Christmas Books

Avoca Café Cookbook 2

Poor old Avoca. How on earth do you follow up a classic cookery book that has sold 65,000 copies? You just can’t win: any successor is going to be like Bridget Jones 2; everyone will say it just isn’t as good. That is what everyone is going to say about Avoca Café Cookbook 2, and everyone will be wrong, for second time out the Avoca crew have produced a book that is actually better than the original. It’s not quite as user-friendly, it’s a little derivative in the design, and some of the photos don’t really belong, but the food here is a minefield of good things, with hundreds of ideas fired at the reader throughout the text.. Leylie Hayes and Hugo Arnold haven’t allowed themselves the luxury of repetition. Instead, this new book pushes the envelope further than one might have believed they could have achieved. Simon Pratt and his crew are national treasures, nothing less.
Avoca Café Cookbook 2 €24.99

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Roly’s Bistro: The Restaurant and It’s Food

Roly’s Bistro is one of the most important restaurants in Ireland’s contemporary food culture. Why so? Because it gave people glamour and value together in the one package, because it created a dining room where women felt comfortable whether dining in pairs or groups, and because it maintains formidable standards despite cooking for extraordinary numbers of people. Like other significant restaurants of the 1990’s – The Elephant & Castle under Liz Mee and John Hayes, Roscoff under Paul and Jeanne Rankin – Roly’s achieved what everyone thought impossible.
To try to understand what makes it work, we once spent an entire working day there, from first thing in the morning to last thing at night, and what impressed most was the extraordinary control over every detail of the operation, an operation which cooked for 550 people the day we were being the fly on the wall.
Now, Colin O’Daly and Paul Cartwright celebrate 10 years of Roly’s with a collection of their classic recipes, many of them signature dishes that have been cooked for a decade. Roly’s always understood one simple truth about the restaurant-going public: they like familiarity, they like dishes they are comfortable with. And here they are: the prawn bisque; the lamb pie; the shank of lamb with colcannon; the summer pudding; the spiced apple samosas. And what does reading them make you want to do? It makes you want to join a friend for lunch in Roly’s, so you can revel in that great room, and enjoy that marvellous blend of hospitality, mania and magic. (Published by Gill & MacMillan)

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Neven Cooks

Neven Maguire is cooking the finest food in Ireland right now. Eat your happy way through his degustation menu of 8 courses, and at the end you get up from the table feeling as if you have eaten half an apple and a water biscuit. The cooking is so poised, so light, so true, that every bite sends the taste buds racing with sheer thrills.
So, here was what Mr Maguire and his team were offering on a recent Sunday evening, when the restaurant was packed: organic pumpkin soup with O’Doherty’s smoky bacon; sea scallops with crab and saffron risotto with coconut and lobster sauce; caramelised belly of pork with 5 spice and celery remoulade; tempura of lemon sole with Eden Plants salad leaves, lemon mayonnaise and chilli jam; passion fruit and raspberry sorbet; roasted lamb loin with confit of lamb shoulder and spinach and rosemary jus; rabbit saddle stuffed with black pudding served with truffled creamed potatoes and Madeira sauce; and the desserts were a choice of passion fruit pannacotta; warm raspberry shortcake with apple crisps and crème anglaise, and roasted banana with chocolate croquettes and vanilla bean ice cream. There is only one word for cooking this fine: awesome.
But Mr Maguire has been busy with other things, namely his first book, “Neven Cooks” a smart and friendly collection of hip cooking for domestic cooks. It is typical of Maguire’s modesty that he didn’t set out to publish some cheffy series of complicated and convoluted recipes. Instead, “Neven Cooks” is modest, mature and effective, food that works, and the writing is just as charming as the cooking. Delightful. So, buy a copy, then book a table and a room and drive all the way up to Blacklion in order to get the man to sign your copy.
MacNean Bistro, Blacklion, Co Cavan Tel: (072) 53022 “Neven Cooks”, Poolbeg, €14.99
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The Bridgestone Food Lover’s Guide to Northern Ireland by Caroline Workman and John McKenna

John McKenna, Jeanne Rankin, Paul Rankin and Caroline Workman at the launch of the Bridgestone Food Lover’s Guide to Northern Ireland in Cayenne Restaurant, Belfast

We are grateful to Seth Linder for this review of the first ever Bridgestone Food Lovers Guide to Northern Ireland, which appeared recently in The Irish News.

The Bridgestone Food Lovers Guide to Northern Ireland

Ring out the bells! For so long a junior partner to the south, the Northern Irish food scene has finally arrived. After years of appearing only as a (rather brief) supplement at the back of Bridgestone’s award winning Irish food guides, the foodie’s bible has finally devoted a whole book, the first of its kind here, to the fast-developing food culture in Northern Ireland.
For those who have worked so hard to bring about the transformation here it’s a richly deserved accolade. For those, like myself, who just enjoy its fruits, it’s a marvellous help. It really isn’t that long ago that local cuisine was still in the doldrums.
Now the renaissance that began in Belfast with visionary chefs like Paul Rankin and Michael Deane has spread throughout Northern Ireland, Encompassing not just top restaurants but cafes, pub food, food shops, wine merchants and specialist suppliers too. Allied to the existing areas of excellence like world class butchers, fishmongers and bakers this represents a pretty impressive offering and if there are still enough low spots around to allow the lazy journalist (step forward Kevin Myers) to take cheap swipes at Northern Irish food as a whole, then this book should help turn that around. Now, there is no longer any excuse for not seeking out the best, wherever in Northern Ireland you are.
The very best, and more expensive, certainly get their fair share of attention. The likes of Cayenne, Alden’s, Deane’s, Nick’s Warehouse and Robbie Millar’s Shanks, are, after all, world class restaurants. But the Book showers praise on other, less well-known gems, too, like the Yellow Door in Portadown, the Oriel in Gilford and the Duke, the restaurant Ciaran Gallagher runs above the pub of the same name in Warrenpoint. It’s not just about good restaurants either. Want to know where to find the best chips or ice cream, cafes or pub food, kitchenware or wine merchants? Look no further.
The Bridgestone philosophy is to encourage quality, they only include places they rate and there are no spurious league tables of restaurants, pitting one against another. That doesn’t mean a total absence of criticism or controversy, when opinions are expressed so passionately and colourfully there’s bound to be disagreement. But, what cannot be disputed is the extraordinary depth of research (each of the hundreds of entries have been personally visited) and the undoubted knowledge of the writers, John McKenna and Caroline Workman. The former has been a food guru down south for so long, it’s a surprise to discover he’s Belfast born and raised (in a pub to be precise, though far from the trendy bars featured here was he reared). Irish News readers will recognise Caroline Workman from her Saturday restaurant reviews.
It is remarkable how much they’ve packed in to what is a fairly compact book.
Alongside the restaurants and cafes are a whole range of ethnic shops and supermarkets, good places to stay, suppliers of organic vegetables, useful food web sites and loads of good shopping tips. Did you know, for instance, that the best chefs in Belfast get their fish from Walter Ewing in the Shankhill Road or that you’ll find one of Northern Ireland’s best kitchenware shops, Vincent McKenna’s, in Great Victoria Street (just press the buzzer first, the door is kept shut). Discover where to get the best apple juice or hot chocolate, the finest potatoes, sausages, turkeys, venison burgers or goats cheese, a VG shop that stocks wild salmon, the bacon master of Enniskillen or locally-brewed beers. A local knowledge section that runs through the guide might pick out a local fish van or herb garden, a great bar or B and B. How sharp is this local knowledge? All I can say is that the entry for my own back yard, the Kilbroney Cafe above Kilbroney park in Rostrevor, is spot on - great home-made food and incomparable views.
For the native, as McKenna says himself, it might be a shock to discover the riches that abound here. For the visitor, for whom there is no other way to discover the best places to eat and shop for food, the Bridgestone Food Lover’s Guide to Northern Ireland is, quite simply, indispensable.

The Bridgestone Food Lovers Guide to Northern Ireland, published by Estragon Press, is £6.99stg. or 10 euros.

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The Rough Guide to San Francisco restaurants, by Elgy Gillespie

Ex-pat Irish writer and bon viveur Elgy has already written the wittiest book about potato cooking, and this cracking new Rough Guide to SF – Elgy’s home base for the last while – shows her wise-cracking witty style at its best. The criticism is sharp and fleet, the descriptions vivid and concise and very, very funny, the layout is clear cool, and the whole book is a winner. Don’t get on a ‘plane to SF without this fab pocket book shoved in the coat pocket.
Rough Guides, £8.99stg.

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“Only The Best”, by Michel Roux

Michel Roux may be the funniest man in the cooking world. He doesn’t mean to be funny, of course, which just makes him even funnier: the Jacques Tati of the kitchen, the Tommy Cooper of la grand cuisine.
His newest book “Only The Best” (such a Michel title!) is full of superb food, beautifully photographed by Martin Brigdale, and packed with hilarious one-liners and magnificent howlers. Such as: “Amidst the profusion of gastronomic excesses and tastes of the wannabe culinary stars, I can remain serene”.
Right on, Michel, me serene old patissier.
Or: “ I was always surprised and fascinated by the warmth of a new-laid egg. I had no idea then that the egg and I would develop such a long and fruitful partnership throughout my life”. A long and fruitful partnership with an egg. Hmmm…
Or: “I was proud of my position as oven-minder; it is a key job, which demands an almost innate skill and a good deal of attention and discipline”.
Sure, if you don’t praise yourself, then who will?
The food, of course, once the guffaws are out of the way, is only brilliant, and there are many ideas here that chefs will seize upon hungrily and make their own. This time out, Michel doesn’t top the extraordinary pomposity, which he managed with his book “Desserts”, which remains the high point of his Gallic insufferability, but, as always, he gives it only his best.
Published by Quadrille at stg.£25.00

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Herb & Spice: The Cook’s Reference, by Jill Norman

Jill Norman’s books are a million miles away from the telly-hype brigade of cookery books which litter our times. Her works belong with those of the great scholar cooks, many of whom she made famous as an editor: Elizabeth David, Richard Olney, Claudia Roden and many others.
Herb & Spice advances the work of her “Complete Book of Spices”, and is more complete, more global and more comprehensive in every way. It is a fabulous book: concise, memorable, wearing its capacious learning lightly as it explains the most obvious and the most arcane with subtlety. Pretty darn essential, and stonkingly good value, we’d say. Dorling Kindersley £20stg

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