Paul Flynn, one of Ireland's most acclaimed chefs, is standing in the kitchen of Birr Castle, Co Offaly, eyeballing a bowl of eyeballs. He doesn't look happy about it. In a separate bowl beside the cow's eyes are its lips and alongside them is a dish of hearts and another bowl filled with what are referred to as "cock-combs" and which come from male fowl.
Flynn surveys the offal before him and makes a quick decision. “I am not cooking with them. If we are faithful to these recipes, will people enjoy them?” He shakes his head.
He is referring to a 400-year-old recipe book he has been challenged to cook from. “We have to stay reasonably faithful but we have also got to make it edible. It will still be a spectacle at the end of the day.”
As cookery shows go it's a pretty dramatic start. Lords & Ladles, which makes its debut on RTÉ One on Sunday night, has taken one part Who Do You Think You Are?, added a dash of Upstairs Downstairs and a soupçon of Downton Abbey, and blended them with a stock of familiar chefs to create a programme that is equal parts history, cooking and grisly fascination.
The show focuses on the foods that would have been cooked for occasions in historic homes and details the sometimes monumental effort that went into dishes.
It features Derry Clarke, Catherine Fulvio and Flynn who are all challenged with recreating the contents of original banquet menus, using recipes from a bygone era. Each week one chef is given the responsibility for cooking, another has to source the food while the third has to dig up the history of the house they are cooking in and the food they are preparing.
It is not hard to imagine how tough it must have been to cook in the 17th century: just have a look at your kitchen and then take out everything that is plugged in.
First up for the Lords & Ladles treatment is Birr Castle, home of one of the world's most famous telescopes and birthplace of the steam turbine. For starters, Flynn is head chef and his menu features the earliest known Irish potato recipe, a pie filled with potatoes, rosewater, currants, raisins, orange peel, cinnamon, white wine, egg yolks and sugar.
He is also preparing a pig’s head and its trotters as the centrepiece to the meal. As he puts the head on to boil he looks mournfully at it.
“He’s not terribly happy, is he? I am going to throw a couple of trotters in. I tell you I’d nearly turn vegetarian after this.”
Flynn looks stressed. “This is the most complicated recipe I have ever come across ,” he says, adding that the experience made him feel “like I was doing my Leaving Cert all over again”. All he has to cook on is a temperamental stove that would burn a pastry pie as soon as look at it. While Flynn cooks, Fulvio has taken on the role of hunter-gatherer. Her job is to source the ingredients for the feast from castle grounds. First up is a pheasant, a game bird which was introduced to Ireland in 1580. While she goes hunting she doesn’t do any of the shooting and has the hired help do that for her. Fulvio’s job is to pluck what has been shot for her. She also has to skin a wild rabbit.
“I got the hardest job this week: I had to take the skin off a little bunny which was way out of my comfort zone,” she tells Flynn after bringing him the rabbit which he is to roast with pudding in its belly – originally the recipe was for hare but given their precarious presence in the Irish eco-system, the programme-makers have opted for wild rabbit.
Clarke has the easiest job of the lot. While his colleagues are in the kitchen, he is given a tour of Birr Castle by a rather delightful Lord Rosse and other members of the Parson family.
Whether or not Flynn and Fulvio pull it off remains to be seen but what we can say is that the biggest round of applause of the evening goes to a pig’s head which inexplicably appears on the table much to the diners’ delight. Lords & Ladles starts on RTÉ One at 6.30pm on Sunday, June 7th
