The best of Ireland’s autumn food
“In Ireland, we’re lucky to have very distinct seasons,” says Ireland’s best-loved vegetarian chef, Denis Cotter of Cork city’s Paradiso Restaurant, “so we’re really able to enjoy what each season offers.”
Autumn is a time of bounty, when produce-driven menus hero late summer’s treats – the polytunnel’s tomatoes, the field’s sweetcorn, the hedgerow’s blackberries – merging into heartier brassicas, roots and seasonal jewels like Crown Prince squashes and wild forest mushrooms.
Harvest time and Halloween
The festivals of Halloween and its Celtic precursor of Samhain have long been pivotal in the Irish calendar, marking the end of the harvest and the start of a new Celtic year. Historically, this holiday was as important for food and feasting as Christmastime, explains food historian Regina Sexton, but “with Halloween attaching more to the pre-Christian folklore secular calendar.”
“It was a very important transitional time,” Sexton says, and the central role played by food was multidimensional. “It served so many functions, not just as a feast to mark the end of one year and the beginning of the next, but also for games and merriment, and in its role in connecting with the larger cosmos and other worlds, with future telling and fortune telling, with the dead and the faeries.”
Bridging October and November, Samhain marks the end of a harvest season that kept farming communities busy since July and August. “By late October, almost everything is saved. Grains would have been long harvested, processed and stored,” Sexton explains. This put a spotlight on anything still growing. “Potato harvests would have been quite late, and then in small rural communities, there is some life still in small vegetable gardens, with brassicas like cabbages, and apples.”
Add the wild harvest of “ancillary foods like hazelnuts and dried fruits like bilberries” and you have the makings of very traditional dishes still strongly associated in Ireland with Halloween’s rituals and practices. “Those ingredients were integrated into belief systems and also into merriment and games.”
Halloween food traditions
Today you will find fortune-telling tokens baked into festive barmbrack (from the original bairín breac, or speckled bread): each loaf dotted with dried fruit soaked in black tea and embedded with a single ring. This sign of love and marriage for the lucky recipient is a modern remnant of the traditional trinkets once baked into each loaf, from a coin (for wealth) or religious medal (for vocational calling) to a thimble (for spinsterhood) or matchstick (for marital strife).
Traditional parlour games are still played by children who bob for apples afloat in water, and in amongst today’s trick-or-treat haul still appears the seasonal nuts once roasted on fires by courting couples eyeing up a cosy winter.
Star of the show is the traditional Halloween night dish of colcannon: a simple marriage of seasonal cabbage or kale (known, in Irish, as cál) folded into a mash of those late potatoes made luxurious by lashings of golden Irish butter bound with creamy milk. Food writer Brid Mahon’s 1991 book, The Land of Milk and Honey: The Story of Traditional Irish Food and Drink, notes how in parts of Ulster and north Leinster, people still remembered dishes like champ (a relation of colcannon, with spring onion replacing curly kale) being left out under a hawthorn or whitethorn tree for the faeries. Other regional variations on those seasonal favourites include fadge (an apple potato cake) and boxty (potato pancakes).
Traditional foods in modern settings
These traditional ingredients are easy to find on autumnal travels around Ireland today. Cafés and tea rooms across the island serve thick slices of tea brack slathered with Irish butter. Pop into The Bakery by The Cupcake Bloke in Dublin 8 to indulge in Bake cookbook author Graham Herterich’s contemporary takes on this traditional treat.
Orchards around the island are open to visitors with harvest celebrations. Early September’s Armagh Food and Cider Weekend sees cider tastings, tours and talks as well as foraged lunches and fine-dining dinners under fruit-heavy trees.
In County Tipperary, The Apple Farm runs until November with 50 varieties of eating apples, as well as a farm shop boasting homemade apple tarts, balsamic cider vinegar, apple syrup or farm-made cider and apple juice. In County Meath, book in for a unique Food, Folk & Farming Tour at the Cider Mill, an 18th-century farmhouse and orchard outside Slane, where Mark Jenkinson of Cockagee Irish Cider explains the traditional methods behind his award-winning Cockagee Irish keeved cider.
Farm shops, markets and masterclasses
Farmers markets and farm shops deserve a browse, if only for their colourful autumnal displays. Visit north County Dublin’s McNally Family Farm shop or find their produce at the best Dublin markets. Tour the plot-to-plate educational gardens at Waterford’s Grow HQ, before dining in their zero-waste cafe, or get busy with a one-day course on Harvesting, Cooking and Preserving. Wicklow’s Macreddin Village and 4-star Brooklodge Hotel offers Heritage Food Masterclasses in ancient preservation methods, alongside monthly food markets, house-pressed apple juice and a smokehouse and wild food pantry in their fine-dining certified organic Strawberry Tree restaurant. County Antrim’s family-friendly Broughgammon Farm run seasonal Farm to Fork Supper Clubs and foraging walks, while their year-round farm shop showcases sustainable meats like wild game.
The land of oysters
Autumn’s bounty extends to the shores as well as the land. September’s oyster festivals celebrate the sea, with the Clarenbridge Oyster Festival and the Galway International Oyster and Seafood Festival bookending the month. Feast on County Clare oysters at Linnane’s Lobster Bar in New Quay or shuck them yourself at their Flaggy Shore Oyster Experience. In County Louth, the Glyde Inn overlooking Annagassan beach and the Cooley and Mourne Mountains is the sublime setting for local prawns, scampi, razor clams and crab claws. Carlingford is a mecca for the freshest oysters (beeline for PJ O’Hara’s or Harry’s Oystercatcher On Wheels). Further north again Coleraine, County Derry attracts seafood lovers from around Ireland and the UK for its acclaimed sister restaurants, Lir restaurant and Native Seafood & Scran.
In Belfast, the seasonal plant-led menu at the Michelin-starred Ox pivots on the weekly changing larder. Chef-owner Stevie Toman loves this time of year. “There is so much produce available and big flavours as the dishes get heartier.” Expect local Ballywalter fig leaves, preserved for use throughout autumn and winter, alongside autumn truffles and ceps, squashes and pumpkins, nuts and wild game. As Toman says, with a local larder this bountiful, “the menus almost write themselves.”