “St Patrick’s pot” is celebrated. The phrase “the drowning of the shamrock” appears in print in 1908 in reference to the tradition of dropping your shamrock into your last drink, and then removing it and throwing it over your left shoulder (Danaher, 65).

Even the parade, now central to the identity of the day, has unexpected origins. It was shaped, in part, by the Temperance movement, a movement that sought to control and reduce alcohol consumption on the day. The parade was, at least initially, a moral spectacle as much as a civic one: an orderly expression of Irish identity, rather than a chaotic release from the demon drink:

From the mid-nineteenth century, they held colourful parades on St. Patrick’s day which offered a celebratory teetotal alternative to alcoholic pursuits. These parades spread to Irish emigrant communities abroad and they became embedded in the international celebration of St. Patricks Day and brought it to a global audience (McGarry, 22).

The first Saint Patrick's Day parade in Ireland was held in Waterford in 1903, hundreds of years after the first parade in North America.

Wearing the Day

One of the more enduring customs is the wearing of shamrock. Jonathan Swift refers to it in his Journal to Stella in 1713, noting the practice of people placing it in their hats on St. Patrick’s Day:

The Irish folks were disappointed that the Parliament did not meet to-day, because it was St. Patrick’s Day, and the Mall was so full of crosses, that I thought all the world was Irish.

But even here, the story is not straightforward.

It is often suggested that the plant St, Patrick used to illustrate the Trinity was not clover but wood sorrel, a plant more common in Irish woodland, with a sharper, more delicate flavour (and a more interesting culinary history on the island). The shift from sorrel to shamrock may be botanical confusion, or it may be cultural simplification: the smoothing out of a story over time. Writing in 1727, the botanist Caleb Threlkeld identified the shamrock as a white clover, though this is not to say that wood sorrel was not used orginally.

Either way, the act of wearing something green, something living, something gathered, connects the body to the land on a day that sits at the threshold of growth.

The Colour Green

Though the first association of the colour green with Ireland is from a legend in the 11th century Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of the Taking of Ireland), its association with St. Patrick’s Day is relatively new. Interestingly, early depictions of Ireland weren’t always green. The colour blue often called “St. Patrick’s blue” was first associated with Irish identity in earlier heraldry from around 1783. Green begins to take over in the 18th century, especially in popular and political contexts. The shamrock becomes stylised and the colour becomes shorthand for the plant and Ireland.

The real turning point is political. In the late 18th century, groups like the United Irishmen adopt green as a symbol of Irish identity, particularly in opposition to British rule. The phrase “wearing of the green” becomes charged with an Irish identity. By the 19th century, especially through the diaspora, green becomes fixed as the colour of Ireland. St. Patrick’s Day parades—particularly in America—help standardise this. By the time the Irish state begins shaping its own national image in the 20th century, the association is already cemented and St. Patrick becomes our green hero.

Dúchas and the Memory of the Day

If we turn to the Dúchas Schools’ Collection, the day becomes smaller, closer, more human. Children describe Mass in the morning, shamrock pinned to coats, and the quiet pleasure of a good dinner” in the evening. But the most striking details are the small ones.

One account records:

St Patrick's day is the 17th March. Everyone wears shamrock in their hats and coats on that day . Everyone who can wears green- a green ribbon or a badge tied around a shamrock branch. It is a national holiday and everyone has a free day. That night the men "drown" the shamrock in a glass of whiskey. They dip the shamrock into the spirit and then they drink it. If we have friends over the sea we send them boxes of shamrock to wear on that day (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0742, Page 307)

Another account reflects the broader feeling of the day:

“It is a day of rejoicing at home and abroad.”

But what sits underneath these is not excess, it is contrast from the rest of lent.After weeks of Lent, even small things carry weight: tea, a piece of meat or fish, a sweet. The day mattered not because it was extravagant, but because it was different. It was, quite literally, a change in taste from the subdued flavours of the other forty days.

Of course, drinking is also remembered by the children:

On St Patrick's Day all went there to drink Pota Patrick, or Patricks pot of good old poteen whiskey and Beoir Márta (or March beer) (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0612, Page 323).

From Ritual to Spectacle

The modern version of St. Patrick’s Day (global, amplified, commercial) is, in many ways, a reversal of its original meaning.

What was once a small lifting of restriction has become a large assertion of Irish identity, especailly among the large diaspora around the world. What was once local and domestic has become international and performative, mythological even. What was once quiet, has become loud.

And yet, something of the older structure remains, if you look closely at the day and its faint folkways.

The bacon and cabbage is still there, even if it competes with burgers and tacos dyed green. The shamrock still appears, even if it is now plastic. The idea of exception, of doing something slightly outside the norm, still holds, even if it means spending the whole day drinking in the pub while your child waits for you in the corner.

Perhaps that is the continuity of this fading tradition.

Not the scale of the celebration, but the permission it grants: to step, briefly, outside the everyday.

Aniar: Cooking the Day Now

What does it mean to cook St. Patrick’s Day now?

Not as spectacle, not as tourism, but as a day that still carries the residue of Lent, of land, of the small permission of our geography.

In a kitchen like Aniar, the question is not whether to reproduce bacon and cabbage, but how to understand Irish food now.

The myriad of wild green plants, from seabeet to ground elder are in their own way, a perfect contemporary expression of the Irish calendar around St. Patrick’s day. Wild garlic, just beginning to emerge at this time of year, offers a nice bridge from the past ot the present. Not historically tied to the day in any explicit way, but deeply tied to the season. A reminder that while the liturgical calendar imposed one rhythm, the land was always keeping another, both with their own shade of green.

Perhaps this is the most honest way to cook the day now: not by amplifying it, by playing to its gargantuan nature, but by respecting its scale of old. By understanding that its power lay, historically, in contrast rather than abundance. St. Patrick's Day begin with something taking a herb from the ground.

A Personal Note

I didn’t grow up thinking of St. Patrick’s Day as a feast of food.

Of course, it was a day that felt slightly different to the others.

There may have been bacon and cabbage somewhere, though not in our house. There was always something sweet. There was the sense that something had been allowed, briefly, a little bar of chocolate, a green and white piece of cake, before things returned to normal, until Easter.

Later, in kitchens, the day became something else again. A service. A menu. A version of Ireland presented outward. Corned beef and cabbage, oysters, ham and cheese sandwiches, beef and Guinness stew.

But the older, more ancient, feeling never quite leaves. A man in the field looking at the year to come.

This is not a day of abundance, but a day of contrast.

Not a feast, but a shift in the year.

And perhaps that is what is worth holding onto.

Not the spectacle of the day, but its restraint, a day of rest from work to play.

A few pints.

A small loosening, in the middle of Lent. A taste of something that had been missing in Irish food for many years.

And then, quietly, back again.

Yours in Irish food,

Jp.

17th March, 2026

The smell arrives before you see the plant.

You walk through Barna woods in early spring and suddenly the air changes. A soft garlic scent drifts through the trees. At first you might not know where it is coming from. Then you look down and see the leaves spreading across the forest floor: a green carpet under ash and beech, thousands of small plants quietly announcing the end of winter.

For most of human history in Ireland, people would have known that smell. But for much of the twentieth century it was strangely absent from our kitchens. This lacuna seems uncomprehensible.

Today garlic is unavoidable in Ireland. It perfumes restaurant kitchens, appears in nearly every cookbook, often nearly every recipe, and each spring the woods of Ireland fill with people gathering wild garlic or ransoms (or creamh) if you’re a Gaeilgeoir. Young Irish chefs now fold it through butter, ferment it, turn it into oils, powders and vinegars, capers and, of course, pestos. For many young foragers it is the first plant they learn to recognise.

It was my gateway drug into the wild larder.

Yet within living memory garlic was almost unknown in the Irish domestic kitchen. My mother didn’t cook with it. My grandmother certainly didn’t. If the smell of garlic appeared at all it came from somewhere else, from restaurants, travel, and continental cookbooks. It belonged to French food, Italian food, and Spanish food.

It was not ours.

And yet garlic, or at least its wild cousin, has been part of the Irish landscape for thousands of years.

The First Garlic Eaters

Long before there were restaurants or farms, the early inhabitants of Ireland were gathering plants from woods, riverbanks and wetlands. Among them would have been wild alliums: the pungent family of plants that includes onions, leeks and garlic.

Wild garlic (Allium ursinum) grows naturally in damp deciduous woodland across Ireland. In early spring it appears suddenly, carpeting the forest floor in thick green drifts. The smell travels before the plant is even visible. It is a gentle, green garlic scent that travels through the woods.

For Mesolithic communities, these leaves would have offered one of the first fresh flavours after the lean months of winter. Leaves, flowers and bulbs: all edible, all bright.

Long before Gaelic culture emerged, Ireland itself was a heavily wooded island. Oak, hazel, alder and ash dominated the landscape. The earliest inhabitants lived within these forests, gathering nuts, berries, fish and wild plants. Wild garlic would almost certainly have been part of that woodland diet and one of the first green flavours of the year.

Interestingly, the dense carpets of wild garlic seen in many Irish woods today are also partly a result of centuries of ecological change. Wild garlic thrives in ancient woodland that has been lightly disturbed but not intensively cultivated. Medieval woodland grazing, deer populations and the gradual clearing of forests created conditions where the plant could spread rapidly across the forest floor. In woods that survived agricultural clearance, wild garlic often became one of the dominant spring plants.

When Gaelic society later developed on the island, the forest continued to shape life and law. Early Irish law codes, such as the Brehon Laws, classified trees according to rank. Certain trees such as oak, ash, hazel and yew were considered the airig fedo, the “nobles of the wood”, protected because of their importance for food, tools and building. The landscape was not simply scenery. It was part of the structure of society.

Garlic in Ireland, in other words, is not new.

It is ancient.

A Linguistic Trace

The Irish language preserves this long familiarity with pungent alliums.

The word creamh refers broadly to garlic-like plants. Variations such as creamh garraí (garden garlic) and creamh coille (wood garlic) appear in botanical descriptions and plant lore. Rather than distinguishing sharply between garlic, leek and other alliums, the language groups them together as a family of strong, strengthening plants.

Language often remembers things that kitchens and people forget over time.

Garlic in Folklore and Early Herbalists

By the medieval period Ireland had a culture of herb gardens attached to monasteries and large households. These gardens contained many of the plants common across European medicine and cooking: onions, leeks, parsley, sage and occasionally garlic.

Across medieval herbals garlic was valued as much for its medicinal qualities as for its flavour. It was believed to strengthen the body, aid digestion and protect against illness.

Irish folklore collected in the Dúchas Schools’ Collection during the 1930s reflects similar beliefs. Pungent foods such as garlic and onions were often associated with strength and resilience. In some accounts strong plants were believed to cleanse the blood or help the body recover after winter. One entry from Gortatoor in Co. Mayo recalls:

Long ago in Ireland the people used herbs to cure people and animals . They tell us there is an herb for every disease if only we knew it or could find it out.
Garlic was much used in those days , as it was supposed to cure almost any disease, and was very healthy and safe to use . People suffering from consumption and other lung diseases were improved in health by taking a grain or a couple of grains of the garlic fasting every morning this was supposed to be a great cure for the consumption . Another way garlic was use was to boil a heads of the garlic in new milk , and the hot milk fasting and often during the day . It was believed to be a great cure for babies and all delicate people, and used to give a great appetite to those who could not eat well (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0141, Page 410-411).

Wild garlic also appears in plant lore as one of the signs of the turning year, a plant that marked the arrival of spring in the woods. Yet despite this familiarity, garlic rarely appears in descriptions of everyday Irish cooking.

Garlic Suspicion

For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries garlic occupied an uneasy place in Irish and British food culture. In England it was sometimes jokingly called “the foreigner’s perfume”. In Ireland it was often associated with continental cooking rather than domestic food. Its smell was considered strong, even slightly suspicious.

In the School Collection, eighty year old Michael O’Rourke from Tyrrellspass, Co. Westmeath recalls:

We do not like garlic in this country. It has certainly a fearful odour, but its curative properties for chest complaints especially asthma are wonderful. French cooks insert a small cone of it into the bone of a leg of mutton, or other joint before baking makes it very tender (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0731, Page 286-287).

Irish cooking developed instead around a different flavour structure: butter, onions, dairy, cabbage, parsley and thyme. Though nothing as wrong with that, garlic simply never embedded itself deeply into the domestic repertoire.

By the mid-twentieth century it had become something faintly exotic, something that appeared in French cookbooks or restaurant kitchens rather than the Irish home.

Garlic comes Home

I remember when garlic entered our little house in Rail Park.

It was 1995. I was working in an Italian restaurant called Donatello’s in Maynooth. In that kitchen garlic was everywhere: chopped, sliced, crushed, gently fried in olive oil, folded through pasta sauces, rubbed onto bread with good old Irish butter.

When I brought it home it felt faintly radical. There was a newness to it. A vague feeling of revoution.

My father still remembers that period as the moment we started eating garlic bread.

It sounds small now, but at the time garlic carried a certain cosmopolitan energy. Ireland in the 1990s was opening: travel, restaurants, Mediterranean ingredients, olive oil appearing on supermarket shelves instead of chemists (ask my father’s generation about this one).

Garlic moved quietly from restaurant kitchens into domestic ones.

Within a decade it was everywhere.

The Wild Return

Just as garlic became normal in Irish cooking, chefs and cooks began rediscovering its wild cousin.

As I said, wild garlic had always been there, growing under ash trees, beside old walls, along riverbanks, but in the early 2000s it began appearing on restaurant menus across the country.

Foragers gathered it and sold it to restaurants. Chefs picked it and turned it into soups, oils, pestos and powders. Its small white flowers decorated plates and the Polish thought us how to pickle the un opened buds.

In many ways wild garlic became one of the small symbols of what people began calling new Irish cuisine: a cooking rooted in landscape, seasonality and wild ingredients.

Each spring the woods filled with people looking for it. Some knew exactly what they were doing, others simply followed the smell.

For many young cooks it is the first plant they learn to forage.

As I said: a gateway drug into a wild world.

Garlic at Aniar

At Aniar wild garlic arrives with the first real breath of spring.

Edward, our forager, brings in some small leaves which we use as a garnish for lamb. Then someone brings it into the kitchen after a walk through the woods outside Galway. This is the real beginning. When the leaves get a little larger. The leaves are soft and bright, almost luminous after the darker months of winter cooking.

As the leaves grow larger, they become wild garlic oil, blended and strained until the liquid turns a deep green.

It’s wonderful with poached white fish, such as cod, ling or pollock.

After the unopened buds get pickled, while the flowers occasionally appear on plates for a brief moment in late spring. The leaves also find their way into wild garlic purées, emulsions and ferments, preserving the flavour of spring for the months that follow. Lastly, in May and June, the seed heads are salted for 10 days and the pickled in malt vinegar for three months. This “capers” are what I like to call Irish gold. They are probably the most important ingredient at Aniar.

It defines our project: foraging, pickling, preservation, and showcasing new Irish cuisine to the world.

Like many wild ingredients, its season is short. When it arrives we use it generously across the menu.

A Smell that Returns each Year

For thousands of years people on this island would have known the smell of wild garlic. For a long stretch of modern Irish cooking we seemed to forget it. Garlic became something imported, something that arrived through restaurants, travel and Mediterranean cookbooks in the late twentieth century.

Now the journey seems to have come full circle.

Wild garlic has become one of the small symbols of contemporary Irish cooking, not because it is fashionable, but because it reconnects the kitchen with the landscape.

At Aniar, the arrival of wild garlic always feels like the first real sign of spring in the kitchen. After months of roots, brassicas and preserved flavours, those green leaves bring something fresh and immediate.

They remind us that the landscape is beginning again.

And perhaps that is the real story of garlic in Ireland.

Not simply that it arrived in our cooking.

But that it returned.

After the trauma of famine and colonization.

Each year, quietly, in the woods.

And eventually, on to our plates in Aniar.

Go out and get some and fold it into your food.

Make Ireland green again.

Yours in Irish food,

Jp.

14th March, 2026.

Primrose (Primula vulgaris) is among the gentlest signs of spring in Ireland. Teagasc describes it as part of our native Irish biodiversity and one of the flowers most widely recognised as marking the season’s return. It appears on south-facing banks, in hedgerows, woodland edges and sheltered grassy places, carrying that pale yellow flowers that seems less like a display and more like a reassurance that winter has finally passed. After months of mud, rain, roots, and bloody brassicas, primrose arrives almost as a form of sweet permission. A therapy, even. For farmers, it means the ground is opening up again and the eye can begin to trust the brightness in the sky.

Gorse (Ulex europaeus) by contrast, does not so much arrive as boldly declare itself. Wildflowers of Ireland describes it as a remarkable native shrub whose yellow flowers light up the Irish landscape, especially from February to May, and notes the plant’s famous coconut-like scent when freshly picked. Anyone who has walked a road in the west of Ireland or along rougher upland edges in spring knows that smell: sweet and warm, oddly tropical, and drifting from something otherwise made almost entirely of thorn. Gorse is a plant of contradiction. It is fierce to touch but generous to smell and it’s visually extravagant even on the bleakest day.

In culinary terms, both plants sit at the edge of use rather than at the centre of the Irish country kitchen. The Royal Horticultural Society lists primrose flowers as edible, suitable for crystallising, using fresh on cakes, or freezing in ice cubes. That is useful to know, but it also tells us something about scale. Primrose belongs to the world of garnish, delicacy and the brief edible flourish, not to nourishment in any substantial sense. It is not a thing to gather heavily. Its value is partly symbolic and seasonal: to use a little is enough.

That same restraint should govern how we think about wild flowers generally in Aniar. Primrose matters not simply because it may be edible, but because it belongs to the ecology of early spring. It is a sign of the times. Teagasc notes its nectar is important for long-tongued bumblebees, bee-flies and butterflies, and specifically links primrose with the brimstone butterfly, which emerges from hibernation and feeds on it on sunny days. In other words, the first primrose is already spoken for. Before it becomes decoration, it is part of the annual reawakening of pollinating life. This is why it’s important to always leave until petals behind for the bees and other Irish insects.

In Irish folklore, primrose carries far more weight than its size would suggest. Dúchas preserves repeated references to it in May customs: primroses gathered for the May-bush, primroses placed outside the door, primroses bound up with ideas of luck, protection and the proper beginning of summer. One Schools’ Collection entry records that the May-bush outside the door was decorated with primroses, cowslips and bluebells.

There are many legends connected with the first day of May. It was customary long ago to place a May-bush outside the door and to decorate it with primroses, cowslips, bluebells, and other flowers to honour the month of May (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0743, Page 334).

While May is still a while a way, we can appreciate the sentiment of May flowers, even though many of these flowers now arrive earlier in the year due to climate change. Another Dúchas May Day booklet preserves a Donegal tradition of decorating a rowan branch with may flowers and primroses and leaving it standing so that good luck would come through the year. These are not merely floral details. They show primrose as a threshold flower, brought deliberately to the boundary between house and world.

That threshold quality feels important. Primrose blooms low, close to the earth, and yet keeps appearing in traditions concerned with the passage of time: from winter to summer, from bad luck to good, from vulnerability to protection, it is there. It is easy to imagine why it has a hold on the Irish folkloric imagination. In a rural society attentive to signs, milk, weather, fertility, and the unseen risks of seasonal change, a small early flower could become more than itself. It could stand for the safe crossing into a better part of the year. It could signal a change in the quality of the milk. Not surprisingly, a folk cure from Roscommon survives in Dúchas: primrose boiled with new milk as a remedy for jaundice (The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0268, Page 231). Whether or not one takes the medicine seriously, the pairing is telling. Spring flowers and fresh milk are both emblems of renewal in the year in Ireland.

Gorse has a less domestic but no less deep place in the Irish imagination. It belongs to rough land, roadside banks and the untidy brilliance of the few remaining uncultivated places in our country. It is not hard to see why it has lasted so strongly in our memory and language. For many people in Ireland, gorse is one of the first plants that makes spring visible at a distance. Unlike primrose, you do not discover it by stooping. You see it on the hill before you and the dog come near it. If primrose is the intimate one, gorse is its theatrical brother: mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

Gorse has its practical uses in the rural economy. Folklore and local heritage sources record furze or gorse as useful for hedging, shelter and, when treated properly, fodder. This older practical Irish life matters because it reminds us that the Irish countryside did not divide plants neatly into beautiful and useful. A thing could be thorny, troublesome, fragrant, bright, and economically valuable all at once. Gorse was part of the working landscape before it became merely scenic to a hoard of ecologically minded tourists of the picturesque and the sublime.

As food, gorse and primrose are best understood not as ingredients of substance but as ingredients of the season. Primrose petals may be scattered sparingly through sugar, set into a dessert, or used in the old fashioned style of crystallised flowers for birthday cakes. Gorse flowers, where carefully and lightly used, are more likely to enter the kitchen through their scent than flavour: infused into syrup, cream, vinegar, wine or tea. They carry a fleeting coconut note that feels almost unbelievable in the Irish spring. As both plants ask for a little delicacy, to overuse them would be to miss the point of these tiny things.

What they really offer the food calendar is not sustenance but sequence. They remind us that the Irish year was once read through simple signs long before it was managed by supermarket abundance. The first primrose under the ditch in Knocknacara and the sudden yellow of gorse in Cappagh Park, tell us that winter is loosening. They belong to the hungry gap not because they fill it, but because they soften its edges. They are among the first wild notices that another season is on its way.

Wild flowers rarely become ingredients of substance in the contemporary Irish kitchen. Though they sometimes leave a small trace in the kitchen. The key is mindfulness and restraint. These are not harvest crops but seasonal gestures, a way of bringing the outside briefly to the table at Aniar, to show out customers that the Irish spring has finally come.

In truth, neither gorse nor primrose flowers exist to feed us. They arrive too early, too lightly, and too beautifully for all that. Their work in the Irish food calendar is different. They soften the hungry gap. They offer colour and warmth, and the first small suggestion that the land has begun to move again. A primrose under a hedge or a sudden blaze of gorse along a roadside can change the mood of a day in early March. They remind us that food does not begin only in the kitchen or the field, but in the slow reawakening of the landscape itself. Before lamb, before the first true greens, there is simply this: yellow returning to the land.

Yours in Irish food,

Jp.

10th March, 2026.