Jp McMahon told David Hennessy about his An Irish Food Story: 100 Foods That Made Us.
It was when he was a teenager that Jp McMahon saw exchange students from France, Spain and other countries and the pride with which they spoke about the food or their homeland, he wondered why there wasn’t anything similar regarding Irish food, in fact it was barely spoken about.
The book An Irish Food Story: 100 Foods That Made Us is ‘about the story of Irish food and food Ireland. They may seem like the same thing, but they’re not’.
It has been longlisted for the André Simon Food and Book Awards.
Jp McMahon is a Michelin- starred chef, restauranteur and the best-selling author of The Irish Cookbook.
An ambassador for Irish food, he is the founder and host of one of the biggest and most talked about food events in Europe, Food on the Edge.
He also has a monthly slot on RTÉ TV and wrote a weekly column for the Irish Times for eight years.
His new book illustrates what there is celebrate about Irish food and a changing Irish food culture.
Are you delighted that the book has been longlisted for the André Simon Food and Drink Awards?
“Yeah, it’s very unexpected.
“I suppose I don’t necessarily write for awards but they’re nice.
“They’re a nice bonus when they come along.
“For me the project is just trying to uncover a little more about Irish food culture and put it out there, and hopefully people will receive it well.”
I usually ask where a project started but this has kind of been all your life really, hasn’t it? That you have been observing such things..
“Yeah, the interest in food is probably from a young age.
“I started cooking when I was 15 but the interest in Irish food or Irish food culture is probably the beginning of the 21st century, the early noughties and that kind of interest in revival in local foods, artisan foods.
“I was involved in that in Galway and that kind of progressed into opening Aniar and really looking at our wild foods, our seaweeds and kind of learning a lot of stuff that I never knew.
“I suppose the big one was writing The Irish Cookbook in 2020.
“I started that in 2016 and that kind of brought the two things together: The tradition of Irish food, its history, and then also where it is in terms of its contemporary standing.
“I suppose that’s what I try and do in An Irish Food Story, put these kind of three elements together.
“We have a very long history of people being in Ireland. They always ate. They had to eat.
“Whenever there’s people and there’s eating, there’s a food culture and it’s interesting to kind of uncover that.”
It goes back to your teenage years and seeing how other teens from other countries spoke about their food. There was nothing from the Irish side and not even much discussion about it..
“I think there’s different elements.
“There’s a complicated history of colonisation and famine and a very reduced attitude towards food.
“But I think that just because we didn’t talk about it, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.
“I think at any period in Irish food history, if you look at it, there’s plenty to uncover whether it’s something happening in Irish food, or something happening with foods coming into the country, say the rise of Chinese food and that interest there.”
Do you think there is a misconception, even amongst ourselves, that Irish food is just Irish stew, back and cabbage and that’s it?
“100%, I think that it’s interesting that that kind of reduction of what a national food is can be applied to any country whether you go to Spain or go to Italy, and you could say, ‘Oh sure Italian food is just pasta’, or ‘Spanish food is just rice’.
“And we don’t seem to have that attitude towards those countries that we have a much more vested interest in knowing much more about, France and Spain, than we do about Ireland, and I think there was a lack of confidence in terms of talking about the story of Irish food.
“I think there was pockets of- you could call resistance whether it was Myrtle Allen or Maura Laverty, a lot of female figures in the 20th century were writing about food while we were kind of saying, ‘Well, there is no food’.
“I mean it’s interesting to uncover some cookbooks in the 20th century and say, ‘Well, look, there’s whole books about food in Ireland and not only Irish food but also food in Ireland’.
“The different traditions that were coming to Ireland whether it’s when curry comes into the country and takes off or when Chinese food does.
“They’re all relevant questions for me in terms of what a food culture is and it’s not necessarily just about flying an Irish flag or being nationalistic about it.
“I try and make that distinction in the book, that there are native Irish foods and there’s a kind of native Irish food tradition and then there’s food in Ireland which never stops changing and it’s different for my kids now than it was for me, and it was different for my grandparents as it was for me.
“I think that they’re interesting stories as well and I think that they make the story richer.”
You mention curry there and indeed the book includes other dishes such as spaghetti Bolognese that wouldn’t be considered Irish but we have taken to..
“It’s amazing but there is so much confidence.
“I’m writing an Irish baking book for 2026 and I’m just kind of researching baking at the moment.
“There’s so much baking tradition that comes from Europe via England for a long time we were like, ‘Well, that’s not Irish’.
“And the question is, well, why isn’t it Irish?
“And how long does something have to happen in a country to become Irish?
“Is it ten years, 50 years, 100 years?
“If there’s a baking tradition for 300 years in Ireland that originally came from England, it’s going to have differences and it’s going to have a history.
“I think that it’s important not to just discount like, ‘Oh this thing came from here, therefore it’s not part of Irish food’, like spaghetti bolognese.
“I think that the history of spaghetti bolognese in Ireland you could write a whole book on.
“I think that’s a really interesting topic because it shows not only how pasta and noodles travelled, initially from China but also how this dish that doesn’t really exist in Italy, became something that the English and the Irish ate.
“In my grandparents’ time, most of his family emigrated to England.
“My grandfather lived in England during World War Two, came back to Ireland.
“We see them as two separate countries but really, there’s a lot of shared history.”
What is the direct reaction to the book that you’ve observed?
“It’s predominantly positive: People saying, ‘I didn’t realise that there was so much you can write about’.
“I mean initially I think we had 400 entries.
“We narrowed it down to 100 to make the book kind of accessible.
“Every time I finish a book, there’s another book waiting to begin with all the bits that are left over that didn’t make it into that book.
“I think that the odd negative comment is just, ‘Well, are you kind of making this up?’
“Which is funny.
“I remember I saw one of the Amazon reviews of The Irish cookbook, because some of the recipes in it are contemporary like raw scallops and apple and seaweed.
“It’s nothing groundbreaking, it’s just a little, small dish made of Irish ingredients and the comment was, ‘Some of these recipes have a spurious connection to Ireland’.
“I think that we still have a little bit to get over in terms of trying to also build a new tradition, in terms of uncovering, like, what we do in Aniar with all the seaweeds and people go, ‘Well, I wouldn’t consider that Irish’.
“And you’re like, ‘They’re here. They’re here longer than people and we’ve been eating them’.
“I think that it’s worthwhile to see what we can do with them and if our food ends up looking a little bit Japanese, so be it.
“But to say that that’s just a Japanese dish because it has raw shellfish is, I think, just a little bit reductive.”
Has it opened people’s eyes a bit?
“Yeah, I think we have a lot of nostalgia for food in Ireland.
“A lot of people would say to me, ‘Oh God, I’ve completely forgot about some of those things’ whether it’s Bird’s custard or some of the more processed foods like Angel’s Delight.
“I think, from anthropological point of view, everything is worthwhile in terms of writing about it.
“Even the spice bag.
“I never thought I’d be writing about it.
“I haven’t even eaten a spice bag in years.
“My daughters love them but I think all food history is interesting depending on what angle you want to take.
“I think that when we were growing up, we thought that food history would have to have a capital H, it had to be the big food history.
“Not food history about what processed foods we ate or the first time we had a pizza.
“But I think they’re really interesting questions because they showcase how cultures change.
“We shouldn’t be ashamed of our food culture just because we ate cream crackers or something like that.
“They’re all worthwhile pursuits.”
Is Irish food in a much better place now than it was when it wasn’t thought about, spoken about, that time you referenced?
“I think so.
“I think it’s kind of a two pronged approach.
“I think on the one side, there’s a lot more confidence and education, interest in food nowadays and I think that we do feel that we can compete with the French and the Spanish and Italians to some degree, think about Irish food producers or Irish restaurants.
“On the other hand, I think that also it’s a very delicate balance.
“We have a very new food culture in terms of restaurants and going out and that.
“I think we need to mind it better.
“From a government point of view, we have no strategy for food in Ireland.
“I mean other than say producing food and exporting it and using it as a commodity, we don’t have a cultural strategy for food.
“I think developing that over the next 20 or 30 years is important because the tension between the local and the global is very strong, and globalisation is so powerful that I can see my kids just veering back to an international sense of food and not really caring.
“I wouldn’t like to see the last 30 years as being just ‘a trend’ or a shift towards the local in the same way the kind of global landscape is changing now, I’d hate to see all that lost but it is easily lost.
“One could just revert back to Irish food is just this and let’s keep on going with the big cuisines.
“I think it’s important that I keep doing things but also I’m always trying to push local and national agencies to try and come up with some sort of cultural strategy for food because the first thing that’s always cut, unfortunately, is the culture around food in terms of festivals and that.
“I’ve seen the rise and fall of food festivals in Ireland over the last 20 years and that’s symptomatic, I think, of where we’re at at the moment so there’s positive and negative elements.”
We’ve seen an explosion of new Irish producers in the food and drink world in recent years..
“And it’s being fuelled predominantly by an entrepreneurial spirit.
“You have great producers, great restauranteurs.
“You have Bord Bia very much pushing Irish food as a wonderful export but there’s no point in having €100 billion worth of exports if we don’t mind our food culture at home.
“Irish food is known throughout the world as a product: Kerrygold, beef, lamb but we have to translate that back into a culture at home because we don’t want to be like we were for 500 years, just producing food to feed the world which was predominantly what Ireland was.
“It was pretty much making cattle and dairy for the British Empire.
“I think it’s very important that we don’t just fall into that and and not develop our food culture at home.”
Jp’s The Irish Cook Book, published in 2020, was a revelation to some who thought he couldn’t get a book out of Irish recipes.
“When I wrote the Irish Cook Book, there was just so much material left over.
“Ironically when I wrote the book, I think the brief was to write 500 recipes and people were saying, ‘Sure, there wouldn’t be more than four recipes in Ireland’.
“That’s what someone had said to me.
“In the end, I produced 900 recipes so there’s a lot there.
“It would be nice to have this project of bringing out a book every two years to try and amplify this culture and to keep momentum and really to just get the message out there so people can keep on seeing that this is something worthwhile to investigate.”
An Irish Food Story: 100 Foods That Made Us by Jp McMahon is available from Nine Bean Rows.
