The Donegal cafe recreating Irish foods we have lost or forgotten

Since Irish homes had neither hobs nor ovens long ago, it can be challenging for us now to recreate our national dishes, as we no longer cook everything in, on, or over the fire. The situation is even harder for restaurants, as fire officers and hygiene inspectors do not look kindly on open fires in commercial kitchens.

This was the quandary facing William McElhinney, when he decided to open a cafe on Malin Head serving tourists the sort of food that had been eaten on the northern tip of the Inishowen Peninsula for thousands of years, produced locally and cooked in the traditional way.

Inspired by wood-fired pizza ovens, he built a similar structure with a thick stone floor and a large clay dome, allowing him to recreate Irish fireside cooking while still complying with all health and safety regulations.

At first glance, Wild Strands Caifé seems like an ordinary Irish eatery - pine tables and hard chairs in a boxy white room inside the Community Centre in Carnmalin, on the road to the most northerly tip of Ireland. It's only when you notice the vivacious, gesticulating figure of McElhinney in a tweed cap and a grey beard, tending to the flames of his alembic chamber, that you realise this is no ordinary café.

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His timber-fuelled furnace and hearth allow him to bake bread with fresh seasonal toppings, such as roast lamb, spiced beef, smoked vegetables and fire-dried seaweed, in the way that local people have been doing here for millennia.

McElhinney spends his days stoking the cinders, cleaning the hearth stone, sliding cast iron pots of fish and vegetables nearer and further from the embers, and cooking his traditional Irish flat breads directly on the hearth.

For those who suggest flatbreads aren’t traditionally Irish, he explains that “The rye, barley, oats, spelt and ancient forms of wheat that grew here did not have enough gluten in them to rise into puffy loaves. The only way they were digestible was by rolling the dough out thinly and baking it on a griddle or on the hearth. These were flatbreads. I’m just continuing that tradition.”

When a customer orders a sandwich, McElhinney rolls out a dough of spelt, barley, rye, oats, wheat and ground seaweeds with some virgin Donegal rape seed, fermented overnight. He throws a disc of this Irish sourdough onto the fire stone, then adds toppings like local Malin Head lamb marinated in a seaweed spice mix and cooked with Carrageen Moss, or locally-caught fish, or a hummus made with locally grown beetroot and goats cheese.

“I’m trying to re-imagine the foods that we may have lost or forgotten, and to remind people of the range and complexity of food that we would once have eaten here, such as cnuasach mara (sea pickings), bán bia (white foods) and bocht bia (poor food). I use seaweed in almost all my dishes, because it’s what we’ve been doing in this part of the world for eons. I’m been foraging seaweed here for more than 25 years.

“I also use a lot of fermented products, as I’m pretty certain we were fermenting vegetables and other products here in the past. It was one of the ways we could preserve things. And when you consider the range of great cheeses and curds we were producing in Ireland up until the Famine, you’ve got to assume that we had mastered other forms of fermentation too.”

Wild Strands is also the hub of McElhinney’s eco-tourism business, which offers “slow adventure experiences” such as seaweed outings, wild cooking demonstrations, foraging tours and educational talks. Seaweed is a particular focus for McElhinney, who regards it as the cornerstone of a new model of Irish cuisine based on food justice and food sovereignty.

He uses it in every single dish in the cafe, from the scones to stocks, sauces and dressings. “It’s subtle but it makes a big difference to the flavours and texture – and of course there are health benefits too.”

McElhinney even uses seaweed in his desserts. “I use crotal in my flummery,” he says, which was indecipherable until he explained that flummery is a traditional milk pudding made with soaked or fermented grains, and crotal is a local word for Carrageen Moss.

"Crotal was a very important social and economic resource for the area. There are a still a few people who collect it, mostly for personal use, but when I started collecting seaweeds with my father-in-law, John Edward Logue of Malin Head, the strand was still divided up into strips, with each neighbour having rights to a section, just like turbary rights on a bog.

“In fact, White Strand is still divided between local families here. We had a great connection to coastal foraging and the different seaweeds, though we’re losing the local names for many of them, which is why I wanted to preserve the word crotal on the menu.”

His fish soup is called a bree skink for a similar reason. Bree is a local townland in Malin Head, and also a word associated with a barnach (limpet) broth, while skink is a local term for a soup made with onions, potatoes and milk.

“I make it with a stock of local seaweeds and vegetables, a dashi really. I could call it a chowder, but why would you, when that’s a recent import that came in with the prawn cocktail in the 70s? Let’s be proud of who we are and what we have.”

For a humble community cafe in a remote Atlantic outpost, Wild Strands is doing something bold and innovative, presenting visitors with a taste of Ireland that stretches back beyond the invention of baking soda (and soda bread) in the 1840s, and summoning authentic tastes of pre-Famine food in Ireland.

Might other areas along the Wild Atlantic Way be able to research and rediscover (or reimagine) local fish soups, oatcakes, breads and seaweed dishes associated with their areas? Suddenly the fact that we serve visitors BLTs and tuna melts along our tourist routes while proudly boasting of the richness of our culture and heritage seems odd and somewhat obtuse.