Gathering of gourmets all in good taste

Hadyn Shaughnessy willingly samples good food and chat at a gourmet gathering against the backdrop of Garnish Island

For the isle formerly known as emerald these are interesting times. After the Celtic Tiger and Ireland's brief glory as a source of software production comes the hour of the food island and its incarnation in the serrated peninsulas and jagged promontories that make up the scenery of the dazzling south-west.

Witness a place apart, gourmet west Cork. Food producers from the region met their admiring public in the Bamboo Park in Glengarriff yesterday at the West Cork Garden Party. This annual event is organised by Fuchsia brands to promote the link between west Cork craft foods and the development of west Cork tourism. It works.

"We sell about €40,000 a year's worth in Luxembourg, Elmer Nolan, of Union Hall Smokery, said as she offered a plate of smoked salmon pate and crackers.

Alongside the tropical-looking Jubaea Chiliensis (Chilean Wine Palm) and the Washington Robusta, holiday weekend visitors enjoyed Martin Carey's pork sausages (pigs reared locally of course); Bill Hogan's Gabriel and Desmond raw milk cheeses, and the Irish original Milleen cheese, produced by the Steeles on the Beara Peninsula - among other treats.

Being a gourmet is not only about good eating. It also involves plenty of chat.

O Connail's chocolates now come in just about every strength of cocoa solid from 35 to 95 per cent, each a fine step in the gradient to purity. Well, how do you take your solids? Milky and weak or up there? Who would have thought chocolate could become a technical talking point?

Perhaps that's the way we men are. Chocolate says a lot about character. The women enjoy it. I took mine at a modest 50 per cent and came away feeling like the type who compromises too easily.

On the subject of purity, Norman Steele had a few things to say about microflora.

"We re-establish the microflora now after pasteurisation," he said, explaining the craft of Milleen cheese-making, "in the way we store and ripen the cheese".

The microflora used to be an ever present in the formerly raw-milk Milleen. Now it has to be encouraged. Son Quinlan, an old hand in the ripening room, nodded his head. "Millen tastes different depending on the time of year."

"It always tastes different," Norman said, "which is why supermarkets can't deal with it. But we want to make a good cheese that's always interesting, not a cheese that tastes in a standard way."

Bill Hogan, of the West Cork Natural Cheese company, made the same point. For those addicted to technicalities, Bill talks good cheese mechanics.

"The enzymes break down the long chain fatty acids," he says. "This is a live cheese and basically a monounsaturated product because of the way the enzymes work."

Fascinating. Tasted good too.

Half his product goes to the UK. They lap it up in London, where it is sold at the famous cluster of gourmet health shops in Neal's Yard. Norman's Milleen also goes down a treat in the south of England.

Looking for a tasty Indian Chutney?

I now know just the place.

Castletownbere.

Jamaican pickles?

Glandore.

Martin Carey has been a flag-bearer for west Cork food artisans. His butcher's shop on South Main Street, in Bandon, sells fish, cheese, preserves and of course meat, much of it in marinades for different occasions. Many of the west Cork producers are represented there.

"We're always experimenting," says Martin who also concludes that his trade has changed dramatically over the past decade. "It makes our job much more interesting."

He now makes 12 different types of sausage. "They all sell. No matter what we try. We're now doing en croute products too."

At the butchers? Does nobody ask for the simple cuts off a dead animal any longer in west Cork?

Apparently, not. For the isle formerly known as emerald the rebranding means there are several new words out there to describe the progress to a gourmet Ireland. Not least among them; Fancy!