Guest Blog: Forgotten Skills of Cooking
No single cookbook could ever tell you everything you need to know about food but many claim to be comprehensive, promising to teach you everything you need to know about food preparation and cooking. The best type of cookbook has an expert writer and a unique perspective on food and cooking that permeates the whole book. Forgotten Skills of Cooking, a 2009 cookbook from Irish television chef and cookery school owner Darina Allen, is filled with information on nearly every facet of food preparation for Irish cuisine, as well as a collection of straightforward recipes for nearly every traditional Irish dish you could think of. Some of the techniques described may be a bit niche, expensive, and time-consuming, but there is such a wealth of information that anyone who loves food and cooking can easily learn something they didn’t already know in the book.
My name is Casey, and I am Alanna’s partner. Alanna doesn’t enjoy cooking so I handle pretty much all of our cooking in the home. I’ve tried a lot of recipes and techniques, especially over the past year or so, where nearly every meal has been cooked and eaten in the home. I have made pasta by hand, tried several different recipes for mayonnaise, made full holiday meals from scratch, baked custard-filled eclairs, and I love to try out new techniques in the kitchen. On the other hand, I’ve served raw chicken to people, gotten sick eating meat I minced myself, and I have had to use the fire extinguisher more than once while deep-frying. My skills are around average for an enthusiastic home cook, so Alanna asked me to take a look at a few Irish cookbooks and write a review for Seaside Books.
It goes without saying that not every book is for every person, and cookbooks are no different. In addition to traditional cooking methods, One of Allen’s main points of emphasis throughout the book is the importance of choosing fresh, natural, locally-produced, high-quality ingredients. Many sections begin with a nostalgic anecdote about the local, traditionally-farmed meat and produce Allen remembers from her youth, which then leads to Allen explaining how, in an effort to recapture the flavors in her memories, she began to personally raise many different types of animals herself at her cookery school in County Cork.
To fully put into practice the culinary ethic Allen is promoting in Forgotten Skills takes, frankly, discretionary income that the reader is willing to spend on ingredients and equipment. You may agree wholeheartedly with her assertion that free-range, grass-fed, dry-aged, local beef, but the directive to cook with it is only practical if you’re willing and able to pay for it. And, some readers might be – in that case, this book might be a great choice for them. Are you someone who is willing to track down unpasteurized, unhomogenized raw milk and skim the cream off of it? Maybe you are – I’m sure there are many such people, who love food and want to learn more and do more, that would gladly take the time to find the correct ingredients, buy the proper equipment, and follow the process described in the book for separating cream from milk. If you’re the type of person who buys their double cream at Tesco – and again, there are many such people (myself included), and it’s a practice equally as valid as the other – then that part of the book, and many other parts that explore the same concept but with different foods, might not be as useful to you.
However, the book is so comprehensive that even if many of the sections aren’t practical to every reader, there are many other parts they might be interested in. Not all of the topics are expensive either. The book explains how to forage edible plants commonly found in Ireland, as well as how to collect and prepare seafood from Ireland’s coasts and waters. There is a comprehensive guide of all the different types of wild plants you might be able to find, and what to do with them. Many of the recipes use less-popular parts of animals, like kidneys and other organ meats. There’s a good overview of home smoking, as well as an overview of all the different types of plants one might be able to grow at home. In general, the parts of the book that deal with these kinds of preparation techniques, of which there are many, are easy to understand, informative, and detailed enough to give the reader an idea of whether the technique is something they want to pursue further, without being boring or overly-long. I didn’t have a chance to try very many of the techniques described, just due to the effort, expense, and equipment needed, but they do look technically sound and like they would provide good results.
The recipes are straightforward, based on classic ingredients and traditional methods. They are what I would call textbook recipes. The book is, of course, intended to promote “forgotten skills,” not modern methods, shortcuts, unusual ingredients, or anything like that. I was only able to make a few of the book’s recipes, and they were all classic versions of the dish. The Gratin Dauphinois, one of the recipes I tried, is what you would get if you asked someone familiar with the dish to come up with a recipe from memory. It came out great, by the way, and in this case, a simple Gratin Dauphinois was exactly what I wanted. This recipe was also another case where the book shines in its mission to teach you about what you can do with food, because following the basic Gratin Dauphinois recipe is a list of different tweaks and additions a cook can make to add different flavours to the food. The instructions for making mayonnaise, which I also tried, followed the same basic formula for pretty much every other mayonnaise recipe I’ve ever seen. It was nice, in the way homemade mayonnaise is, and the recipe worked the first time, without any complications. Allen does stress that the quality of the dishes depends quite a bit on the quality of ingredients you’re putting into them, but I just used whatever I had available, which was usually store-label stuff from Tesco.
A huge strength of this book is how much information is included that the reader didn’t even know that they wanted to know. Anything about food can be found and read online, from dozens of different sources – every recipe, every DIY project, every preparation technique – but this information is useless if you don’t know that you want to learn about it in the first place. Regardless of how many of the recipes or skills a reader ends up actually using if someone is interested in food, this book is bound to teach them something new.