The Good Fortune of Country Cooks

Paul Flynn, chef-proprietor of Dungarvan's brilliant Tannery Restaurant, reflects on the good fortune of country cooks, both amateur and professional, whilst making his wife collapse with laughter.

"I feel it is only now that I am really learning to understand food.  I suppose that's a funny statement considering that I have been cooking professionally for eighteen years.  Maybe I am a slow learner, but the older I get, the more I realise I have a lot to learn.  

I'm a lot closer to nature than I ever was before, having moved to the country.  We are now surrounded by blackberry bushes, mushrooms and animals of all sorts, and a plethora of people that all bake me under the table, turning out jams and chutneys of a stunning quality for the local country market every Friday morning.  I recently went to the Country Market, totally unprepared for the serious business this was as I was elbowed out of the way constantly by agitated septuagenarian ladies intent on getting their favourite treat and nothing would get in their way.  Home made cakes, quiches and buns and a couple of jam stalls, vying for the same customers, eyeing each other up suspiciously.

Freshly cut flowers nurtured with love to grace someone's living room and craggy mud-covered carrots and parsnips waiting to be scrubbed, boiled and mashed with tons of butter.  Fudge slices, caramel slices, fairy cakes, biscuits and jellies.  

This sort of gathering happens religiously in towns and villages all over Ireland.  These are indeed women to be cherished in the ever growing fast-food-no-time-to-cook lifestyle which we now live.  Both adults working to fund a mortgage, arriving home at 7.30pm too tired to do anything but pop a pizza in the oven and eat in front of the telly.

The food at the country market may not look as good as the work of professional pattissiers, but it is sold in tip top condition, just made that morning and packaged in margarine boxes or whatever is handy.  We ate ours with piping hot tea, looking out at rainlashed Dungarvan bay, and I wouldn't have been anywhere else.

Maire my wife tells me I am taking this country living a bit too seriously.  She answered the door to me a few weeks ago to see me standing there, dripping wet, in the full country regalia.  My favourite item of clothing at the moment is a wax jacket which she bought me some years ago andwhich I swore I would never wear.  I have also taken to wearing my late father's tweed cap, so, along with my green wellies and a stick and with our young dog and cat, Olive (black, get it) and Delia (Smith of course) in tow she nearly fell down laughing. After picking her up off the floor, highly indignant with her laughter, I was offered the ultimate compliment.  "You look like Daddy".  Right I said, and vowed never to wear that particular ensemble in public again.

For the restaurant, I try to buy as much as I can locally.  A veg man that grows anything for me to order gets up at 6am to pick his produce and it arrives on the restaurant doorstep at 10 am.  You can't but understand the produce more when you have such a relationship with it.  Comments like "How big would you like your carrots?" are common.  He has now bought his seeds for next year to ensure an even bigger variety of salads which are sold to our local veg shop who then sells them on to an even more knowledgeable and demanding public.

We now feel privileged to live in West Waterford.  It is a secretly beautiful place, undeniably one of Ireland's hidden havens.  We recently attended a friend's wedding in Kilworth and gave some English friends a lift back to the reception in Dungarvan along the breathtaking Blackwater Valley route.  We thanked our lucky stars that the sun was shining and they could see it at its best.  Our visitors were astounded by the beauty of Cappoquin and Lismore castle and spent the evening telling us how lucky we were to live here.  They had to return to London the following day and West Waterford would be just a memory.  

We on the other hand can enjoy it every day of the year."

email: tannery@cablesurf.com

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text © John & Sally McKenna
illustrations © Ken Buggy