Allen - Rachels Irish family food: a collection of Rachels best-loved family recipes

This is a cookbook I have always wanted to write. Its a collection of my very best family recipes, seriously comforting and nourishing food, all inspired by both traditional and modern Irish cooking. In Ireland we have fabulous ingredient-led dishes that make the most of the incredible produce from our farms and fish and seafood from our coast. These are my favourite recipes to cook for my family, the ones I turn to again and again. Whether or not youre familiar with Irish food, Im sure youll love this celebration of our countrys culinary culture.

Irish food has a rich history and tradition. Of course, our love for the potato is well known and very real, but with recipes such as colcannon, Irish stew and our wonderful soda bread there are so many distinctively Irish dishes that make our food ideal for home-cooked meals wherever in the world you might live. I grew up in Dublin and my mum was a very good cook. She would often have casseroles gently bubbling in the oven, filling the kitchen with their alluring aromas to make my sister and me ever more impatiently hungry.

My own relationship with cooking started with baking. My sister, mother and I would often bake together, making biscuits or cakes. I loved the whole process, from the messy mixing to the mysterious rise behind the oven door. It was at the age of eighteen that my interest in cooking became a passion and eventually an obsession. I travelled down to East Cork to study at the famous Ballymaloe Cookery School, which at the time had been going for six years, and at which I still teach to this day. It was at the cooking school that I met its founder, Darina Allen, who would eventually become my mother-in-law! I also met her mother-in-law, Myrtle Allen, the matriarch of Irish food who had founded the Ballymaloe House Restaurant and guest house all the way back in 1964.

On my first day at the cooking school I learned many of the principles that we still teach students today: that the best food comes from the best ingredients and that means carefully grown crops and lovingly raised animals. The school sits in the middle of an organic farm from which we get the students cooking ingredients. It opened my eyes to how much more important proper produce is than complicated or long-winded recipes.

This is echoed by our impressive and still rapidly expanding modern Irish food culture. Ours is not a history of elaborate multilayered dishes. Irish food is about local produce. The greenest grass in the world feeds the happiest cows, which in turn produce the most beautiful butter and cheeses. We have teams of small dedicated farmers who put their efforts into growing delectable crops and our cold water creates the sweetest seafood. With ingredients like this, I think its important not to dress up the food too much, to let their flavours take centre stage. This book is filled with simple and easily achievable dishes that I love to cook and, perhaps most importantly, that I love to eat!

The recipes range from light suppers for a summers evening to big hearty casseroles for when the wind is blowing and the rain is lashing down. There are everyday dinners for school nights when youve been at work all day, as well as slightly more involved recipes when you want to make something a little more special. All the recipes are easy to follow and not at all difficult to execute.

Ive also included four passages about each of the different provinces in Ireland, with information about the food as well as the people, their history and folklore. Irish culture is ancient but alive and vibrant, with food a fundamental piece of it. I hope that through our food you can connect both to the history of Ireland and to the wonderful country that it still is today.

These are the sorts of dishes I like to serve as a casual supper or a light lunch. They are versatile recipes and not too filling. A soup, for example, can easily feed a family if accompanied by lots of delicious crusty bread. Probably due in no small part to our blustery and bracing weather, there is a real tradition of warming soups in Ireland. It might be a nourishing broth such as the or a rich and creamy comforting soup like the two different chowder recipes in this chapter.

Lots of the recipes in this chapter would also work really well as an starter for a larger meal..

Asparagus has to be my favourite vegetable. The exquisitely flavoured bright green spears have a season that is always sadly short. Ireland has perfect growing conditions to produce some of the best asparagus Ive ever tasted. There are lots of different ways of cooking and serving asparagus, but to me this is the very best: simply boiled in salted water and served on with butter and lashings of hollandaise sauce.

Vegetarian

Serves

Preparation time: 5 minutes

Cooking time: 20 minutes

1620 asparagus spears

Good pinch of salt

A few slices of

Butter

Snap off the tough woody end of each asparagus stalk and discard. Fill a large saucepan to a depth of 46cm (12in) with water, add the salt and bring to a boil. Tip in the asparagus and cook in the boiling water for 48 minutes, until tender when pierced with a sharp knife. Drain immediately.

While the asparagus is cooking, toast the bread, then spread with the butter and remove the crusts, if you wish. For each person, place a piece of toast on a warmed plate, put 45 asparagus spears on top and spoon over a little hollandaise sauce.

Vegetarian

Makes 75ml (3fl oz)

Preparation time: 5 minutes

Cooking time: 5 minutes

1 egg yolk

1 tbsp cold water

50g (2oz) butter, diced

Freshly squeezed lemon juice

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Place a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of simmering water over medium heat. (The water must not boil to avoid heating the sauce so much it scrambles or curdles; take the pan off the heat every so often.) Add the egg yolk and cold water. Whisking all the time, gradually add the butter, a few pieces at a time, until each addition has melted and emulsified before adding the next.