Next week we’re off on holidays for a few days and in advance of that, Herself was smitten by what everyone agreed was a good idea. She spotted, and bought, a portable pizza oven from one of the supermarket middle aisles.
It’s a dinky little thing, though when she brought it home, we realised that, while the oven is portable, the large gas canister it requires is slightly less so. Nonetheless, I took myself off to the shop and got the last one in stock. The checkout queue provided the explanation for this: it consisted almost exclusively of men buying barbecues or gas canisters, or both.
This was that weekend in mid-July, when the country experienced almost record-breaking temperatures: a climactic phenomenon that seems to prompt in Irish humans an irresistible urge to cook and eat outside.
It wasn’t always like this. People will often say the summers were much warmer when they were young. Yet when they were young, they’d go home to have meat and spuds and veg. Indoors. Eating outside was regarded as a bit suspect, even reckless. No one did it, because everyone knew you can’t turn your back on the Irish weather. It’ll round on you in an instant.
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But that attitude has changed, for various reasons. The smoking ban introduced the idea of the indoor-outdoor pub. Covid did the same for restaurants and coffee shops: and perhaps lulled us into the wish-fulfilling idea that Ireland is far more Mediterranean than we had previously thought.
Some people are evangelical about barbecues, and will use their barbie every chance they get, even if it’s raining. They’ll have opinions on different sorts of meats and desserts and sauces, on the merits and demerits of gas versus charcoal, which baffles me. I get that charcoal may add a certain flavour to the meat and produce a pleasing aroma. But why use a gas cooker in your garden when there’s a gas cooker metres away in your kitchen? Isn’t that exactly the same? (I’m sure there’s a barbecue-nerd explanation for this.)
Equally baffling is why, just because it’s sunny, people choose to cook meat in such a risky way. The advice is that chicken should be pre-cooked in the oven anyway (rendering the barbecue pointless) while grilling burgers and steaks is a knife-edge proposition. It’s far more difficult to do on a barbecue, and all too often can lead to burnt on one side and raw on the other. Plus – at the risk of sounding all heteronormative – barbecuing seems to be a primarily male task: men who don’t routinely prepare the family meals. So, you have an inexperienced cook using a piece of equipment that requires a lot of experience. It’s a one-way ticket to Diarrhoeaville.
Even if the beer-swilling alpha manages to produce food that isn’t a gastroenteritis time bomb, Irish barbecue convention seems to demand that you consume it with your hands, with the plate sitting on your lap. Apart from being greasy and awkward, this makes you a target for every small flying creature in the garden. Within seconds, you’ll be enveloped by a cloud of midges, bent on eating you, and your burnt dinner. But you can’t move. You have to sit there and munch on your insect-laced burger and declare it to be delicious to stroke the ego of a man who barely knows how to switch on a kettle.
Yes, I’m a miserable grump. And a hypocrite. Because, like most back gardens in Ireland, ours is home to a barbecue. It’s small and red and we did try to use it once. But the smoke from the charcoal kept blowing back into the kitchen. Now it’s a place for spiders to erect their webs during summertime. We think of it as doing our bit for rewilding. And if it’s sunny and we want that barbecue vibe, we eat at the kitchen table and open the patio doors.
