This week on Drivetime, Cormac and Sarah spoke with Róisín Hynes, a woman on a mission to save old Irish recipes; from sheep's brains to stewed eels and blackbirds roasted over an open fire. Listen back above.
From comfort foods like bread and cakes, to quirky delicacies like sheep's brains, Róisín Hynes has collected over 3,000 old Irish recipes and published them on her blog. She tells Cormac and Sarah on Drivetime about the flood of recipes and stories that came her way once she began talking about old Irish recipes online.
Róisín says she wasn't particularly into cooking or baking until her first daughter was born, when she suddenly felt the need to get her hands on traditional recipes from her own family:
"It became suddenly so important that I had my grandmother’s soda bread recipe and then I wanted my grandmother on the other side of the family, I wanted her apple tart recipe."
From there her collection grew, and Róisín went in search of cooking and baking instructions to match her vintage recipe collection. Old school books came to her rescue, she says: "I love the old Home Economic cook books from the 1970s and I started collecting them."
Róisín started a Facebook group about old Irish recipes and she says people started sending her their family recipes in huge numbers. It wasn't just about the food, though; each recipe came with a back story, she says:
"People started to send me recipes and stories about their families and I would share those and then they would ask me questions. They would say I’m looking for this old recipe. We have this old family story but we need the recipe or the recipe doesn’t make sense, can you find one for me?"
Some of the ingredients mentioned in the older recipes are no longer available to buy, like sheep's brains, for example. Róisín says she hasn't tried all the recipes personally, but she enjoys 'threatening' her kids that she will serve them up at home:
"Sheeps brains with parsley sauce comes up a lot. So that would be one in particular that keeps coming up – and eels as well; and all the different ways of preparing eels. My kids happen to particularly dislike those ones. And I’ve many more – many more like those."
Cormac said he badly wanted to know how to cook sheep's brains, so Róisín obliged:
"Sheeps brains are quite small, you know sheep are known to be quite stupid. You’re going to have six for a meal. And you’re going to soak them in salt and water for a few hours, say two hours. And then you remove them from the water and you’ve got to remove the skin and the fibres…"
To hear the rest of this delicious recipe, listen back to the full segment above.
Róisín says she hasn’t made it herself, but she’s asked people who have and they say it's pretty special:
"Apparently it’s an absolute delicacy; it’s meant to taste like really heavy, heavy cream and be light and be really, really delicious."
Róisín’s recipe hunting came full circle when she remembered stories her grandad had told her about eating blackbirds – stories she didn’t really believe as a child. She says her own kids were also sceptical:
"My grandad, when I was growing up he’d tell me stories that he would hunt and eat blackbird when he was a kid – around 8, 9 – that’s the sort of age my kids are now. So I’d tell them, but up to now they didn’t believe me.
Revisiting the blackbird stories, Róisín had to concede that her grandad was telling the truth - catching and roasting songbirds really was a thing, back in the day:
"His older brother showed him how to make a slingshot and with a stone he would hunt them down and his brother and he would actually cook them in a field and eat them for their lunch and it wasn’t until I was older I realised that he actually did this!"
You can find Róisín Hyne’s old Irish recipes here.
Listen back to more stories from Drivetime here.
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