Irish Cooking: A Culinary Quest
From Plump Mussels to Blood Pudding, Surprises Are in Store

By Ambrose Clancy
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, March 16, 2008

The world's shortest volume: "Irish Cooking." Only one recipe: root vegetables and meat boiled several stages beyond exhaustion.

But all is changed utterly, say the Irish hospitality industry and foodie buzz. The Irish have become prosperous and, of all things, European. I decided a food safari was in order to smell what was cooking. Here is a chronicle of some meals during my recent visit: a sampling of the new and old, a search for the best seafood chowder in the West, and how I came to love the blood of pigs.

A prudent travel plan is to eat what the country does best, and so it's said that when in Ireland, eat breakfast three times a day. So my wife, Mary, and I start the hunt at Galway City's Elles Cafe, a modern place advertising "certified organic coffee." Alas, a "classic" omelet has the lightness of a paving stone, with slices of bubble-gum-colored ham fresh from shrink wrap, and pieces of greenish tomato with a hunk of stem still attached. The coffee is certifiably appalling.

Ah, but lunch. Now we know what they're talking about. On Quay Street, a pedestrian-only street of this medieval college town dedicated to fun, we find Trattoria Pasta Mista . It's a true trattoria, like those found in every town in Italy, down to murals of local sites committed by a less-than-Sunday painter, moronic Euro-pop, crisp and professional service, and sensational food: plump mussels posillipo with fresh tomatoes, mopped up with toasted spears of Tuscan bread. Scarlet carpaccio on a nest of baby arugula topped by broad shavings of Parmesan. Prawn and crab ravioli topped by sweet sun-dried tomatoes strewn with bitter olives, creating an opposite-attracts love affair.

The next morning, at Darry Ryan's B&B in the heart of town, the old advice is true; we could eat this breakfast all day. Eggs over easy fried in bacon fat, two small mild sausages, a grilled half-tomato garnished with fried mushrooms, white toast in a rack, brown bread, strong tea.

There's also black pudding, which I eyeball carefully. You can't have a proper Irish breakfast without black pudding, a sort of sausage that uses pig's blood as its dominant ingredient. Added to the blood are oatmeal, milk and bread. It's baked and then cut in thick circles and fried.

The texture is dense; ditto the taste, heavy and unpleasant. I drown it with tea.

"You don't have to eat that," says Mary, slathering toast with rough-cut marmalade. She had tasted a small morsel once and immediately pushed the pudding to the side of her plate, stared at it and said, simply, "No."

Hold the Curry

The 16th-century severity of Churchyard Street hosts a lively farmers market circling through fog around the Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas. Delicacies bump into each other, Galway Bay oysters next to dozens of farmhouse cheeses.

Organic farmer Martin Korek offers his specialty, wild garlic pesto, "made last night." He holds out the flowers of the garlic, a gentler scent than the bulb. Here's a small, perfect pumpkin. Korek notes that in the past, the Irish raised big pumpkins suitable only for watery soup. "This, just slice and bake, a little salt, a little honey. Delicious."

Steps from the market is Griffin's, a traditional Irish bakery here since 1876, with jaunty, white-capped shopgirls working the counter. New Ireland is around the corner in the form of the Gourmet Tart Co., a spare gallery that lets the art do the talking, with glittering confections posing like museum pieces.

Pubs now offer oddities such as curries or pasta, but stay with sandwiches and soup in the labyrinthine rooms packed with fans glued to a soccer match from England. At the Front Door, Mary deems the seafood chowder "nice."

One grilled chicken salad, one grilled ham with butter and stinging mustard, washed down by pints, served up by a merry staff, is nicer. As nice as the stranger explaining the offside rule and the blindness of the referee, poor man.

That evening it rains hammers and nails, blowing half a gale through the black streets. We duck into Monroe's Pub, go behind the bar, dodge the bartenders, through a narrow door to the Pizza Cabin. Place our order, tell the server where we'll be in the pub. God's own hot, crisp, cheesy pizza arrives 10 minutes later.

Next day, a ramble away from Galway finds us in Westport, the elegant provincial capital in County Mayo. At noon the churches are full, the pubs closed. As an excuse to get out of the rain we stop in O'Cee's Coffee Shop. The coffee passes muster, but a fat scone -- suitably crusted, with a soft cake interior, here-and-there currants and a bit of butter -- makes the moment deliciously complete.

Another foodie proverb: The best Indian food beyond the subcontinent is in London. Now add, astonishingly, Westport. We find it at the Everest, run by Jivan Timalisina, born in Nepal. The recently opened restaurant is in an old stone chapel on the tree-lined quay of the Carrowbeg River. The green, maroon and white decor shines, overlooked by a spectacular image of the Anapurna range. Lunch is a vivid chicken tikka and sizzling lamb kebabs laid across grease-free onions and peppers, with a riata of yogurt, mint and parsley. Curries have a blush of tomato. Nutty basmati rice balances the heat. (Choices are mild, medium or hot, but go for hot -- do you really want to live forever?) Cobra beer, golden, as bitter as it is cold, is recommended.

Business is good, Timalisina says, and not just for wandering gourmands. "We're getting a very good local following," he says.

It Only Gets Better

To say Connemara -- that land of mountains springing from flat moors, ebony lakes changing to blue along with the vault of sky -- is beautiful is to say nothing. So say what Mary says, as we approach every turn of the road: "Prepare to gasp."

In the town of Clifden, set above an estuary leading to the sea, a place where hikers and cyclists make base camp, lunch is at E.J. Kings, a pub of stone-flagged floors and food either simple or full of flair. The Guinness is creamy, and an open-faced crab sandwich on brown bread, with no mayonnaise but just oil, gives a straightforward tang of the sea. Just as good is a BLT, with crispy rashers (bacon), sun-dried tomatoes, caramelized onions and a sharp farmhouse cheese making every bite satisfyingly complex.

But the star is the chowder, based in rich stock, laced with sherry, cream, onions, potatoes and salmon that adds a touch of pink to the creamy whiteness.

After a day spent walking the empty, mountain-shadowed moors, enchanted by the innocence of nimble Connemara lambs -- woolly, black-faced, with slender black legs -- we decide to eat one.

The pleasantly eccentric Marconi Restaurant offers the old peasant food with remarkable changes. Colcannon -- baked cabbage, mashed potatoes and butter -- is updated brilliantly, just with lemon. The rack of lamb is crusted outside, lusciously pink inside. And there are three kinds of potatoes: mint-roasted, mashed with oven-baked scallops wrapped in streaky bacon, and a quickly disappearing mound of sea-salted fries.

Sweets for the sweets: three scoops of hand-churned ice cream in a caramel- and brandy-spun basket afloat in a pool of English toffee sauce.

The next morning at the Quay House, in the sparkling conservatory of vines climbing and crisscrossing overhead, the breakfast is superb, especially a counter of freshly squeezed orange juice, grapefruit wheels, apricots, rhubarb and syrupy plums next to a bowl of thick yogurt, the best tasted outside Greece. But the black pudding? It's . . . never mind.

The Perfect Picnic

If travel is the search for the perfect experience, we've found it at Roundstone Beach, with a picnic on an island of boulders on a stretch of empty sand. We settle into stone benches carved by wind and tide. Sea pinks -- delicate pompoms -- flourish in the fissures. The beach is watched over by a cemetery rising on a bluff with Celtic crosses against the ever-changing sky.

At the Connemara Hamper, we had packed our rucksack with salami, an Irish brie, olives in their own oil, two rolls and a bottle of Sicilian red, which stands up to the salami and the Atlantic's breeze. The rolls stuffed with cheese and sausage are moistened with the oil. Surf crashes accompanied by the screech of one gull, which finally goes quiet and politely keeps its distance.

Later that day, in the rugged little town of Kinvara, hugging a wide harbor of fishing boats accompanied by an aristocratic yacht, we bag the best fish chowder of the cuisine safari at Keogh's, a pub with prominently displayed pictures of hurling teams going back to the '60s and a tape playing Elton John profundities. The chowder is more like a creamy fish stew, with hunks of hake, cod, salmon, clams and a sherry-less stock so vibrant that the bounty of Kinvara's fishermen needs no tarting up.

Asked about the chowder, a teenage girl brings more brown bread and says, "Ah, we make it every day." And that's that.

The Last Breakfast

Go to Drumcreehy Guest House, a comfortable B&B in the heart of the Burren region of County Clare, for views of the limestone mountains and sea but also for the breakfast.

The eggs are perfect, the sausage and rashers have more bite than normally found, and I feast on black pudding two mornings running. It is light and nutty, the texture smooth, perfection with the yolk of fried eggs, and each bite doesn't remind me I am eating the blood of swine.

No one would tell me why it was better, the amused German staff indicating that perhaps I was a bit overexcited about it all.

Ambrose Clancy last wrote for Travel about Hampton Bays, N.Y.