Elegant Irish Cooking: Hundreds of Recipes from the World's Foremost Irish Chefs [Hardcover]

Noel C. Cullen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 6, 2001

The dishes presented in Elegant Irish Cooking are served in Ireland's best restaurants and homes.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Lebhar-Friedman; First edition. edition (February 6, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0867308397
• ISBN-13: 978-0867308396
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 9.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #992,881 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #50 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Regional & International > European > Irish

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not Your Grandmother's Cookbook!, March 8, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Elegant Irish Cooking: Hundreds of Recipes from the World's Foremost Irish Chefs (Hardcover)

The recipes in this book are terrific! Anyone looking for an escape from "traditional" Irish cookery books will love these unique and tasty recipes. Well worth the price! Clear, consise directions. Even the beginner cook will be able to make these dishes tonight! (All that being said, some related books I'd like to recommend on generations-old Irish recipes are Irish Heritage Cooking, Irish Traditional Cooking, and Celtic Folklore Cooking.)

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Chef Cullen is great, February 28, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Elegant Irish Cooking: Hundreds of Recipes from the World's Foremost Irish Chefs (Hardcover)

I saw a demonstration he gave using recipes from this book a few weeks ago. The samples provided were outstanding. I went home and made the smoked salmon stuffed chicken breast, and it was a hit with everyone

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Irish 'haute cuisine'. Buy It'., February 15, 2006

By 

B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Elegant Irish Cooking: Hundreds of Recipes from the World's Foremost Irish Chefs (Hardcover)

`Elegant Irish Cooking' by culinary scholar, teacher and professional chef, Noel C. Cullen Ed.D, CMC, AAC is a great foodie book; however it may not be the first Irish cookbook you want to get if all you want is a good cookbook with traditional Irish recipes. If that is what you need, go for `Irish Traditional Cooking' by leading Irish cooking school owner, Darina Allen or the much more ethnographic `Celtic Folklore Cooking' by culinary writer and folklorist, JoAnne Asala.

If Irish culinary traditions and cooking are major interests for you, this is an excellent second or third Irish cookbook, depending on whether you are more interested in cooking technique, fine dining and entertaining, or culinary lore. If your primary interest is in technique, get `ballymaloe cooking school cookbook' by school co-owner and Irish TV cooking show host, Darina Allen. Otherwise, go with this one.

Due to the author's dual life as both a chef and an academic, the book offers rewards for both interests. While Cullen is currently a professor in culinary and hospitality skills at Boston College, he trained and worked as a serious high end chef in many Irish and French restaurant kitchens and learned first hand the lessons of cooking to local products, at the same time unlearning his French cooking doctrines while he reached the upper levels of Irish `haute cuisine'.

The book begins with an excellent essay on the history of Irish food, including its high point during the Middle Ages monasteries and its low points during the potato famine. My only disappointment with this chapter is that it does not explain the mystery of why agronomists did not import one or more of the hundreds of other New World potatoes into Ireland when the potato blight affected only that one strain on which Irish livelyhood depended. On the other hand, this essay is very revealing about the curious fact that while Ireland is an Island, like the Greek Islands, there is a lot less seafood eaten than one may expect. Most fishing yields are sold to foreign markets or the Irish simply do not have a great taste for the fruits of the ocean, other than salmon and trout.

The title of the book and the author's background are excellent indicators of what we are given with the recipes in this book. We do not get standard recipes for traditional Irish dishes, although all the most traditional Irish produce such as milk, cream, cheese, apples, pears, potatoes, berries, lamb, pork, and game are well represented. Also represented is the one type of ingredient Ireland shares with another major Island nation Japan. This ingredient is seaweed. In fact, seaweed is historically important in that those who lived near the sea escaped the worst of the potato famine, not because they had fish, but because they had seaweed to eat.

While the book is primarily dedicated to Irish `haute cuisine', there is much here for the average cook. Opening the book at random shows me an excellent opening section in the chapter on `Salads, Dressings, & Cold Sauces' which details many variations on the classic French Vinaigrette. This may not be earthshaking for someone with 20 French cookbooks on their shelves, but for someone who only has room for a few good Irish cookbooks, this is great stuff.

I also find Cullen's plan for presenting a recipe very appealing, where each step is numbered, making it very easy to keep one's place in the procedure. It also means that each step is clearly identified, instead of being buried in a dense paragraph of text. This is especially rewarding in that the same gool schema is applied to all recipes, even those many which were contributed by `guest chefs', major chefs at restaurants and schools in Ireland. This also means that the many recipes which do not have a `guest chef' author are the creations of the book's author.

If by some chance, you have only room for a single Irish cookbook and this one appeals to you, I must say that many traditional dishes do find their way into the book; however, I cannot guarantee that the procedure is the same you would find at home in a private house in Dublin.

I especially recommend this book over `The New Irish Table' by Irish-American culinary journalist, Margaret M. Johnson, which also deals with recipes from Irish cooks, but more from the local pub than from the larger restaurants.

Last but not least, I find this an exceptionally well designed book for the average list price of $35. An excellent addition to any cookbook collection, and most especially to an Irish cookbook collection.