“A meal is never just food,” the critic John Mullen observes in his book, How Novels Work. “Novelists have long known what anthropologists discovered relatively recently: social eating means something.”
From the painstakingly prepared three-course family meal that gives Sarah Gilmartin’s Dinner Party its title, to the moreish gruel in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist and the norm-shattering extravagance of Babette’s Feast by Isak Dinesen, writers have dished up drama on a plate.
Here, a smorgasbord of Irish authors turn to memoir mode to share the details of their most memorable meals.
Anne Enright
Many years ago, in that fog of free time before we had children, I cycled along the Loire with my husband Martin. The plan was to go east for a week then double back through Saumur, Chinon and Tours; all fantastic eating towns. In the evenings there were Rabelaisean meals involving meat from organs you never knew were edible, and I wasn’t ungrateful but it was all a bit lush for my taste.
Our furthest destination was a vineyard in Savennières, which I had visited in an earlier more prosperous life to film for RTÉ. The wine was La Couleé de Serrant, the wine maker an early advocate of the biodynamic process called Nicholas Joly. We bought a cool bottle from the cellar of the manor house and sat looking out over vineyards planted in the 12th century. Then we set out our usual lunch of bread, ham, tomatoes and cheese and we drank some of the wine, right there on its own earth.
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And there was nothing to be done except quote the poem my father used to roll out, on beach or bog or on the side of a mountain, anytime there were picnic sandwiches and a flask of tea; the lovely Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.
“A Jug of Wine, A Loaf of Bread – and Thou/ Beside me singing in the Wilderness– / Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow! / ”
Anne Enright’s latest novel is The Wren, The Wren
Joseph O’Connor
We were in Venice in a foggy midwinter, and it felt morbid and haunted, a place of echoing footsteps and whiffy grey canals. I’d recently seen Pinter’s play Betrayal in which a character mentions reading Yeats on the nearby island of Torcello, so we decided we’d go out there for a look around.
It was grim, cheerless and everything was shut, except for the church, which featured a lavishly gory mural of the harrowing of hell. I knew how the sinners felt.
With a three-hour wait for the return waterbus, we trudged the freezing mists looking for a restaurant, a caff, anything. Suddenly, through the gloom a little light came gleaming like a rumour.
In the bar they shook their heads and said they didn’t do food in midwinter, but would knock us up a pollo e patatine. Chicken and chips. And a jug of rough red. And home-made bread. And we could sit by the fire until the ferry came.
[ Blackbird in Dun Laoghaire – a poem by Joseph O’ConnorOpens in new window ]
Outside the wind sneered but inside we were happy. It was the most wonderful, blissful, memorable meal. I think it cost €20.
Later, I read that Pinter had used the word “Torcello” as the working title for his play. I still remember that afternoon with great fondness.
Joseph O’Connor’s latest novel is My Father’s House
John Banville
Mellow autumn in Umbria, and we were strolling through one of those little hill towns down there, feeling hungry. Our friend, an old Italy hand, stopped at a distinctly unprepossessing hole in the wall with a flashing neon sign over the door: MARIA’S. He had heard it was good. We risked it.
Maria herself crept out of the shadows. Ancient, bent double, wild hair, an age-ravaged beauty. Might we have –? She interrupted with a squawk: “Spaghetti! Solo spaghetti, con tartufi!” We hadn’t tasted truffle before, and were still in the mood for risk.
Maria withdrew and reappeared with a lighted candle and a set of keys. Groaning, she knelt behind the counter and opened the safe underneath it, extracted two plump black truffles, relocked the safe.
She had left us an unlabelled bottle of the local wine. It looked like nothing, and was excellent.
I won’t describe the spaghetti con tartufi Maria eventually served us, since I don’t want you weeping in envy. We came back next day with some friends. Never try to repeat a treat. Afterwards, our friends’ only comment, delivered with a sniff, was that the bread was stale. We didn’t bother to explain that bread in Italy is always stale; it’s how they like it.
John Banville’s latest novel is The Lock-up
Aingeala Flannery
It’s 1998 and I’m living in Brooklyn, New York, around the corner from this Italian dive called Two Toms, where it’s said nobody ever finished a pork chop. The regulars; firemen and cops whose families have eaten here for generations always take a doggy bag home.
Two Toms doesn’t have a menu. Or a card machine. Wine (red or white) comes by the carafe. When you push the door a bell jangles and every head turns. It’s like stepping through a wormhole to the 1950s: dark wood panelling, ceiling fans and a groaning Coke fridge that’s full of Budweiser.
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My father’s over from Ireland, and when I tell him about it, he claims he could eat “an Italian chop – no bother”. So we go to Two Toms, where the owner, who’s also the chef and waiter, tells us we’re having spaghetti alle vongole, manicotti with “red sauce”, and the compulsory pork chop. From beneath the peak of his Yankees cap, he watches my father chew in slow, unyielding, silence until the glistening slab of meat is gone. Until he lays his cutlery down with a single word. Schillaci.
Aingeala Flannery is the author of The Amusements
Edel Coffey
Just over nine years ago, I found myself in Galway for a work trip. My week had been so full of travel and work and deadlines that by the time I got off the train at Eyre Square, I was exhausted. I had agreed to meet some friends for dinner but I couldn’t face going through the evening in my high-heeled boots and structured skirt, so I ducked into the Eyre Square shopping centre on my way to the hotel and bought some cheap flat espadrilles, a cotton jumper and jeans. (If I could have bought pyjamas I would have.) I showered, changed into the casual clothes and decided to skip make-up and let my hair dry naturally. Leaving my hair to its own devices is like throwing water on gremlins after midnight – ie very bad – but I was among friends so I didn’t worry too much about it.
My friends brought along a friend of theirs, and we all ate handmade gnocchi at the Italian-food restaurant Il Vicolo. The meal turned out to be very memorable ... for the gnocchi, yes, I still think about it, but also for the fact that the stranger my friends brought along didn’t seem to mind my natural look and eventually became my husband.
Edel Coffey’s novels are Breaking Point and In Her Place (March 2024)
Louise Kennedy
When I was 14 my family went on holiday to “the Continent”, travelling by ferry to Le Havre. My parents took turns driving us down through France to the north of Spain. On the way we stayed overnight in a couple of campsites, the second of which was in Montauban, north of Toulouse.
It was Bastille Day and the place was packed, the air hot and humid. We sat at a table outside the bar/restaurant and ordered from the short menu. My starter was a fat, ripe tomato served upside down and cut in four or five slices almost to the base, a wedge of hard-boiled egg slotted into each gap, and blobbed with a dollop of home-made mayonnaise. Then there was steak frites and créme caramel. It all felt very grown up, although I was heart jealous of the French girl my age at the next table with the perfectly flicked eyeliner, who was drinking red wine and smoking cigarettes passed to her by her mother.
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That night fireworks gave way to a thunderstorm that lasted for hours, lightning illuminating the tent until dawn. It was the first time I had encountered sheet lightning. And the first time I understood that ingredients as simple as an egg and a tomato could be beautiful and delicious.
Louise Kennedy’s books are Trespasses and The End of the world Is a Cul de Sac
Rónán Hession
My new (and also current, permanent) wife and I went to New York on our honeymoon. It was 2005 when Irish people used to commute there for cheap clothing and Christmas decorations. We did the Sex and the City tour, and I – the only man on the bus – won a cupcake in the quiz. (Question: What was the name of Steve and Aidan’s bar, and which street was it located on? Answer: Scout, on Mulberry Street.)
By fluke we learned that Woody Allen would be playing with his jazz band at the Carlyle Hotel, where you had to buy dinner if you wanted to listen to the music. We agonised over the cost, but decided that if we just had two kids instead of the eight we/I had been planning, then we could break even.
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There was a maître d’ who sat us at the table. Wanting to fit-in, we tipped him generously. We also tipped the waiter and, if I recall correctly, all the other diners. When Woody Allen came in, I think we might have tipped him too, perhaps inadvertently funding one of his late-era, unfunny movies. I don’t much remember the food, but I do remember the tips. We didn’t care. We were on honeymoon, being serenaded by a cancelled movie director. Love, as the priest on our pre-marriage course had taught us, was all about compromises.
Rónán Hession’s novels are Panenka and Leonard and Hungry Paul
Martin Doyle
My most abiding meal memory is my alimentary education as an assistant d’anglais in Bourgoin-Jallieu, un trou perdu between Lyons and Grenoble, the week’s three-course lunch menu pinned on the school noticeboard my core curriculum. Grated carrot – meh! Boeuf bourguignon – nom! Andouilles – non, merci! Iles flottantes – Béni soit Dieu! We even, like Oxbridge high table, got wine.
Colleagues made me a meal where I got to sample snails (chewing gum in garlic butter), frog’s legs (thighs, in fact, deep-fried and neither filling nor moreish) and eau de vie (I was complimented on having “une bonne descente”). On Armistice Day a colleague brought me on a tour of Burgundy vineyards with copious free samples of premier cru soaked up with a casse-croûte of cheese, charcuterie and crusty bread. While learning to ski – in ripped jeans; it was the 1980s – I pulled in mid-slope in this new, whited-out world for cheesecake and vin chaud. Borscht in a small Russian restaurant in Paris dominated by a huge fridge full of vodka, then a party where we all wrote poetry on eggshells. Pretentious? Moi?
Samuel Beckett, when asked whether he was English, famously replied: Au contraire. The pupils sometimes called me Rosbif. If I could be bothered I might riposte: Non, ragoût irlandais, but I didn’t really mind. A colleague crossed the line, though, when she tried to add garlic to the Irish stew I was preparing. Sacrilege.
Martin Doyle is Books Editor and author of Dirty Linen: The Troubles in my Home Place
