What would a truly Irish dessert look like? I mean if we were to take away everything we import? To begin with, we would have to exclude sugar. We stopped producing sugar in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Siúcra, as many of you may know, is a German company. God knows where the sugar comes from. Sugar is one of the few foreign products we use at Aniar (the other being white flour). I’ve often toyed with the idea of producing a dessert with only indigenous ingredients for Aniar but have yet to take the leap.
A few years back, at the Clare Harvest Banquet, I got a chance to produce a dessert with ingredients only from that county. I had five ingredients: berries, honey, raw cream, herbs and flowers. I sweetened the whipped cream with honey and layered the berries and the flowers between alternative layers of cream. I finished it with some borage and blackberries. It looked and tasted great, but was it a dessert? Is a dessert just something sweet at the end of the meal? Or is it more than this?
On a recent visit to Copenhagen, I ate in Noma and in Kadeau. I was surprised at the lack of sweetness in their desserts. In both restaurants, I received two small desserts as part of their tasting menu.
One in Kadeau reminded me of my own attempt to make an all-Irish dessert. First they placed some creme fraiche in a bowl. Then they added some slightly fermented raspberries, a few white currants and walnut schnapps sweetened with honey. It was very refreshing, though I don’t know if it fulfilled my desire for sugar.
Whatever your own attempts at making an Irish dessert, there's plenty of fruit around in September. Blackberries in particular abound this month. So why not go out and pick yourself some and let, as Seamus Heaney wrote, that first one fall across your lips "like thickened wine".
