Rachel Gaffney wants to be the Martha Stewart of Irish cuisine. Born in County Cork, the daughter of a fine Irish cook and baker, she was astonished to discover, on moving to the United States in 1996, that the phrase “Irish cuisine” tended to produce groans, indications of nausea, or leg-slapping guffaws. Humiliation summoned Gaffney’s mettle, just as one can imagine that Stewart’s resolve was forged, in part, by growing up Polish-American in an era of ethnic jokes aimed full-bore at her heritage.
“Lovely, well-intended people say unimaginable things,” Gaffney reflects. After her husband’s job with Lloyd’s of London brought the family to Dallas, people would greet her with comments like, “You must be so happy to be away from all that corned beef and cabbage,” or, “Aren’t you glad to have something besides potatoes to feed your children for dinner?”
“They didn’t know any better,” says Gaffney, 42. “They simply had no idea that when you ridicule a culture’s cooking, you are ridiculing somebody’s mother.” Like her mother, Gaffney is a fine Irish baker and cook. She could not, she resolved, raise her two sons in a place where “Irish” meant nothing but green beer, boiled bacon, and cabbage. She could, she reasoned—with characteristic stampeding-Longhorn energy—change the way Americans think about Irish culture and food.
Irish shortbread was her first shot fired. Whenever home-baked treats were sought to benefit a good cause—bake sales, birthday parties—Gaffney used “Mum’s recipe” to turn out extraordinarily flaky shortbread cookies with an understated sweetness. The deep gold color and buttery soul of her shortbread became the talk of le tout North Dallas, and eventually Rutherford’s, an elegant interior design store that served an afternoon tea for clients, asked Gaffney to supply the shortbread. Then the store asked to sell her shortbread. Then upscale catalogs began inquiring about the cookies. Gaffney founded a baking company. Then Dallas’ renowned Central Market chain decided to stock her shortbread and asked Gaffney to give baking demonstrations in its stores.
Gaffney was not about to limit herself to becoming the Irish Mrs. Fields. To her teaching demonstrations she added savory recipes, lessons in preserving, tastings of Irish farmstead cheeses. She championed Texas beef—“It’s as pure as the Irish beef,” she exclaimed to startled audiences.
By 2001, among certain circles, “Irish cuisine” drew fewer chortles than it did respect for Gaffney’s recipes for seafood bisques and bakes as well as her meaty stews and puddings, creamy casseroles, and even the trembling flans that she taught at Central Market and other local gourmet stores. There was even, she reports, a surprising amount of interest in the various dessert dishes that the Irish fashion from carrageenan, a seaweed found off the country’s western coast. As Gaffney’s renown grew, her business expanded to dinner parties and weddings, bridal showers and engagement parties. In time she launched Rachel Gaffney’s Real Ireland online, along with a blog and videos.
Gaffney’s style was a welcome contrast to the perfectly matched, minutely orchestrated affairs of the traditional Southern-entertaining mold. (“You’d walk in, and you couldn’t smell anything cooking,” she recalls. “Everything was too set and perfect to let you exhale. It was a performance, not a convergence that begged conviviality.”) Politicians, patricians, and pro football players wanted Gaffney’s cooking, her Waterford vases, fine Irish linen, mismatched china and sterling flatware, the leftover peanut butter and jam jars that she filled with bunches of herbs and, when in season, shamrocks. “Believe it or not, they grow very well in Texas,” she says. “I think of shamrocks as local decor.”
You don’t need fancy food and flatware, Gaffney maintains, “you need what you have and you make the most of it.” You don’t need days of planning, “you need to make a few things the day before and finish it up while people are standing around drinking.” You don’t even need to be a great cook. “Anybody can warm up a loaf of bread in a slow oven with some garlic and rosemary butter. When people catch a whiff of that sort of wonderful coming from the kitchen, they feel at home.”
Gaffney’s emphasis on authentic, unfussy comfort is key to her weekly dinner parties at home as well. “I love to do a pork loin with dried fruit, some chickens, my mum’s Sunday beef roast. This is not complicated cooking. It’s home cooking minus the casseroles and leftovers. Add some Irish blue cheese and my tomato-ginger chutney and roasted-pear purée, and you have a meal that makes people human, allows them to relax and be real.”
For a woman who spent the early chapters of her career in hotel sales and marketing, promoting an ideal Ireland to tourists and other admirers—The vivid green land! The wild, hardscrabble coastline! The magical and irascible Irish character!—Gaffney is not interested in fantasy worlds. Instead, Gaffney is interested in what is. “What Ireland has that few other First World cultures have managed to hold onto, is how real it is. The adversities that slowed progress also insulated us, kept us pure. We don’t need a ‘local’ or ‘sustainable’ movement; we’ve never been anything but that. We don’t need to embrace home cooking; we’ve never been able to afford to stray too far from it,” she asserts. “When I first began teaching Irish cooking, students would be so disappointed when they asked for the secret to my shortbread and I told them that there is no secret. You just use real Irish butter.”
Fabulous, she adds, “doesn’t mean expensive and complicated. People are burned out on acquiring; they want something doing, pure, and delicious. What used to be scorned as ‘poverty food from the potato eaters’ is now ‘peasant cuisine’—the chic, the pure, the unadulterated.”
Let’s face it, she exhorts, huffing breathlessly into her cell phone, “Irish food is not about recipes, it’s about ingredients. It’s simple!” Was she, I wondered, on a treadmill? Practicing her Martha-multitask as we spoke?
“Of course not, darling,” she gasps. “So sorry. I’m just climbing this fence, you see, out on this grass-fed beef ranch about an hour from my house. I need to check the cattle, you see. I’m doing my Mum’s beef roast for a bridal shower for one of the New York Jets’ fiancées tomorrow. I just want to make sure this Texas beef is good enough for my Mum’s recipe.” Gaffney pauses for the briefest of breaths. “And I got about a thousand shamrocks,” she exclaims. “They are in season now, just gorgeous with daisies and herbs.”
Molly O’Neill is the author of seven books, including Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Baseball and One Big Table: A Portrait of American Cooking. Her ebook, This American Burger, was recently published by New Word City. O’Neill’s most recent contribution to Gourmet Live was a personal story, The Devil’s in the Diet.