The Menu: Terrific Tomato and the end of an era at Crawford Gallery Café

His compatriots made free and easy with the ‘oohs’ and the ‘aaahs’ expressing their appreciation of the elemental simplicity of said salad and marvelling at how a top-quality primary ingredient such as said tomato requires little or no further addition or interference is little requirement to find its best expression on the plate. 

Up to that point, The Menu was entirely in agreement with the general sentiments but then came a chorus of, ‘you’d never get tomatoes this good back in Ireland,’ at which point The Menu not only got up on his high horse but near cleared the table in a state of high indignation. Actually, he responded, The Menu all the time eats tomatoes every bit as good and often even better back in the Oul Sod, the crucial difference being that he never, ever buys the anaemic imitations to be found on the supermarket shelves but instead seeks them superb tomatoes from finest local independent growers.

The ever-popular tomato serves as well as any foodstuff as an indicator of the frailties and failings of the international food system. Accordingly, The Menu is delighted to welcome the return of the Totally Terrific Tomato Festival (Aug 27/28) to a brand-new venue, Dublin’s very wonderful Airfield Estate, urban farm and gardens, a two-day celebration of the Irish tomato.

Over 100 Irish-grown tomato varieties will be on display with 60 tomato growers from across the country having pledged to grow tomatoes for the festival. Highlights include, tomato seed-saving demonstrations, tomato growing tours and the all-important tomato taste test, with a prize for ‘Tastiest in Show’.

• www.airfield.ie

The critical study of food

Another round of the UCC Postgraduate Diploma in Irish Food Culture is set to kick off at the end of September and there are still a few places available for this programme of the critical study of our relationships with food production and consumption patterns and their crucial impacts on the world around us.

Taking place over a two-year period, students examine food and culinary systems from the perspectives of production, processing, preservation, preparation, and consumption, and will be guided through popular discourses such as farm to fork, ocean to plate, factory to plate, as well as exploring concepts such as identity, tradition, gender, memory, and ethics, and their application to the study of food. This NFQ level 9 programme is now open for applications until September 16 with course commencing at the end of September.

• Contact: Regina Sexton r.sexton@ucc.ie

End of an era

Our relationships with certain restaurants and the people who run them can often over the years develop bonds almost on a par with those we have with family and friends yet, equally, the hospitality sector can be a heartless business and when a restaurant’s time is done, all the goodwill in the world won’t save it. And so, one of The Menu’s most favourite restaurants of all, The Crawford Gallery Café has shut its doors after 35 years in the heart of Cork city. 

In an effortlessly elegant room, one of the great dining spaces in the country, the food served up on the table following a direct line back to the ethos of the Café’s original founder, Myrtle Allen, with Sinead Doran the most recent to keep that particular flag flying. There are always challenges in hospitality but the last two years have been especially difficult so the news is not entirely unsurprising and, in time, other restaurants will arise anew in our affections but any who ever dined in the Crawford will forever hold its memory in a special little corner of the heart. Farewell, then Crawford Gallery Café!

TODAY’S SPECIAL

The Menu has written before of the very wonderful Dutch-born Marion Roeleveld who has been making cheese in Ireland since 2004, both on the Killeen Farm, in Portumna, Co Galway, creating exquisite Killeen Goat’s cheese, a longtime favourite on The Menu’s cheeseboard. The highly experienced Marion had extensive formal training before coming to Ireland and has also worked here as a ‘hired gun’, making cheese for other producers or helping fledgling farmhouse cheesemakers to create their own take on Irish farmhouse cheese, and has helped launch several brands, now iconic in their own right.

While Killeen is the flagship cheese, Marion’s Emmental-style Kilmora is a cow’s milk cheese, around for almost a decade, and has garnered more than its fair share of praise yet, on foot of a recent and truly splendid sampling, The Menu realised he had yet to hymn its praises in this particular neck of the woods.

Kilmora has that familiar Swiss-style appearance and texture, a slight sheen and large ‘eyes’ or holes, under the tooth it is almost elastic in the best possible meaning of the word, and it is a firm favourite with children of all ages. The flavours are pronounced and forward without being overpowering, sweet, nutty, mildly lactic and while it is a splendid cheese in a fondue or for melting in a toastie, or eaten on its own with a good white Burgundy, The Menu adores it most of all in a plain sandwich of fine, crusty sourdough spread lavishly with good country butter.

• www.killeenfarmhousecheese.wordpress.com