A bowl of seafood chowder with brown soda bread and a pint of stout

Seafood · Cook it

Four things worth cooking

For a rented kitchen in Kerry with a bag from the pier, or for a Tuesday at home when you want the west of Ireland back.

Photograph Benreis, CC BY 3.0

None of these are difficult and none of them are clever. Irish seafood cooking is almost entirely a shopping decision: buy well, cook briefly, salt carefully, and put brown bread on the table.

Cooking in a rented kitchen

These four are written for a holiday let in Connemara or a cottage in Kerry, not for your kitchen at home. Assume one wide pot with a lid, one frying pan, a blunt knife, a colander and no weighing scales. Every quantity below is given in metric with an American equivalent beside it, because the packets in an Irish supermarket are metric and the measuring cups in the drawer usually are not there at all.

Two things worth buying on day one and leaving on the counter for the week: a lemon and a block of proper Irish butter. Two things worth carrying in your case: a small sharp knife, which no rental has, and a roll of freezer bags for the smoked salmon on the flight home. Shellfish keeps one day in a domestic fridge, so buy it on the afternoon you plan to cook it and not before.

Where to buy it: the fishmongers and smokehouses.

Two, as a main · 15 minutes

Killary mussels in cider and cream

The cheapest good dinner in Ireland, and the one we cook the night we get home from the west.

What you need

  • 1kg (2lb 4oz) rope-grown mussels, scrubbed, any open ones discarded
  • 250ml (1 cup) dry Irish cider
  • 1 shallot, finely chopped
  • A knob of Irish butter, about 25g (2 tablespoons)
  • 100ml (scant 1/2 cup) cream
  • A handful of parsley, chopped
  • Brown soda bread, to finish the pot

What you do

  1. Soften the shallot in the butter in a wide pot with a lid. Do not colour it.
  2. Add the cider, bring it to a hard boil for a minute to burn off the raw edge.
  3. Tip in the mussels, lid on, high heat, two to three minutes, shaking the pot once.
  4. As soon as they open, lift them out with a slotted spoon. Anything still closed goes in the bin.
  5. Stir the cream and parsley through the liquor, pour it over, and put the bread on the table.

One thing that matters
Do not salt it. The mussels bring their own sea water and it is usually enough.

Four · 40 minutes

The seafood chowder every Irish pub claims

Every bar between Kinsale and Donegal serves one. Most are flour and cream. This is the version worth making.

What you need

  • 500g (1lb 2oz) mixed fish: smoked haddock, hake, salmon, in equal parts
  • 200g (7oz) mussels or prawns
  • 2 floury potatoes, diced small
  • 1 leek and 1 onion, finely chopped
  • 500ml (2 cups) fish stock and 250ml (1 cup) whole milk
  • 100ml (scant 1/2 cup) cream, 25g (2 tablespoons) butter, a bay leaf
  • Chives and brown bread

What you do

  1. Sweat the leek and onion in butter until soft, eight minutes, no colour.
  2. Add the potato, bay leaf, stock and milk. Simmer until the potato just yields, about twelve minutes.
  3. Cut the fish into thumb-sized pieces. Add the firmest first, the salmon last, and take the pot off the heat.
  4. Two minutes of residual heat cooks the fish. Any longer and it goes to wool.
  5. Stir in the cream, check the salt because the smoked haddock brings plenty, and finish with chives.

One thing that matters
Smoked haddock is doing most of the work. Undyed, always. The bright yellow stuff is a colouring, not a smoke.

Two, as a starter · 10 minutes, if somebody else picked the crab

Crab on brown bread, the way the west serves it

The single most Irish plate of food there is, and it depends entirely on the quality of the two ingredients.

What you need

  • 200g (7oz) picked white crab meat, plus a spoon of brown meat
  • 2 tablespoons good mayonnaise
  • The juice of half a lemon
  • A pinch of cayenne
  • 4 slices of proper brown soda bread, buttered thickly

What you do

  1. Fold the brown meat into the mayonnaise first. That is where the flavour lives.
  2. Fold in the white meat gently. Do not beat it into a paste.
  3. Lemon, cayenne, a crack of pepper. Taste. It will need more lemon than you expect.
  4. Pile it on the buttered bread and eat it standing up, which is how it is best.

One thing that matters
Buy the crab picked from a fishmonger the same day. Picking a crab yourself takes an hour and yields a disappointment.

Two · 5 minutes

The smoked salmon plate, assembled not cooked

What to do with the vacuum pack you carried home from the Burren Smokehouse.

What you need

  • 150g (5oz) oak-smoked Irish salmon, sliced thick rather than thin
  • Brown soda bread and cold Irish butter
  • Lemon, capers if you like them, cracked black pepper
  • A boiled egg, quartered, if it is lunch rather than a starter

What you do

  1. Take the salmon out of the fridge twenty minutes before. Cold salmon tastes of nothing.
  2. Butter the bread properly. This is not the moment for restraint.
  3. Lay the salmon on the plate rather than the bread so the bread stays crisp.
  4. Lemon at the table, pepper on top, nothing else.

One thing that matters
Thick slices, always. Irish smokehouses cut for texture, not for the transparent sheets a supermarket sells.

Rather somebody else cooked? The seafood days worth booking, and the rooms we eat in.

Build the trip around it

Where we would stay for a seafood trip

The weeks this fits inside

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