Food on plate puts Ireland on map at Oxford symposium

A GALA Irish banquet showcasing the best of Irish smoked and cured foods was the highlight at the Oxford Food Symposium, held at the weekend.

The symposium is an annual gathering now in its 29th year, bringing together distinguished food writers, historians, chefs, scholars, anthropologists and hardcore foodies from all over the world. Preparations for the Irish feast, the first to be presented there, started last March on St Patrick’s Day when white Duke of York potatoes were planted in the walled gardens of Lissadell House in Sligo for harvesting in July.

This year’s event whose theme was “Cured, Fermented and Smoked Foods” held in the modernist buildings of St Catherine’s College drew some 200 people from 28 countries, many from the US. Founded by the late Alan Davidson, author of The Oxford Companion to Food, early “symposiasts” were gastronomic gurus like Julia Child, Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson.

Though the event is scholarly and some of the papers on rarefied and arcane topics such as starch fermentation in southeastern Ethiopia or Transylvanian charcoal-coated bread, the atmosphere is light-hearted and convivial and more like a summer school.

Everybody learns something new about another food culture.

Irish participation, which began decades ago with Myrtle Allen of Ballymaloe, has been reignited in recent years through the encouragement of organiser Carolin Young, a dynamic US art historian who leads culinary tours in Paris, and those involved in the culinary arts degree at DIT. A young Irish student chef Elaine Mahon from DIT, for instance, was one of this year’s winners of the Raymond Blanc Young Chefs’ Grant presented by the maestro himself.

In charge of the Irish dinner in the vast dining hall of the college were Padraic Og Gallagher of Gallagher’s Boxy House in Dublin and the award-winning PhD chef from DIT Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire.

Sponsored by Tourism Ireland, the event was preceded by a short film featuring interviews with the farmers and artisan food producers from whom the ingredients for the dinner were sourced.

“We’re here to sell Ireland,” said Mr Gallagher. “Food and food tourism is an element of Ireland we want to highlight.”

Mr Mac Con Iomaire, who delivered a paper on the origins of corned beef believes “We are food leaders. People are looking to us for ideas and inspiration. We are now on an international stage.”

The menu, which included a map of Ireland showing the various locations of the producers, consisted of cold and warm starters of smoked salmon, eel and mackerel with boxty and treacle bread accompanied by red and white wines. Main course was bacon and corned beef served with York cabbage, new potatoes and champ, along with a mustard and a parsley sauce, and followed by farmhouse cheeses, oatcakes, porter cake and Irish coffee.

Claudia Roden, co-chair of the symposium and considered by many to be the most important living food writer, said: “It was fantastic in every way.

“It is some of the best salmon I have ever eaten and the potatoes and cabbage had real taste. The beef was perfect and the cooking was not pretentious, but natural and honest. Such quality of ingredients you rarely get now.

“Ireland has come into the picture as the country of food. It is on the gastronomic map. Please keep it that way.”