Hungry for history

Irish chefs are taking the best of the country's traditional ingredients and giving them a top-class 21st-century spin.

- DAVID COHEN

It's one o'clock on a grey-lidded Dublin afternoon and I am enjoying a fashionably old-fashioned lunch at The Winding Stair, overlooking the ancient city's landmark River Liffey.

This book-lined restaurant's name riffs on a line from the Anglo-Irish poet WB Yeats, but the view out the window from my stripped wood table is all James Joyce.

Ah, that'd be a skiff I see in the distance, a crumpled throwaway. And "Elijah is coming, rode lightly down the Liffey, under Loopline Bridge, shooting the rapids where water chafed around the bridgepiers, sailing eastward past hulls and anchor chains, between the Customhouse old dock and George's quay".

Sounds about the right place to be researching items for an article on a deluxe new trend for deeply traditional food.

Joyce, this city's ultimate author, died more than 80 years ago, but the menu essentials here would have been as familiar to him as the urban scene.

That hand-smoked haddock, for instance, a sweet-tasting local fish poached in milk with onions and white cheddar mash, would surely have received an approving nod.

As for the cockles and mussels, well, the dish famously features in Joyce's Ulysses, whose literary pantry groans with cabbage, celery, wild garlic, leeks, watercress, sorrel, parsley, foraged nettles and sometimes weird-seeming meat arrangements.

All ingredients I recall from my own formative years in the Hutt Valley, seasoned as it was with the two great spices of the Irish (and Anglo-Kiwi) pantry - salt and pepper - and drowned in mutant white sauce. What may have come as more of a surprise to the old man is the newfound wealth on the plate.