Wholesome: Feed Your Family Well For Less by Caitriona Redmond (Mercier Press €19.99)
Writing in The New Yorker, Jill Lepore describes the discovery by Elizabeth Warren, Harvard law professor, United States Senator and potential Democratic 2016 Presidential candidate, of the reality that, “Financial crisis, for a two-income family, usually means having to live, quite suddenly, on one income. In these straits, families with children tend to totter on the edge of ruin”.
Tell that to Caitriona Redmond, the author of Wholesome. Ms Redmond lost her job in the world of property in 2009. She went from being a high-flyer who could purchase whatever she desired to a being mother of three with €70 per week to feed her family. Wholesome is the story of how she managed to stay afloat but it is also, in fact, about a lot more than just cooking on a budget.
The introduction, in particular, is a frequently brilliant analysis of what we used to call “Domestic Science”, that is, using your smarts when it comes to managing the household economy to get the best results at the best possible cost. “I'm now using the skills I already had to make the household work for us... When so much of my life was out of my control, cooking and nourishing my family was something I could control. It gives me great strength to be able to take ownership of and responsibility for the food we eat and where it comes from”.
That is an inspiring message, but what is not inspiring is that the message was learnt at the cost of considerable pain for Ms Redmond, and her family. If you needed a book to describe the fiction of the Celtic Tiger and the on-going hurt of its aftermath, then how interesting that it should be a cookery book that tells that story, albeit obliquely.
The Celtic Tiger sold the Irish people a comfortable lie: it said that all you needed was to be able to afford things, because everything was for sale, and everything that was for sale was good, and there was no need for anything else other than the ability to purchase. The more money you had, the more control you had, because you could decide what to spend your money on.
The reality that you worked hard all day and then wasted your money hastily hoovering up overpriced, unhealthy, mass-produced industrialised food in a supermarket was never adverted to: you just brought that cooked roast chicken at the rotisserie, brought it home, ate some of it, then chucked the rest away.
Today, Ms Redmond is not just the wise cook, but also the wise person: “A medium chicken will result in at least two meals from the meat, and a further meal from chicken stock.”
(Full Disclosure: several years back, I wrote an article in The Irish Times describing just how many meals I could produce from a single chicken. People laughed at me, and called me a skinflint. Really.)
Our Minister for Health, James Reilly, should ensure that every HSE department and secondary school in Ireland has a copy of Wholesome. Ms Redmond has done the State some service.
The Pleasures of the Table: Rediscovering Theodora Fitzgibbon, by Donal Skehan (Gill & MacMillan €24.99)
When you met Theodora Fitzgibbon, you knew straight away that here was a woman who knew things.
It wasn't simply her appearance that was striking, though she retained the good looks that defined her young life. But what was more striking about her was the aura of knowledge, of culture, of experience, that she exuded. This was the clue that told you that Ms Fitzgibbon belonged amongst that elite group of singular, twentieth-century women who led interesting, often bohemian lives, and who expressed their feminism and their independence through writing – M.F.K. Fisher; Elizabeth David; Patience Gray; Julia Child.
One got the sense from Theodora that the priviliged upbringing she had enjoyed was interspersed with times of hardship, and the need to earn a crust, as well as bake one.
I met her at a time when things were changing in Irish food, when the twin tent poles of The Irish Times food and wine coverage – T.P. Whelehan writing about wine; Theodora writing about food – were changing, after twenty years when the pair had been the definitive commentators on culinary matters.
But Theodora was unusual in also being a novelist, an actress and an autobiographer, so her food writing was always textured and nuanced – there was depth to it, and depth to her many books, which she produced at a furious rate whilst also writing journalism. The little quirks of her writing style were considered. In a copied excerpt from one of her columns reprinted in The Pleasures of the Table, she is telling us how to make stuffed eggs for a picnic: once we have mashed up our cooked egg yolks with some Worcester sauce, mashed sardine, some herbs and various other suggestions, she continues “Mix it very well and if very stiff add a trickle of yogurt or a little top of the milk but don't make it sloppy”
It's that “a little top of the milk” that brings the sentence alive, for it's both colourful and practical and that, in a sense was Theodora Fitzgibbon: practical, and vividly colourful, a woman who added orange flower water to her carrot pie at a time when the only water that mattered in Ireland was holy water.
Donal Skehan has brought new colour to the Theodora dishes he has selected and photographed for this handsome book. The book succeeds because it shows how diverse and cultured Theodora's recipes were – The Irish Omelette on page 112 is swiftly followed by Le Pounti, “a good egg dish which comes from the mountains of the Auvergne” on page 113, and Theodora was cooking Mushoshi – “An Armenian brown lentil salad with apricots and nuts which can be delightful” before Yotam Ottolenghi was born.
The Pleasures of the Table is a valuable piece of culinary reclamation. I hope someone will now do the same for Monica Sheridan's books and television shows.
