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An Irish Chef in France

Euro-Toques chef Martin Dwyer, is much missed in Ireland since he and his wife Sile sold their eponymous restaurant in Waterford and moved to France. They now live in the Languedoc, where they take guests - and feed them very well.

This month: A Plea for Vegetables

As Christmas comes round again and I inevitably start planning on making it really easy this year (this never works) my mind runs to all the foods which have become a compulsory addition to the table for Christmas dinner and I start thinking of the ones I could discreetly eliminate.

In the Christmases in my immediate past the following seem to have become an essential part of the table. To start with there has to be smoked salmon, just served with brown bread and lemon- but of course copious amounts, I mean you don’t stint at Christmas do you?

And then the main course - the chef d’oeuvre has to be the bird, and this in itself, in our house, always leads to controversy. Having insisted on turkey over the years I decided to take my life in my hands a few years ago and produce a goose.

This turned out to be a bit of a mixed success. There was no doubting the superiority of the goose meat over the turkey’s and the crispness of the shiny brown skin, but, even though Christmas Day was a winner we all missed out on the post Christmas turkey, those wonderful cooking free days when one was able to have it in sandwiches, and reheated and even in a salad.

The second essential Christmas meat is The Ham, which must be boiled tender and then finished in the oven while the turkey is resting, and glazed with honey and mustard and cloves.

But to get back to the Christmas table, ours has always been groaning with vegetables. We must, of course, have roast potatoes, with crisp skins (and in our case spiced with turmeric and cumin) and then also Christmas would never be Christmas if we didn’t have a mountain of white, butter infused, mashed potatoes.

Then there is the controversial sprout, in our case shredded and cooked with garlic and lardons which makes it acceptable to most, but for those few others an alternative must be arranged, and the best candidate seems to be red cabbage, cooked sweet and sour with apples, redcurrant jelly and a dash of balsamic.

That celery (in traditional white sauce) must be present goes without saying, but that completes the meat and veg, more or less, so then one can concentrate on the sauces.

The Gravy, is of course essential, as is bread sauce for the turkey and nowadays (our one concession to America) we have to have cranberry sauce also. So just add a selection of mustards (to help the ham go down) and the table is more or less there.

To get right back to my starting point, every year I start thinking of the bits I can rule out, the obvious candidate seems the vegetables. How could we possibly need five dishes of vegetables on the Christmas table?

My defence is the same as the Left Over Turkey Defence. In those relaxed cooking free days after Christmas these can be reheated and the cook can continue to slouch by the fire and sip his claret. The one exception is of course the roast potatoes but then, they are so delicious that there are never any left for Stephen’s Day.

So, even with the groaning table of Christmas day, vegetables can have a most useful function, and so this, brings me back to the title of this piece, a Plea for Vegetables.

In the last ten or twelve years in Ireland, and I suspect even longer in France, we have seen the decline and finally the disappearance of vegetables served in vegetable dishes with main courses. Nowadays one tends to see vegetables served really as a garnish, one exquisitely turned Pomme Fondant, a tiny timbale of Dauphinoise, a small pyramid of intricately placed julienne of carrots or a chiffonade of shredded parsnip looking like Barbie’s hair.

When I ran my restaurant in Waterford (and it is now twelve years since I did) we always served four separate dishes of vegetables with each table.

There was (and of course is still) a real logic in this: Everyone has a different sized appetite (rugby players managing slightly more than models) and the veg dish is a great thing to either refuse or indulge in. It is simple isn’t it? Then why is it no longer done ? I rest my case - but have a happy Christmas!

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Martin Dwyer started cooking professionally over 40 years ago in the legendary “Snaffles Restaurant” in Dublin. After a time in a Relais Chateau in Anjou and in “The Wife of Bath” in Kent he opened his own much acclaimed restaurant, “Dwyers”, in Waterford in 1989. In 2004 he sold this and moved south to France where he and his wife Síle bought and restored an old presbytery in a village in the Languedoc. They now run Le Presbytère as a French style Chambre d’Hôte. Martin however is far too passionate about food to give up cooking so they now enjoy serving dinner to their customers on the terrace of Le Presbytère on warm summer evenings. Martin runs occasional cookery courses in Le Presbytère and Síle’s brother Colm does week long Nature Strolls discovering the Flora and Fauna of the Languedoc.

Le Presbytère can be seen at: www.lepresbytere.net;
email: martin@lepresbytere.net