These days, few of us have ever been on a farm. A hundred years ago, most of us would have been living on one. And though we don’t visit them or live on them, we eat their products every day of our lives.
On the very southwestern tip of Ireland, there is a peninsula protruding westward into the Atlantic. Leave that peninsula, head west, and it’s just the sea until you reach Canada. On that sea bound land, the Ferguson family has worked the 250 acres of Gubbeen farm for six generations. This book is subtitled The Story of a Working Farm & Its Food. It’s part history, part survey, part lessons on how-to-farm, and part recipes. It’s all love story.
The author Giana Ferguson is actually from Spain, married into the Ferguson family, and has been instrumental in a revolution that makes Gubbeen an important prototype for successful farming. She introduced cheese making on the farm in 1979 and today Gubbeen cheese is world famous. The farm always had a few hogs, but now they have many of the critters and serious production of smoked and processed meats. Giana has made certain there is now an Irish chorizo [Spanish flair and Irish hogs].
Giana and other family members each write chapters about key aspects of the farm:
The Land describes a landscape shaped by the last ice age which wiped away the topsoil and has today’s farmers using seaweed for fertilizer.
The Farmyard describes the lively fare that surround the house. There are recipes for the Best Scrambled Eggs and Roast Goose and Goose Stuffing. If you are considering opening your own farm, there are little lesson plans here for raising pigs and caring for calves.
The Dairy chapter focuses on cheese making and using the bog-fed dairy cattle to yield supreme butter and yogurt. This part of Ireland is famous for its butter, shipped around the world. That Gubbeen cheese appears in a lovely recipe: Gubbeen Cheese and Chorizo Potato Cake, an amalgam of Spain and Ireland due directly to Giana’s power and vision.
The Smokehouse takes you on a production tour as hogs become salami, bacon, ham, pepperoni, sausage, sopressata and that chorizo. In a nod to the American South, there is a recipe here for a Pulled Pork with Celery Root Remoulade Sandwich. If you prefer things a tad more conventional, you might be interested in stunning Platter of Grilled Gin-Marinated Pork Tenderloin, Merguez Sausages, Zucchini, and Blacked Leeks.
The Kitchen Garden is a must for home gardeners who dream lovingly of that perfect English, or Irish I should say, garden. In a coastal, wind-blasted environment, the garden and the gardening are very much a seasonal endeavor. You grow what can survive in that climate and on soil that, thanks to the Ice Age scraping, is very thin. Perhaps that is why here you’ll find a recipe for Bramble Jelly. You grow what you can — somethings always manage to thrive in even the worst environment — and you use what you grow.
Gubbeen is the story of success, success born from hard work, imagination, and a confidence that you can always do more.
The recipes are very interesting and sometimes more than a little different. Or perhaps not. My favorite recipe here is for Mushroom Ketchup: mushrooms, vinegar, shallots, allspice, mace, cloves, cinnamon, brandy, sherry and sugar. It’s their riff on a recipe that was a failure but eventually turned out okay. The inventors of Lee & Perrin’s Worcestershire sauce made barrels of product and tasted it soon after. It was terrible. Fortunately, they did not throw the barrels away — were they too depressed at this costly misfortune? An entire year went by, the barrels were opened and the sauce, that delightful sauce, was revealed.
Don’t worry. With the recipe here, you only need store the Gubbeen Worcestershire Sauce for a short four months before indulging.
Gubbeen is a book to read, to learn from, and to enjoy. Today and in a mere four months.
