John McKenna is one of Ireland’s leading food writers. He and his wife, Sally, are known for their guide of Ireland’s best 100 restaurants, which is published annually. They have co-authored a new cookbook, Milk, which aims to promote Irish dairy as the best in the world. I spoke with him about the process of writing the book, and its relevance to a student audience.
This interview has been edited for length, and to give the impression that the interviewer is fluent in English and proficient with technology.
Q. Let’s start with this one: who is this book for?
A. [Sally and I] write these strange books that take a subject that intrigues us but which we in some ways take for granted. The first cookery book we did, 25 years ago, was a book on pizza, about a lady who’s a legend up in Sligo, Bernadette O’Shea. It’s called Pizza Defined, and of course you look at that and think, pizza isn’t native to Ireland, who was this woman cooking pizza in Sligo anyway? But she is one of the great chefs I’ve encountered and that book continues to sell away 25 years later. The next book we did in that genre was a book about seaweed five years ago. Milk is one of those things we take for granted in everybody’s fridge and everybody’s house in every corner of the country, and yet we don’t look at it as anything other than a commodity, and what we hoped to do was to look at something and say, “There’s more to this – it’s not just a basic thing; there’s a culture here.”
I hope the book is of interest to people who are curious, really. I think people who cook are curious: you’re always intrigued by what you don’t know rather than what you do know. For some people cooking is just hard work and a chore, but for the people we write for cooking is a means of expression and creativity. One of the curious things about cookbooks is that they’re filled with recipes that feature milk in one way or another – usually making a béchamel or something like that – but if you look in the index under ‘M’ you will not see ‘milk;’ like butter it’s completely taken for granted. I got a call two years ago from the National Dairy Council (NDC) and they asked me to give a talk at the Quality Milk Awards, so I had to think about what I wanted to say about milk, and that was where I started to borrow the language from wine. We talk about wine being a grand cru liquid but of course I’m stealing that from the French classification of wines.
Q. I really enjoyed the profiles of Irish dairy farmers in Milk. Was there something that particularly surprised you when you were researching the book?
A. There were two things. One thing is scientific: I had already done some work on the science, I had spoken to Professor Alan Kelly of UCC, but then we wanted the input of the NDC so that their nutritionists and dietitians could oversee it. When you have a cow on grass, the milk is this amazing product with vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin K. It’s a little bit like seawater: you can take seawater apart and you can put it back together, but you don’t make seawater – you make salted water; you put a fish in it, the fish will die. Milk is a bit the same. If you take a cow off grass, you’ll get milk, but the milk is no good. So the pasture fed thing, the small fields, it’s very important to the quality of milk. And I suppose then the second thing was, talking to all the farmers, it was their knowledge not just of their herd but of their fields: when was the right time to move the cows, when was the grass ready; in other words, what was the optimum timing to optimise the quality of the milk? That didn’t surprise me – I live among farmers here in west Cork – but their knowledge is so deep, and I think we tend to live in a modern society that I think undervalues what I would call cultural intelligence, we prefer scientific or empirical intelligence, but cultural intelligence where something is handed down from parent to child can be extremely powerful. It’s difficult to objectively examine it but it’s there. These people know their land, they know their cattle, and I found that very powerful.
Q. I was blown away, not just by the emotional attachment but the emotional connection between farmers and their herds.
A. Yes, we published our first book just over thirty years ago, in 1989, and when we began to meet artisans for the first time, we discovered the emotional attachment they had with what they made, whether they made cheese or cured salami or smoked ham – it actually didn’t really matter. A real artisan wants to be their best, and it’s very exciting to write about that. It’s exactly the same with these farmers. I would love to see a situation in which we have more cuvées: here is a “summer milk,” or here is the first milk after the cows go back on the grass after the summer. I know that’s difficult to do. In a practical sense, you need separate bottling et cetera, but I’d like to see us move towards that. After all, the French do it with wine. They don’t simply say, “Here’s red wine and this is white wine,” no, they say, “Here’s a viognier from the Rhône Valley,” and you pay much more because it’s a viognier from the Rhône Valley. I’d like to see more specificity if it were possible, but I think the people in the co-ops would tell me I’m talking through my hat.
Q. It’s an odd experience for a student reading a cookbook. One the one hand, Ireland is a very exciting place nowadays in culinary terms, but students’ access to that world is limited by their finances. What’s the best way for a student to engage with Ireland’s food scene?
A. It is exciting, but the difficulty we face is that eating out in Ireland is expensive, and that’s due to a whole array of factors, most of which are outside the control of restaurateurs. If you’re renting a place in Dublin, the rent is sky high; the price of food reflects a whole host of external factors. It’s a pity because a lot of students – and it was the same for me as a student forty years ago – you’re stuck eating the same things: noodles, cheap food.
To answer your question, is it possible to eat well but eat cheaply? The answer is yes, but the problem is that it takes a great deal of work, by which I mean it takes a great deal of time. I bought two lamb necks last Friday in Bantry and they cost four euro each. There’s a lot of meat on a lamb neck but no matter what cookery technique you use, it takes a lot of time and effort. That’s very difficult for anybody, not just students. We have built a very exciting food culture in Ireland. When we started thirty years ago there was really nothing, but it’s an issue now that an obstacle is cost. Food is part of creativity, it’s part of our culture, and whether you’re a student who doesn’t have much money or you’re someone on minimum wage, you don’t have the luxury of being able to access an everyday eating experience. Even a cup of coffee – you know the joke: “3fe coffee, three f**king euro!?” It’s a good joke but it’s not even really funny. It is a problem. The only way into the food culture is reading, tasting, and learning, and it takes time; you keep discovering things every day if you’re lucky and if you’re curious. When I first got into food in my twenties, it was because of one book, one recipe actually, by an American called Richard Olney, from Iowa. He moved to France, to Provence, in the 50s, and he has a little book which is still my favourite cookbook, called Simple French Food. Of course, it’s anything but simple, but he had this recipe for scrambled eggs with tomato and basil, and I thought “You don’t put tomato and basil in scrambled egg – I’d better see what that’s like.” It blew my mind. If you’re lucky, at some point something will trigger that curiosity, and will empower you, but that’s a lucky break.
Q. It’s no coincidence then that one of the recipes in Milk is for mashed potatoes with basil and sundried tomatoes.
A. That’s a great recipe which actually was pioneered by the original owners of Elephant & Castle in Temple Bar. That was originally run by a couple, Liz Mee and her partner John – Liz was one of the great cooks – and they opened the same year we did our first book in 89. They used to make mashed potatoes to die for, but of course they were made famous by their chicken wings, which they made like nobody else and, before Dublin’s traffic became such an issue in the early nineties, we would know people who would detour into Temple Bar just to have chicken wings. It was one of the most important restaurants in our culinary culture, in terms of accessible food that was also highly creative.
On the topic of recipes you can give a bit of magic to, there’s a very old recipe of Sally’s in the book, which comes from her family, and that’s the recipe for corn cheese. It’s as cheap as chips and it’s fantastic. You make that for your friends and they will just fall over in adoration.
Q. Now that Milk has gone to press, are the other exciting projects you’re working on?
A. No, we’re into lockdown now and the book is out. I’d like to do a book on butter which the National Dairy Council might also help us with. The last few books we’ve done have been with Harper Collins, the biggest publisher in the world, but we’re real control freaks, we like to control how the book is going to be – Sally does the design. But no, we’ve written three books in the last year, and we’re a wee bit burned out. We’d like to have a nice quiet Lockdown Two, and do lots of cooking because the work on Milk was incredibly intense – we actually did the book in five weeks, all of the recipes, all of the testing, so it’s nice to get back to cooking domestically and trying new ideas and new things. But I’d like to do a book on butter. I think we have a fantastic dairy industry and we need to show it some respect, and try to bring more culture to it. Being a farmer is hard work. You work 365 days a year, you don’t get a day off. I’d like to do more on agriculture. I think we’ve tended to be food writers, but it would be nice to look at agri-culture. People talk about agri-business and the price of this and that, but I’d like to do more about the people behind these things.
Milk was published on October 6th by Estragon Press. It’s available for €17.99 at selected book shops throughout Ireland.
