Asparagus at last...
Plus John Dory and Chips, Duck à l'orange and the great Hoppy...
Much of this first appeared in The Sunday Times Ireland on 27 April 2025
On one of our wetter and windier days my great-nephew and I repaired to The Beach House in Tramore where Jumoke Akintola and Peter Hogan offer a stripped back menu in this off-season, one that showcases fish and chips as true culinary art. We had never experienced John Dory deep-fried before and, believe me, it was a revelation: that firm flesh within a most delicate batter (so delicate, indeed, that the word batter seems inappropriate).
Peter and Junoke also have two Dublin restaurants: The Fish Shop on Benburb Street (where the wine list has section headed “under the flor”, a joke for serious wine enthusiasts) and Bar Pez on Kevin Street. They started off in a shed at the back of the Blackrock Market with a few picnic tables outside, cooking the best fish available on the day with proper chips. When I reviewed it for my then newspaper, I partnered the meal with a bottle of rather good white Burgundy from Blackrock Cellar and still ended up with a total bill considerably less than usual. Nevertheless I still got my knuckles rapped. But Meursault with such good fish and chips was worth the earful from the boss (who ultimately agreed to pay the expenses in full).
The wet and windy spell meant that I could get a lot done in the tunnel; if the sun is shining, even on a cold day, it just gets too warm for much exertion after about 10am. So, there was much clearing, weeding, mulching, feeding of such tomato plants as are in flower (I always wait for the first flowers to appear before adding nutrients), the sowing of sweetcorn and yet more lettuce, moving through Little Gem, Parella and Marvel of Four Seasons (which really is a good all-the-year variety if you get it going in the Autumn).
The asparagus, grown under cover, is superb but sparse and we occasionally satisfy our cravings with Spanish or English stuff, both of which are very good. Our own is served only with melted butter, no messing, but we subject bought asparagus to somewhat rougher treatment. This can be good old-fashioned asparagus vinaigrette (cooked, cold, with French dressing and a fluffy topping of grated hardboiled egg – much better than it sounds), or a recipe that I think may have originally come from River Cottage.
For a bunch of asparagus you take 80g of skinned hazelnuts, roast them at 200ºC for ten minutes (but check so they don’t overcook), then crush them roughly in a mortar and pestle. Decant them into a bowl and add 120ml of extra virgin olive oil, a tablespoon of finely chopped parsley, 3 teaspoons of sherry vinegar, plus a little salt and stir together. Cook the asparagus and while it’s still warm, spoon over this dressing. It’s surprisingly delicious.
As the bloody pigeons (how I wish I liked to eat them!) destroyed the purple sprouting broccoli in their infancy last Spring, this is really quite a hungry gap. The broad beans are just starting to plump up but the cavolo nero is plentiful in the tunnel. I like to cook this with a vague nod to Ottolenghi, simplifying one of his recipes. (An online review of his cookbook Simple reads “Simple, my arse!”)
Put a finger either side of the mid-rib of each leaf and strip away the soft green part, then chop roughly. Melt some butter in a pan and add a handful of chopped chorizo and a tablespoon of chopped preserved onions. Then dump the cavolo nero in, reduce the heat, cover and simmer for about 5 minutes. The leaves will reduce to very little, so make sure you pile them high on the pan at the outset.
At Easter I decided to cook, once again, duck à l’orange according to the elaborate recipe by Simon Hopkinson in his wonderful book The Prawn Cocktail Years – something I’ve written about before here. If you’re interested, and have a duck and plenty of time to spend in the kitchen, you can read a blow-by-blow account of how I fared on my Substack (tomdoorley.substack.com), including my iconoclastic use of Cointreau instead of Grand Marnier, my daring employment of Marsala instead of Madeira, and more… The suspense is simply thrilling. Incidentally, the sauce takes longer to make than the the duck takes to cook but it’s well worth it.
As the asparagus season is in full flow – with some supermarkets infuriatingly still sourcing theirs from Mexico and Peru – it’s timely to mention a recent discovery that was a bit of a revelation to me. I had always believed that the only wine that really works with asparagus is the Loire Chenin Blanc known from Savennières. I still think it’s the best, but the flintier Sauvignons from the Loire manage pretty well too: Sancerre, Menetou-Salon and, especially, Pouilly-Fumé. These are the antithesis of those caricatures of the grape from Marlborough, pungent and aggressive: white wines for people who basically don’t like white wine. But each to their own and horses for courses.
And here’s another unlikely match that I encountered again recently: Jerusalem artichokes with fino sherry but make sure you cook them with some lemon zest. When I first stumbled across this combination I thought I had a new discovery to share with the world but apparently it’s well-known amongst the cognoscenti. But here’s one that I think I genuinely discovered: Alsace Gewurztraminer with very mature Gouda. Now that is genuinely celestial.
My adventure with the duck first appeared in February 2024 and this is how I recounted it:
Back in the kitchen here, I was leafing through the great Simon Hopkinson’s The Prawn Cocktail Years, first published in 1997. It’s a celebration of the 1950s hotel dining room, the swinging 1960s, the… well, the 1970s. You get the picture. There are first class recipes for the likes of egg mayonnaise, scampi, rice pudding, French onion soup, mushrooms à la Grecque, saltimbocca, beef Wellington. And the one that caught my eye was duck á l’orange, a dish I first encountered with my parents in the Berni Inn that had just replaced - if that’s the word – the legendary Jammet’s a few months before.