Two things to look out for in a restaurant as warning signs: broccoli and the brandished pepper mill. First, broccoli. Why broccoli? Why has it become the most ubiquitous vegetable of them all? It does not taste particularly well, although, if lightly and swiftly steamed, and left with much of its raw crunchiness, it is not the most offensive of insects. It is better than a scorpion under the eyelid; but otherwise it has little potential as a seriously pleasurable food, its main function being as roughage.
Which is no doubt why Hillary Clinton likes it so much. You know, I never trust a woman who eats food in order to keep her bottom happy; there are so many much more important bits in between.
It is easy to undercook broccoli, but easier still to overcook it, and then it enters a class of its own. It smells like a dockers' urinal in a hot summer, and it looks like something you scrape from between alligator's paws during the annual reptile pedicure. Eating it reminds me of the time I was hiding from the Black and Tans in my back garden for six months and had to eat composted cow dung.The things I do for Ireland.
There are better vegetables than broccoli.
Why the fuss?
And why the fuss about the black pepper? The way it is presented at restaurants one would think that its bearer was about to perform Elgar's Concerto for Pepper mill in D Major, or engage in a bit of nuclear fission with the world's first waiterportable atom smasher, rather than simply split a peppercorn, which is what we can all do with the tiny hand-held devices we keep at home. Such ceremony, such gravitas - if the patron saint of pepper-grinding should be Jacqueline du Pre or Neils Bohr.
The truth is that pepper grinding does not require a machine which resembles a newel post in size and is so heavy only the fit and young are able to operate it. It calls for no particular skill. A tadpole could work a pepper mill without spending a year in the Dublin Institute of Technology.
Broccoli, sir? as a green goo with stalky little legs sticking out of it is waved in front of you. Pepper, sir? gasps a burly youngster as he weaves and totters beneath a huge decorated caber beside your table.
I am not saying that broccoli and the flourished pepper-mill are inevitably signs of a poor restaurant. But they are evidence of culinary trends; they are the hula-hoop, the Davy Crocket hat and the Teletubbies of food. Their time will pass, while more enduring comestibles will stay with us for ever.
No broccoli
So the first thing I did when I received a copy of Gerry Galvin's Everyday Gourmet was to hunt through the index for broccoli - bouquet garni, breadcrumbs, breads, burgundy venison, butters are there, but - heaven be praised - no broccoli. Come here Gerry and let me kiss you, you honey: for what do I find when I look for the real vegetables of Ireland, the vegetables which went into the making of this nation, the cabbages and the carrots and the turnips, but mentions galore.
Which is how it should be. Broccoli is designer cabbage, cauliflower which has both lost the plot and lost its way. Broccoli should stick to making James Bond movies, and leave the kitchen and the dining room to real food cooked by real chefs.
Gerry Galvin is one of the latter who has, throughout his career, been an intellectually serious cook, as all good chefs are. Good food is not based on complexity but on a radical simplicity: good ingredients treated with respect for what they are. Years and years ago, when Gerry and Marie (da mot) were running a restaurant in Kinsale, they were preaching this message: the traditional raw materials of Irish food, nourished by worthy influences from abroad, are all you need to eat well.
One of the problems of many modern cookbooks is that they are not written for plain people, but for Martians who can at the drop of a UFO collect sun-dried mongoose quills, Sumatran cayenne, Tibetan yak yoghurt, Peruvian llama butter, and an ounce of Antarctic caviar. How many times has any of us been half-way through assembling a recipe, flour and currants and scales all over the place, when we are brought up short with the instruction: ". . . then lightly fry the walrus kidneys in a little crocodile lard and stir in the humming-birds' tongues"?
Quinnsworth
And that in part was how Quinnsworth (RIP) came to be involved in backing Gerry's Everyday Gourmet. A Quinnsworth top bod - and I can't remember which one - happened to be dining at Gerry and Maire's legendary restaurant in Drimcong House, Moycullen and happened to ask Gerry where he got his ingredients from, expecting to hear mail-order from Fortnum and Masons or the Harrod's delicatessen by weekly helicopter. Instead, to his tearful joy, he heard that Gerry and Marie do their shopping at their local Quinnsworth (RIP).
This was the genesis of Everyday Gourmet, with its guiding principles of simple ingredients. And no sooner was the book was complete but still unpublished that Tesco arrived waving loadsamoney, and exit the Westons with a fatter wallet than they woke up with, which was very fat indeed. However, Tesco stayed true to the deal; and why wouldn't they? It wasn't Quinnsworth (RIP) they were after. It was Gerry's book.